By Ben Wright
As an industrial design student and curmudgeon, I tend to look at the world, and especially objects, with a critical eye. Sometimes this criticism is viewed as overly harsh, or perhaps even unwarranted; I say it’s deserved. Without people like me, the world would be a much happier place, where the sun would shine every day and the fabric of life would be even more fraught with ignorance and stupidity.
With that disclosure, I ask to bring your attention to the Nissan Cube.
Consider, if you will, its basic form, the shapes and lines involved and the overall emotions of the automobile. Is it innovative? Does it make you feel vivacious and hip? Can you picture yourself driving downtown in this vehicle with four of your best friends, honking at your friend Ricky on the sidewalk? Further, can you see Ricky as he stops and smiles and thinks to himself “Man, what an awesome car. It surely has some staying power and will be a classic automobile throughout the dusty webs of time.”? Last: What does the Nissan Cube say about the person who drives it?
A few of those questions can be answered by realizing that the Cube is merely a soulless ripoff of the Scion and Honda Element, slowly sucking all the blood of the previously trendy and hip designs. The Cube, as a whole, is Nissan’s U.S. response to the rise of the boxy, customizable models that were the hot car to have—two years ago.
It combines the rectilinear shape of the Scion, rounds the edges, adds the customization, throws in an ad campaign with bright colors and buzzwords and then it is dumped in the vast wasteland that is the American car market: a slum in the favela of the contemporary design language in the vast majority of products that Americans buy.
The Cube itself has been available in Japan for over a decade now, and is slowly declining in popularity as the Japanese suffer withdrawals from the decade’s saccharine design, overdue in America.
To introduce the Cube in the States and not even call it a car, but to market it as a “mobile device” is almost as absurd as its design. No matter which way you slice it, anything with four wheels and an internal combustion engine is going to be called a car, and no amount of homemade Youtube-style videos with guerilla marketing will get around that. There’s nothing new offered by the Cube, service-wise and design-wise.
The design motif, inside and out, is liquid. Smooth lines dominate the exterior, and on the interior this is taken to an insane degree. The roof of the car is literally rippled, as if a drop of water landed on the dome light and the designers captured its mathematical arcs in the upholstery.
Juxtaposing the amorphous element of water and the strict angularity of a cube is, by my best guess, supposed to shock the customer into confusion, and then the Cube just keeps on coming with light-up cup holders and a customizable patch of shag carpeting on the dashboard.
No, really. Shag carpeting.
Remember a simpler time, say, 1999, when a VW Beetle would come with a fake flower in the cup holder? That was an excellent piece of flair, showcasing the Beetle’s then-innovative green aspects, and also appealing its target demographic. The ungodly patch of shag carpeting in the Cube is inexplicable, unforgivable and absolutely absurd.
Moreover, their overuse of the wave motif on the interior induces motion sickness and gives the general feeling that the exterior designers and the interior designers spoke different languages, or were blindfolded, or both. The exterior screams contemporary while the interior screams water. If you were to step back and try to understand what both parts were saying, you would only hear “stupid.”
I can’t fault the Cube on its large interior space and easily-accessible rear hatch, but I can offer that the Scion did it first, and, while not exactly an award-winning design, it still deserves the credit. The recessed windows, chamfered edges, and overall bulbousness stand in stark contrast with the Cube’s namesake.
I have included a picture of a cube for comparison’s sake. My point is a car that is built like a toaster will continue to look like a toaster, no matter how many round edges you put on it.
My main problem with the Cube lies in the fact that it has taken the general idea of a Scion or Honda Element, and done nothing to the design to improve its effectiveness as a vehicle, concept or design. Instead, Nissan rounded the edges, added unnecessary and debatably stupid additions to the interior and made it as cheap as possible.
As consumers, we are used to this by now, but as designers and citizens of the world, hoping that each day might bring something a little better to the blight that is existence, we shouldn’t be complacent. By accepting and even buying truly awful, unoriginal designs we cheapen our status and our values. We can’t allow such bad design into our lives and then let it propagate.
It is time to reclaim our stake as design-conscious, or even just conscious consumers and stop filling our world with garbage thinly veiled as just another trendy design.
Cube photos courtesy of Nissan
Actual cube illustration courtesy of Wikipedia.
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