Art Center Summit 2009

The Art Center Summit, now in its third year, has finally seen the rest of the world catch up with its preoccupations. Initially conceived in 2006-07 to bring government, academic, and business leaders to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, to discuss issues related to mobility and sustainability, the summit has benefited from the financial turmoil that has recently gripped the world.

Previously, the event was highly speculative and appealed mainly to designers working in the advanced mobility community; this year, the summit occurred against a backdrop of meltdown in the US auto industry, chaos in the global financial sector, and a growing realization - supported by the incoming Obama administration - that energy and transportation policy will form a key part of a Green future.

The overwhelming message of the 2009 summit was that the time for talk is running out, and that the moment for concerted action has arrived. This is no longer about policy wonks, car designers, and environmentalist sharing notes - it's about coming up with a program for survival. Fortunately, people outside the transportation and design communities have come to understand the urgency of the situation.

The proof that sustainability has finally broken into the mainstream could be found in the months immediately preceding the summit, when organizers David Muyres, Art Center's vice-president for educational initiatives, and Geoff Wardle, the College's director of advanced mobility, were invited to testify before Congress. They were asked to offer perspectives on the role that design should play in the ongoing rescue of the American auto industry, which will cost the taxpayer some $34 billion USD. Previous Art Center summits have sought to place design squarely within the policy debates that relate to sustainability and transportation. This year, Art Center - already a leader in transportation design education - found itself called upon to provide broader political leadership.

This fit with the 2009 summit's overall theme: 'Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility'. The first summit was intended to provide a forum for the transportation community to foreground the question of sustainability in an automotive design environment too often preoccupied with next year's models. The second summit advanced the discussion to include urban planning and complex 'systems' approaches to mobility design. This year, fewer car designers were called upon to make presentations; instead, the summit's organizers brought in energy policy experts, scientists studying climate change and natural-resource scarcity, and even a U.S. Air Force colonel focused on cyber-security.

Kenneth Verosub, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, set an early tone when he insisted that it's currently "crunch time - we've got about seven years, plus or minus two, before we exhaust domestic oil supplies". He balanced optimism with some slightly dire prognostications: "Some time in the not too distant future, the demand for oil will exceed maximum oil production. That's a recipe for social unrest, civil war, and outright war."

Designers, and in particular car designers, are starting to recognize that sustainability often means offsetting the demands of clients and consumers against larger societal issues. In the past decade, electric-vehicle startup companies have sought to enter the market and provide consumers with more options - and designers with fresh employment opportunities - but a nagging question remains: Does the world really need more cars? Again, the summit, taking place as the Big Three Detroit automakers struggled to remain viable, addressed this conundrum.

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By Matthew DeBord