Do boat designers need to be naval engineers

yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder and good the sun is out, was snowing this morning here tho..
had a fisheye look at some angles on a bit bigger pershing too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfSC-plTmWg&feature=player_embedded#!
yet i sence your concern may be more into the sails that are missing on a boat like that?

 

If you set aside the idea that the stylist person is incompetent or somehow feeble minded, you're left with the question of why there is this conflict between people who agree on a common goal. It seems to me to come down to an issue of honesty. An NA sort of takes a vow to be honest with physics and is taught to present an honest reflection of physics in his work via design drawings and other media. The stylist has a very different take on what presentation media are supposed to communicate; and I don't think a stylist feels they are being dishonest if physics takes a back seat.

I looked at the old 2007 thread that brian eiland resurrected yesterday about <this> boat and suddenly had a LOT more sympathy for Alik's position. If I had been the NA on that (some suspension of disbelief is required here), I could be found chasing the stylist around the room with a kitchen knife yelling "Are you trying to make me look like an idiot on purpose?" It's not that the imagery isn't superb and stylish; it's just that the imagery is dishonest in an engineering sense. (compared to <this>, which I found a lot more interesting). I have no real doubt that the actual boat has banisters on the stairs, and, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a genoa sheet winch drive hanging from the roof of the motoryacht's engine room.

So I wonder how much of the contentiousness boils down to the presentation of the work rather than the day to day strife of negotiating details. Do stylists EVER try to sell their presentations to the engineers? Or is this just pointless? or simply viewed as unnecessary and a waste of time? Or worse yet, counterproductive?

Top end magicians are fantastic athletes and scientists and technicians who portray themselves as being none of these things. Same with comics- I wouldn't want to meet Larry the Cable Guy on Jeopardy. Stylists are a similar breed. I don't think engineers should get quite so upset with what they do with our source material. NA's provide stylists their material in the same sense that politicians provide comics theirs, but the roles are reversed. The comic makes honest the invariably dishonest politico. The stylist creates the appearance of dishonesty from the chronically literal NA. And apparently, there is value in this. (Who doesn't want a design that cheats the wind?)

So now I feel better, I can put the kitchen knife away, take a deep breath, bang my forehead against the doorframe three times, and get over it.

 

many times style is preferable to function. In this port is a highly stylized carbon fiber motorboat, custom built in the Netherlands. The boat is not big..10 meters and looks like a Stealth fighter. From its dock image your would think she is highly powered , travels at the speed of sound with a helmsman wearing a crash helmet and space suite...Wrong...its got a conservative diesel, cruises at 15 knots and only looks fast. I very much like this boat. Style is important

 

I believe You are quite right, as naval architect would be blamed if he proposed infeasible solutions. But in similar situation stylist says 'this is just idea and engineers should make it work', avoiding any responsibility for solutions proposed. As a result, success is always on stylists but failure is always on engineers. Now this has gone too far and guys normally responsible for wallpaper colour already are defining the shapes of hull.

Yes, we often receive esquires from stylists do to the 'engineering' for their projects; and we always say no. In terms of completed feasible projects, there is nothing we can not do without those stylists, so why do we need them? Thus my attitude to stylists is clear; I have walked long way to boat design through art school, classic naval architecture education and practical experience of building and using boats. So do we really need those guys from car styling studios, most of those have no clew on what they draw when it comes to boats?

In our office, we do use stylists - for design of fashion pieces, consoles, interiors, etc. General shapes and overall concept of craft is privilege of naval architects; well, we have three of them (of total 5) with good hand and eye for art drawing. So it is a teamwork with common goal.

It is also noticeable that stylists are mostly involved in 'tasty' size of super- and megayachts; not being able to compromise their styling ideas into real life 20' boat with standing headroom cabin.

At the end, I am sure naval architecture education should include art aspects of design and leave just 'wallpaper colours' to stylists

 

I think Michael is right on spot regarding the possibility for young people to afford boats in most European countries. In the north where we have more lakes and costline per capita, boating is not restricted to the rich. Almost anyone who put owing a boat high on the priority list can do so. The number of vacation weeks (5 in Sweden) might seem high to US citizen, but it still means that most of the vacation will be spent with the boat and not on vacation abroad. Getting the boat ready for the summer will also take a number of weekends during spring. This, and not money, makes boatowners younger than 40 scarce.

Back to topic. Where I work we have numerous engineers and one industrial designer. Also combat vehicles need styling to some extent. People learn also after university, so also someone with a "styling" degree will pick up common sense engineering knowledge. Our industrial designer seldom propose something that won't work at all. The learning process goes the other way too. We hardcore engineering types that work together with our industiral designer learn to also consider styling.

Although it might be considered heresy on this forum, I definitely believe that an artist drawing boats can pick up the knowledge usually attributed to an NA and do the complete design loop for a small boat. The catch is that the artist has to be humble enough to acknowledge that there are boring engineering stuff he will have to learn, and intelligent enough to learn it.

A boat for yourself is one thing. The feeling of "I did it all by myself" can offset that some solutions are less than optimal. Making a boat for other people is different. It's downright stupid to not consult expertise to offset your own failings. That is true for engineers not consulting "stylists" as weel.

Erik

 

Stylist also create unusable marine shapes. Seems about 20 years ago a fashion came on that made yacht wheelhouses resemble automobiles. Smooth, low windage, curved window. These are simply terrible, harsh to live inside. The traditional wheelhouse was like a baseball cap with a visor ...it had overhangs to block high sun and used flat window panels that were optically clear, reducing eye strain.

 

Have You seen taxi cars in India? That's it!

 

No I havent...Ill google it.

But Im happy that I sail an older , out of fashion , vessel with a baseball cap wheelhouse ,flat panel windows and chunky handholds.

 

That is almost certainly true in the case of custom-built craft (possibly because owners are less inclined to pay for them, rather than any allegience or otherwise to the artistic abilities of their NA). But in the production boat field I would disagree. Most of the larger manufacturer's use either in-house or contracted designers - a lot of them trained in the automotive field - to add 'style' to their product. Exactly as Ike described it... it is a team effort... and probably a better managed one than is sometimes seen in custom builds, where there is not always the required oversight to keep all the ego's in check - both designer's and NA's....

As to Michael's remark about many of those boats being too high for their length, I absolutely agree. But is this the stylists fault? I doubt it very much... it is the market that demands that every boat must have at least 3 cabins, all with separate heads, a garage for the tender, 30 different places to laze in the sun, etc, etc...
The stylists job is to take that package and make it look as good as he/she can. Personally, I think most of them look crap... but that's not because of a lack of understanding from the styling department... it's because they've been given an impossible mission in the 1st place.

 

Will
The Titanic was a team effort with stylists !

The Engineers had the watertight bulkheads going to the weather deck. The stylists wanted large grand open spaces and the bulkheads had to go down a deck or two .....

Here's a nice rendering from a 'yacht design firm' and at 30 knots there's not even the start of wave pattern , must be planing. I suspect their in house design team has stylists and artists for the critical design advice. Then if they somehow win a contract the poor NA will be the bane of everyones life and the grand artwork will become another compromised mess .

Where does the stylist fits sensibly in the design spiral?

 

I'm not for a moment suggesting that stylists are a necessary 'ingredient' to the design process, but I would argue that they are not by definition superfluous to it either.
Of course there are some truly ridiculous flights of styling fantasy out there... but as I noted before, these are generally (I hope!) intended to be concept vessels: more intended as expressions of inspiration than any kind or realistic design effort. And whilst there are a very few owners who are prepared to push the boundaries (like "A" picture below) most are conservative enough to insist that their not insignificant $ are spent on something a "little less spectacular"...

My experience of people with this kind of wealth is that they won't put up with pretenders... and the fact that there are so many well established "yacht design firms" would suggest that they deliver a service that is in demand. If they were superfluous to the design spiral, then they would have been weeded out years ago.

And in the production boat building arena, how many yards have the spare cash to have a bunch of pretentious young "hairdressers" on their staff if they don't lend something valuable to the process?

 

To ammend MikeJohns and Will's posts: I have posted this before but will do it again.

 

Excuse me! Have you seen a stealth ship lately? Or the new National Security Cutter? If they used a stylist he was tripping on speed. These are a case of function over form.

 

Military style is often copied because it represent the highest level of unlimited budget, form and function engineering .
This form and function " Agresssion" is marketed as The Predator, Dominator, Wave Smasher, and all the other names typical to boats owned by people who need this image.

 

The SOR starts with the the 'Artwork' requirement but that can easily result in a total failure as a practical economic and safe vessel.

That's why I was asking where the stylist belongs sensibly in the design spiral. What do you compromise, the craft, as a practical safe economic offshore vessel, or the artwork. I guess it depends on who is employing whom and the requirements of the client.

The stylists traditionally gets the design at the end and then buggers up the design after the NA's can no longer object