Gorden Wagener is a German car designer and a chief designer for Mercedes Benz. A lot of automobiles manufactured by Mercedes have come his “pen”. Which is why many will say that validates Gorden to be one of best car designers and works at one of the biggest automobile company in the world. Some of his famous works include the Mercedes Benz EQ which is the first electric car from the company along with the Mercedes Benz EQ Silver. (Images 1 and 2)

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Gorden Wagener designs do not just limit to automobiles he designs boat and even some jets, but to do so his designs are based of philosophy and research into the future as well as user experience. Gorden is forever questions himself to be more innovative and future seeking like “how will the urban future would like?” “What will the mobile technology of tomorrow enable?”. Questions like these enable him and his team to seek beyond human expectation and reinvents their outlook on car design as a whole. [1] My design on cars follows a similar path of questioning but like all designers there are differences in our outcome on how we would picture the future. Car designers somewhat base their designs on meeting the 5 senses of the customer, the similar technique used in retailing like John Mackey’s Whole Foods Supermarket in Austin Texas. John Mackey built a state-of-the-art supermarket where he insists on smelt baled bread and roasted nuts the visuals being of colour coordination and meets the eye and successfully meeting all other senses through this to acquire attraction which lead to sales. [2]

My latest work on a jaguar electric car has proven that all designers have a different out look to the future but may seem to have a similar process on getting to the final product. Differences between me and Gorden may start from something simple as our sketching and rendering methods. Looking at images 3 and 4 we can see that our sketches varies in our strokes and line weight and the overall proportion on based on the fundamental designs of the car in this case Jaguar and Mercedes. It varies from how we what it too looks like to and how we apply certain line weight to get that idea within our mind. In my case side view a side view is how I get my design going and build up from there but Gorden has enough experience to start his sketch exactly the way he sees it because although we both design cars I am a third-year student and a master of the craft.

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Gorden philosophy revolves around this norm of “DNA of Form” whereby he draws his ideas form nature and all its natural curvatures. These earthly elements are what he resembles is his sketches and his work. By studying a piece of long grey granite and describing it as an “essential beauty and elegance and earth at its purist form”. He reflects this ideology in his sketches and has incorporated into the Mercedes automobiles. Whereby my own ideology revolves around the fluidity of water in its original state, like organic shapes it makes when it hits the ground or when its exposed to low temperatures and turns into ice. These stages are how I navigate through my sketches and designs and incorporating this philosophy into my final design in image 5. The way I have rendered it reflects a sense of fluidity across the car with touches of white reflections. But looking at Gordon’s final image 6 in his design we see the long silver granite DNA in his final being elongated and has “exaggerated proportions and pronounced wheel arches”[4]

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We both have a vision for the future and some sort of idea of how it should look like and some may argue that they are similar outcomes but in saying so would validating why we are so different but the same in a strange way but I as a student I will still look to designers such as Gorden for inspiration to become a stand out car designer and rebuild the future in the ways that I picture it by asking myself the critical questions and having to answer it through my designs.

[1] (Mercedes Benz ‘The spectacular utopias of Chief Design Officer Gordon Wagener’ 27 February 2017)

[2] (Adam Mack (2012) The Politics of Good Taste, The Senses and Society, 7:1,
87-94, United Kingdom)

[3] (Voldy Bukishie ‘Final Jaguar Concept SX, 08 November 2018)

[4] Greg Kable in ‘Modern Day Concepts captures the spirit of streamliners, 25 August 2018)

The amazing black and white photographs displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Sydney Australia provides us seven decades of a very naked truth of the life of South Africa’s rich history in a series of images taken by David Goldblatt. David Goldblatt’s Photographs of 1949-2018) draws us and inch closer to understanding the reality within the apartheid era through his camera lens. With just a display of black and white images and a short explanation next to each image, speaks volumes than a history lesson taught in school because not only is the work exquisite but a harsh reality that many I not ready to visualise, which the fact of matter is that the apartheid era was cruel and inhumane.

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Here are images that have been captured from Goldblatt’s lens where he portrays the lifestyle of a black South Africans. In Image 1 we see a man sleeping on the ground, with an additional context this man has been using the park as his bed because he needs to catch a kombi (South African version of a taxi) early in the morning to go and mine to earn money for himself because where he stays in the township restricts him to catch a kombi on time, so Joubert Park is where he took refuge during the week. In Image 2 Goldblatt photographed more than just two people of colour but a gender comparison of what a male and females’ role was during the apartheid time. A woman had to commit to being house maid with minimum pay and the man being a miner or do any other occupation which involved serving under the white man and finally in Image 3 Goldblatt displays the shovels that belong to black miners who dug into the ground for more than 14 hours a day and after finishing their jobs they would stack their shovels together so it would be easier to collect at the start of shift. David Goldblatt’s images reflected something deeper than just racism or colonisation but how deep the conformation of the oppressed have become to their oppressor. In questioning Goldblatt described his images as “visual timeline”. “Apartheid became very much the central area of my work, but my real preoccupation was with our values … how did we get to be the way we are?” stating this in interview regarding his work.[1]

In the article “the history of apartheid in South Africa quotes a law made by the National Party government in 1959 where they forcefully removed black natives out of their land, “This Act caused much hardship and resentment. People lost their homes, were moved off land they had owned for many years and were moved to undeveloped areas far away from their place of work.”[2] This is a similar act that occurred within the Aboriginals in Australia when their land had been stripped away from them through unimaginable massacres. Hence is why the “, Australian Indigenous design charter” [3] outlines clear guidelines for designers when designing aboriginal themed work. They encourage the designers in section 3.4 of the research article to be “deep listeners’ to understand their ways and their culture for these natives have been generationally scared, and David Goldblatt photographs makes viewers understand this norm or struggle and hardship. The apartheid era had been described as “a light on sometimes unpleasant realities of history, as well as enduring aspects of human nature. For those who are willing to seek out the details and contemplate the contradictions, the end of Apartheid leaves a legacy of insight most valuable in our turbulent age.”[4]

[1] David Goldblatt in ‘David Goldblatt Photographs 1949-2018, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 19 October 2018- 3 March 2019, (Sydney, Australia)

[2] South African History Online ‘The history of Apartheid in South Africa’ 06 May 2016, (Johannesburg, South Africa)

[3] Dr Russel Kennedy and Dr Meghan Kelly, Australian Indigenous design charter’, June 2016 Design Institute Australia (DIA)/Research: Communication Design, (Victoria, Australia) (Week 2 Reading)

[4] David Robinson, ‘World Politics Explainer: End of Apartheid’, 11 October 2018, The Conversation