By Olivnes
Winner of the “Red Dot Award: Design Concept” 2019, today we’re looking at the Lilium Jet designed by Mathis Cosson, Patrick Nathen and Daniel Wiegand in partnership with HYVE, Germany. 2 distinct questions will be raised.
Taking this course has made me navigate the art world in a way I never had before. Never before had I really thought through on how art is conceptually undefinable and yet, art is judged every day.
I wondered on what terms. That’s how I found the Red Dot Design Award, an international design competition – “aimed at all those who would like to distinguish their business activities through design”. There’s a jury of experts, deciding on very specific criteria. Examples of criteria are degree of innovation, realisation possibility and aesthetic quality. For the latter one, RedDot asks “Is the concept’s form pleasant to look at?”. And I ask: how can this be defined? Does it make sense to define what’s pleasant? More importantly, should art be pleasant?
Now, what is the Lilium Jet? It’s a full scale prototype of an aircraft that pulls out all the stops in redefining air mobility – it takes off vertically, meaning you could eventually just have it parked outside your house, as it does not need a track to gain speed, in order to take off. It creates value through functionality, without neglecting design, which is a fundamental part of this product. There’s also emotional and symbolic value, given the innovative component of this product. The combination of creating value in these two directions will hopefully create monetary value as well, which in turn will allow this company to keep producing and taking design to the limits of physics.
Let’s get to the real discussion here: building such a product obviously comes with great prestige, which stems from it being a well thought through product and in terms of innovative design, it’s cutting edge. However, making this aircraft beautiful comes at a cost. A high one.
The world has a hard time accepting change. Sometimes you have to package it nice and pretty (such as with the Lilium case), in order for your innovation to be accepted by the society at large and be recognized as something which adds value. In other cases, if you go all out on design thinking, you may be spending money you can’t afford to.
Just look at the Tesla case: their electric vehicles rely on the way they’re designed and integrated to be marketed, but try counting how many times they were close to being bankrupted because they did not have enough money to live to next day. Spoiler alert: you’ll lose count. And how was that money invested? Going into the details: making sure every single piece was done to the highest quality and that every single piece made aesthetic sense.
Investing in design today can prevent you from making rent tomorrow. Would you?
Visit their websites https://lilium.com and https://www.red-dot.org/about-red-dot/?r=1.
Making sense of art and design industries 