A Daydreaming Designer Revisits A Curious ‘Motorhome’ Project

Imagine it’s around 1989, and you’re inside a weird-looking leaky building that purports to be a design school. You’re all sitting around a studio on the paint-covered steel stools in your high-top white Reeboks when the instructor walks in to lay out the week’s project. You hit PAUSE on your Echo and the Bunnymen cassette in the Walkman to listen. Here it is:

“Take an animal and make it into a purpose-built vehicle.”

As GenXers, we readily admit to having been influenced by MTV, arcade video games, and images of the excesses of the ’80s. Still, there is one part of our upbringing that we don’t discuss quite as much. Most of our educators (and even parents) reached their formative years during the hippie decade of  “free thinkers.”

If you went to an art and design school in the Reagan/Bush era (Editor’s note: Didn’t everyone? –PG), you would absolutely have been taught by instructors with, well, unique viewpoints. We would often get rather bizarre assignments from early on, and the results were even stranger. “I really want to get my girlfriend on my back and fly through your sculpture” is how one teacher commented on my roommate’s completed project. Actually, many of their comments would get them fired and canceled today, but you get the picture. Crazy was right on the surface with these people.

Back to the assignment: what animal to choose? I am really not a big bug person, but for some reason, I chose a big bug: the Goliath Beetle. It’s impressive since it’s just so damn big, and you can really see some of the shape details that you miss on the ‘standard’ sized insects.

source: Wikipedia /Fir002 and Wikimedia/Fungus Guy

A closer look at a beetle reveals a number of things. One, it’s a pretty clean shape that can lend itself to some kind of vehicle relatively easily. Second, the shape really does NOT look that much like the Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle that stole this insect’s name. In fact, I think a Tatra T87 bears a stronger resemblance to said insect.

Regardless, we weren’t supposed to make a car out of this animal anyway, so this vehicle might as well fly. It is possible that I was subliminally influenced by the sleeve for Journey’s Escape which was likely lying around our apartment (but we were now art students and too cool to listen to that shit anymore).

That vehicle on the cover of this corporate arena rock magnum opus appears to be beetle-influenced (Scarab Beetle?) but functionally I never knew what the vehicle was supposed to do, other than help Steve Perry and his bandmates break out of some tiny glass ball that they inexplicably got trapped inside of by REO Speedwagon or something. Hard to tell.

source: Wikipedia (Columbia Records) and etsy (for sale listing)

Purpose is the big problem here. This is a design project that runs counter to the form-follows-function mantra you often hear since you’re essentially doing the opposite: finding something that this animal/vehicle might do. This big-ass beetle apparently lives on tree sap and can go for long periods of time without food, so I figured something that worked in the woods might make sense.

I’d seen Return of the Jedi years before, and while that Ewok crap was a nightmare, the speeder that flew through the jungle seemed rather cool.

Someone has even tried to replicate that will a small hovercraft you can see in this video.

Also, I knew from reading about the insane journey where three Corvairs drove through the rugged Darien Gap in Panama that there’s plenty of undisturbed, unpassable forest in the world:

Why not change that by violating these precious woodlands with a giant bug-shaped flying machine? Something that can go over any surface and even be able to clear the way if necessary?

Seriously, this is what I did in school while you were gaining, say, useful financial or medical knowledge. Plus, we paid tuition to do this shit.

Anyway, trying to get through rough terrain is best done, if at all possible, without wheels. Mechanically, as design students and not engineers our solutions here were often of the pull-out-of-our-ass variety, as you’ll see. The giant bug vehicle would be a hovercraft, with four fans or jets underneath to provide lift (if it’s fans it would likely need a hovercraft ‘skirt’). The openings would be able to pivot side to side or front to back like on the hovercraft you see in that forest video above, or even like the single jet with multiple outlets on a Harrier Jump Jet (I had no idea it worked with ONE big engine):

source: Wikipedia/Alan Wilson

I like the jet idea but that might catch the forest on fire…but it’s a RAIN forest so a little warm air might do it well, right? Well, fan or jet-powered, this type of lifting system would allow for easy helicopter-like movement in any direction, and travel up to a certain speed. If you’re on a long, clear surface (like a body of water or plains) and want to cover ground much faster (like triple-digit speeds), there’s a jet on the tail at the back that can turn side to side for steering. Also, small retractable wings extend from the sides for additional stability at speed. Or something like that.

To get through tight areas and to make space for more vehicles to pass, we’ll need some forestry-related capabilities. There are machines we know of that can chop down trees like toothpicks with saw-fitted arms. That object being held in the picture below is just one of the teeth that go onto the big rotating saw blades:

sources: Komatsu and The Bishop

At least two of the flying bug’s six legs would feature some kind of cutting tools. The legs also can grab objects and act as landing gear for the bug to sit on.

In school, we didn’t have time beyond the two renderings to determine what the inside of this thing would look like, and I figured it was high time I did. We know that up front in the ‘bridge,’ there will be controls for a crew of up to three, with the center one piloting it and the side crew able to manipulate the legs and saws.

However, where would the crew stay if they were on a long-term task where they didn’t leave? Needed fuel and supplies would be brought by other vehicles through the path they just cut, but they would stay in the bug so it needs to be like a mini motorhome as well.

Behind the ‘bridge’ in front, there would be a space with a table, chairs, and monitor, flanked by wall cabinets for storage and a small kitchen area. There would be a tiny bathroom on the side as well:

Further back, there are three bunks with the center-mounted one raised up over the storage area, fuel tanks, or engine. Raising this bunk also helps separate the bunks for additional privacy (but there are sliding partitions/curtains on the openings to each of them).

It’s a difficult job trying to make answers to questions that nobody asked, but it challenges you to find answers that at least make sense on some level. I mean, even the Millenium Falcon has toilets designed into it as well as other Star Wars ships.

What kind of vehicle would you turn a Goliath Beetle into? As odd as these assignments were, in retrospect some of them really did stretch our creativity, force us to think differently and work to bring some sense of reality to the oddest concepts. It’s not unlike what I do now with the Daydreaming Designer exercises; it certainly it helped me thirty years later to interact with Torch and his odd requests for impossibly dumb vehicle concepts.

I honestly don’t know if this is a good thing.

All illustrations by The Bishop

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