Creative, Innovative, Uncompromising

The design discipline has changed. Once, industrial designers were radicals with plans to change how we work, travel and relax. But, in the post-modernist world, corporations have woken up to the marketing potential of design, and almost every idea for a new product – whether wheeled, winged or washing machine – starts life within, or passes through, a CAD program. The effect, in many cases, can be a dull homogeneity. Automotive enthusiasts, for example, lament that different makes of motorcar no longer look that different; they’ve become like subtle variations of a single species.

But there are still a few old-school industrial designers at work, like octogenarian German icon Luigi Colani. In the words of British designer Ross Lovegrove, “Colani’s place is secured as perhaps the most influential ‘form visionary’ of the Twentieth Century in the field of industrial design. He has created dreams that push the limits of our perception of space and technological possibility to the edge of the Earth’s stratosphere, and as the world of industrial design sought safety and acceptance through restraint, he just kept blowing minds with the fusion of art and organic design. He remains ever relevant, connecting man to machine in the most profoundly utopian of ways.”
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At Plankstadt, near Heidelberg in Central Germany, there is a small, family owned machine shop noted for its success in general engineering and subcontract machining of metal and plastic components. There’s nothing extraordinary about that; there are thousands of similar companies the length and breadth of Germany’s industrial hinterland. But, behind the unassuming façade there’s a father and son contingent at work building automotive creations that began life as midnight epiphanies rather than as resolutions by a committee. Creations like the Street Ray.