CASEY RAIA

MEETING 3

But why…

The first portion of this week’s findings goes a step further into my survey. Why am I asking the questions that I have chosen and how will the information I receive help me/us? Here is the breakdown:

Questions 1-4 Demographic questions – Although I realized last meeting, maybe it doesn’t matter if you are a male or female or what your age is because after all were all just people right? Well… it quite possibly could. If after the surveys come back and the demographics are heavily skewed in one direction or the other, then the marketing process could be adjusted to fit the results. I agree that these questions should be moved to the end of the survey though to reduce subconscious error.

Questions 5-10 Travel questions – These start to get into the preferences of mobility for the people. This whole thing could go to shit if we find that no one wants to travel for more than a few weekends or weeks. What if the people of the younger generation hate the idea of traveling by boat or RV and staying in them? There goes my portion of the study… but at least we’ll know it doesn’t work.

Questions 11-13 Job questions – This will gather information on how people take to being shuffled around for their job. I also ask a fill in the blank question asking for companies with known rotational programs. If I get a significant list (as of right now I have Unilever, J&J, and Pepsi) I can dive into where their main offices/plants are and if the infrastructure of those settings can even withstand a mobile architecture market of any sort.

Questions 14-20 Opinion questions – Let me hear what you think. Is this survey so clouded with my ideas of what could be a fun and functional infrastructure that I have lost sight of what the average 20-something year old actually wants? I am sure I will find out here…

“The percentage of people that actually want to live in shipping containers is about 3%. And of that 3%, 90% of them are architects or architecture students, the other 10% are all people who went to school for architecture and then dropped and switched majors to business.” – Loose quote by one of our professors. Although this was said as a joke and everyone knew it, what are the chances that something like this holds true to mobile architecture for the young generation? I seem to hear much more about retirees on the open road over the adventurous bacherlor(ette) trying to make money and memories in a new city.

Aesthetic – Relating the exterior of RVs and trailers to a building’s façade –

RVs and Trailers –

Somewhere between when wagons first appeared to travel out west and now, some mindless person decided that putting flying swooshes, tribal prints, racing stripes, and depictions of animals on the sides of mobile architecture was the right thing to do. It’s not. It’s hard to see exactly when this horrible phenomenon started but it seems like not too long ago. A few decades ago companies went with a two-tone paint job, or just a few 3-inch thick lines running the length of the RV, those are much quieter design elements than today’s options and personally they look a lot better. Airstream, one of the most credible and beautiful companies of the RV and trailer world, remains out of this debate/assault. Airstream takes its material, aluminum, and put its on the big stage as if to say “HEY! This is aluminum and you should know it!” In architecture we also celebrate materials, so why do companies need to clad their RVs in ridiculous patterns? I understand the long side of an RV/bus may not be the most interesting thing to look at but there must be other options. Take cars for instance, they are most of the time a single color but the materials change as well as sculpted body panels for added aerodynamics and function. There is no reason why this cant be true for their larger family members. Boats can be of equal size or much greater than RVs/trailers and they normally have a much subtler color palette. Below are some examples.