Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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PAPERS: From Histories to Materials: Aesthetic and Conceptual Approaches to Sustainability, Additive Manufacturing, and Watermarking Location: Appleton Tower, LT1 Zoom Link Session Chair: Maria Maclennan, The University of Edinburgh Session Chair: Roberta Bernabei, Loughborough University | |
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Is the trend your friend? Exploring the interior shape and material use across Australian ‘Car of the Year’ winners 1: School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; 2: Department of Design, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia As car interiors transition toward emerging sustainable materials, exploring historical patterns of material use may inform future iteration and adoption. While automotive exterior literature is abundant, historical studies of interior trend evolution are rare. This study investigates over 60 years of interior material and form trends using Australian Wheels magazine’s annual ‘Car of the Year’ winners (1963-2024). Objective visual observations of 57 car interior image-sets built an abductive-coded matrix, followed by visual pattern analysis. This identified a cyclical trend in metal usage, and an evolutionary transition of gloss to matte surface finishes. Subjective scoring of interior shape using scales of simple-complex and curved-angular generated a scatterplot demonstrating form language evolution across the four quadrants. This study contributes to Australian car history literature and establishes a replicable visual analysis method to explore similar datasets globally, paving the way for a comparable body of material-form data in interior automotive research. View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1694
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