|
Community category The vision of a universal switch from "gas-guzzling" petrol-powered vehicles to more energy-efficient electric ones can't become reality, many say, until electrical charging is as easy to access as your local filling station. Better Place has designed a systemic concept for a vast network of power supply and other services.
"Think about it as a holistic approach to the problem of providing an electric car with energy. That basically entails every system, every part that connects with energy -- a car's battery, the electrical system that manages your battery, some kind of software to connect your car to the electric-supply grid, some kind of user-identity card, and then the charging location or battery-switch system. These are all connected to a control system that will allow you, the user, to decide how, when and where to replace energy." From his offices in San Francisco with his design firm, NewDealDesign, Gadi Amit is describing something that goes way beyond the simply question of "where do I plug it in?" for an electric car owner. | | "Funnily enough, when I went to design school and had some projects, I was thinking I was going to design cars. I was just 25 years old, and absolutely designed I'd be a car designer. And lo and behold, I'm dealing with cars, but from a completely different angle." | |
In fact, if you ask him if electric charging facilities could ever be as pervasive on the developed world's landscape as petroleum-based products' "filling stations" are today, Amit will tell you that he and his partner in this design, Better Place of Palo Alto, California, intend to go even farther: "I'd say you'll see a lot more spots for Better Place around the world than gas stations. You'll have one at home, you'll have one at the shopping mall or many at the mall, you'll have one in just about every parking lot, and when you go on the highway, you'll see the larger switch stations.
"I think you could say the word is 'ubiquity,'" meaning, in the vernacular, it's everywhere. "I think that when you get to ubiquity, you get to the solution that until then no one has ever thought of using. People are quite aware that electric cars are still a novelty and there's an undercurrent of suspicion about the range of these cars. So mitigating these concerns of people can help electric cars become a reality."
In other words, the Better Place theory is "if you build it -- everywhere -- they will come."
"My role in the system," Amit says, "is developing and designing the front end, the physical and tangible objects of the system. My main challenge is to create a combination of cost-effective, utilitarian design on one hand, a design that's inspiring and pro-society on the other hand, and the third challenge is to blend in with the surroundings, not disrupt those surroundings too much.
"So it's a tricky game. We want to get people excited about the innovation, we want to be prominent so people know we're on every corner, we want to deliver this at low cost, and we want to blend in and be a good community citizen, not disrupting the urban environment.
"We have a solution for just about every car. Even a different connector -- there's a way to plug it in. Better Place is also talking both to automobile makers and with utility companies, like Dong Energy in Denmark," with which Better Place is mounting a major roll-out program. Testing of part of the system was conducted in 2008 in parts of Tel Aviv.
"I'm an industrial designer. I've done a lot of design work in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the tech business. I've known Shai Agassi," CEO of Better Place, "and being friends we started working together and realized there's a lot to do. So this is how I came to join and I feel very committed now to Better Place.
"I was born in Israel, moved to the United States about 16 years ago, I've done a lot of industrial design in the tech world, consumer and commercial work, companies like Dell, like Palm, a lot of work in Japan for Fujitsu and Epson, basically everyone with a prominent electronics or technology company. My company is a strategic design agency, and I think we fit well with Better Place.
"I was born to a couple of architects. And I thought I'd be an architect. But I found I liked playing with things I could hold in my hands. I had this knack for building mechanical contraptions. So I discovered industrial design, went to school in Jerusalem, discovered the Macintosh and that was the first time I saw the beauty of how interactive it is. And since then, everything I've done has had to do with communication and the cultural experience between an electronic object and the person and society around it.
"Funnily enough, when I went to design school and had some projects, I was thinking I was going to design cars. I was just 25 years old, and absolutely designed I'd be a car designer. And lo and behold, I'm dealing with cars, but from a completely different angle.
"And you know today, I'm obviously very supportive of many of the green ideologies, but I do believe my job is to be the toolmaker. And I think that normal folks, people in the mainstream should enjoy good products now rather than getting too ideological and saying, 'Well we need to wait 10 more years before we'll have the perfect design.'
"There's an issue of skills and knowledge. If you're a practical person and on a year to year basis you create practical ways to do things, you learn a lot. If you push for one solution" that may be ideologically driven, "you actually may know a lot less about potential solutions.
"The electrical grid is quite a stodgy industry, only now just slowly becoming more electronic, not just electric. And one of the things I've been saying about Better Place is that we want to be a digital company, not an electrical company."
Designed by:
Better Place Inc., Palo Alto, California, United States. Additional credits:
NewDealDesign LLC (design strategy and industrial design); Nekuda DM Ltd. (Product Development). www.betterplace.com
www.newdealdesign.com |
