Smart wins 2011 LA Design Challenge

Daimler's Smart division won this year's LA Design Challenge, the brief of which was to create ‘Hollywood's Hottest New Movie Car'. The entries were judged on how well the vehicle reflected its brand attributes relative to the plot, how the vehicle related to the target audience, and the level of imagination found within the entry. Befitting the ‘Hollywood movie car' theme, the uniqueness of the story concept and the character development of the vehicle were also factors that helped determine the overall winner.

"The Smart 341 Parkour captured the essence of the Design Challenge by combining innovation and functionality with an adventurous plot," said Chuck Pelly of Design LA, presenting the award at the Conga room on the eve of the second press day.

Smart's 341 future city concept was presented with clever, creative and short story in keeping with the brand. The illustration style execution of the storyboard was also a fan-favorite, but what set this concept apart from the other entrants was the treatment of the vehicle as a character in the story.

The concept told the story of reporter Annie Angle who - while on a mission to write her first, potentially career-making, front-page news article - lives in a city notoriously known for a lack of parking spaces. Using her trusty Smart 341 Parkour and its three different modes - a typical drive mode, a fly mode and a climb mode that allows the vehicle to run up the walls of skyscrapers - Annie set off on an investigation to create her journalistic masterpiece.

Created by the Advanced Design studios in Sindelfingen Germany, the Smart Parkour concept was one of three entries in the LA Design Challenge from Daimler AG this year, owing to the relationship between Mercedes Head of Design Gorden Wagener and Design LA founder Chuck Pelly. Maybach and Smart were also the only entrants to create ¼ scale models of the entries, while a full-scale model of the Silver Arrow concept was created by Mercedes' advanced Design Studio in California under the direction of Hubert (Huey) Lee.

Maybach's entry was focused on aligning their core brand values with a potential movie story, and so chose to make the future of driver-less carriages for a Cinderella-like character. While their presentation can only be described as Teutonic, their model was flawless and the idea was very well thought out.

Mercedes followed with playful story about two crash test dummies that hijack the futuristic interpretation of a Silver Arrow racer. The animation that made up the majority of their presentation was expertly done, and while the concept was the perfect interpretation of a future Silver Arrow racer the character was more in the crash test dummies than the vehicle. The video did win them a consolation prize by Pixar's Jay Shuster - a tour of the Pixar Studios.

Subaru, Honda, and Hyundai presented their ideas in relatively quick succession after the longer presentations of the first three. Subaru's concept was a mission-focused future all-terrain vehicle that was tasked with saving humanity from an energy crisis in a bleak future; Honda's concept also fell in a post-apocalyptic scene with cowboys and sinewy futuristic cars that will replace horses as man's required companion; and Hyundai's concept was the least impressive, with an almost non-existent story and a design that felt generic if anything.

The contest presentation itself was preceded by a presentation from Jay Shuster, which outlined a general description of life at Pixar and a snapshot of their processes.

As we've come to expect from the LA Design Challenge, the event was a fun time, which felt more like a group of friends joking around than a room of influential designers. We just wish it had had a more balanced set of entries from the local design studios in the Los Angeles area.

By Eric Gallina and Peter Lachance