Show Review: RTT Salzburg Conference

Relative to most other automotive design events Car Design News has attended, the RTT event is focussed on the technical side of car design, with much of the 240 delegates from design and engineering modelling management and from related service providers.

The opening presentation from Porsche Design Director Michael Mauer titled 'More Reality and More Reliability' looked at how digital design tools reduce the risk in vehicle development, increasingly important as developing one car now costs about one million dollars. He went on to say; "Design's role is to provide the company with views of the future, and VR provides the link between these views and reality".

He also identified the core issues facing the Porsche design process as: more competitors, greater product complexity, and reduced development time. The two main areas of digital design that he specifically hopes to see greater progress in are the ability to evaluate the perception of proportions of a car when moving (as these differ to those when viewing a stationary car), and detail representation of lights that are an intrinsically complex and ever more important part of car design. As an aside; it was interesting to see the virtual recreation of the Porsche's Stuttgart viewing yard happened to have a virtual Maserati Quattroporte in it...

Dr Bernhard Bl'ttel, Director of Model Techniques at BMW Design, presented the new BMW Design Portal. This is a system that integrates all BMW digital design tools so that design management can easily access any virtual design property from Mini, Rolls Royce or BMW from any of their studios worldwide. An important component of this is what Bernhard referred to as the 'Virtual Plate' which is a powerwall display that resides adjacent to clays (on real plates) and displays design properties 24/7. The thinking behind the portal is to bring digital design out from the small tube that is switched off when the individual designer is not there, to allow design management more access to design properties and more 'soak time' with these designs. Refreshingly Bernhard talked of the ubiquitous but rarely mentioned VR issues that affect every user; the poor integration between systems and reliability within them that typically manifests itself during presentations to senior management!

The presentation from Michael Saboun, Vice President of Design at Sony Ericsson, emphasised how design was increasingly about communicating and selling design ideas to management and how instrumental the role of digital systems are in this. Interestingly he also described the philosophy of Sony Ericsson Design of being "half a step ahead of the customer" because one step ahead was too far, particularly in a field where product lifecycles are twelve months and development programmes last four months.

Talks from a variety of other speakers, a round table discussion and product demonstrations from companies in related area producing projectors, power walls and other hardware, gave the event a unique value for the growing sector of automotive digital design. We look forward to next year's event.

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