Blog Articles

- Any -
Program Article

Revs Program at Stanford Wins Core77 Design Runner-Up Award

We're proud to announce the Revs Program won first runner up in the Core77 Design Awards for 2013. Our 'ReMake' class was awarded in the group's Educational Initiatives category.

The Core77 Design Awards celebrate the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. For Revs, it is another example of how we are bringing the automobile to the center of the university. Where most people consider automobiles to be the domain of engineering, we strive to make the automobile available across the disciplines. ReMake was a perfect example of that, a collaborative effort to... Read More

Event Article

Carlos Ghosn Open Garage Talk Video Posted

Our evening with Renault Nissan Alliance CEO Carlos Ghosn is now posted for viewing. The special evening, a part of our Open Garage Talks series, was held at Stanford's Automotive Innovation Facility in April.

 

All of our previous Open Garage Talk events are archived on iTunes U as well. You can view the collection by clicking here. To view photos from the evening, view our gallery here.

To join us at our next Open Garage Talk (free and open to the public), sign up for our mailing list on the bottom of the page.

Course Article

Telling Car Stories

What is it about cars that make people talk so passionately? In ME 236 (Tales to Design Cars By) class this quarter, we are finding people relate to cars in ways unlike any other object. As a result they tell car stories differently than any other story.

We’re finding a number of elements contribute to this. Chief among them: a car provides a confined space that encourages but never forces interaction. Because the vehicle takes its occupant on a journey, it becomes a natural mechanism for storytelling.

Inspired by cinema, video, road trips, interviews and observations, our... Read More

Course Article

Do Automobiles Have Politics?

The gateway question to the Science and Technology Studies (STS) program at Stanford is deceptively simple: “do artifacts have politics?” An affirmative answer leads to four wonderful years at Stanford studying the myriad ways in which artifacts do, indeed, have politics – and the insights gained by considering technologies as social actors.

The car and its paradoxes offer a wonderful place to begin to explore these questions. At once an icon of freedom and mobility, the automobile has also brought unprecedented regulation in the form of policing, traffic and auto regulation, and... Read More

Blog Article

Sorting Clocks To Learn About Automobiles

How might we judge the importance of an object? In ME 200 this quarter, we are taking a long view to approach this question. While the ultimate end result will be to judge a group of automobiles and deliver an award, we are starting with a series of lectures and discussions that force the students to think about how they might determine organizing principles using information and perspective on hand.

Ironically, we won't be discussing automobiles at all for a number of weeks, instead offering experts from the fields of archeology, technology, culture and psychology.

In class... Read More

Pages