The Car of the Future (1958), by Jesse Greenfield

5 Responses to "The Car of the Future (1958), by Jesse Greenfield"

Vinay Ghai says:

April 25, 2014 at 8:57 pm

What I liked about this slidecast was that it did a good job of showing the context of the “Car of the Future”. Planes were indeed a huge topic of the time, with the climax of World War II and the recent invention of the jet engine. Similarly, gender roles did factor into the creation of a futuristic car because of what they would be used for – work for the men, and chores for the women, respectively. In addition, because advanced cars would be used in the future, advanced places to drive would need to be considered, and I thought the image of the highway attached to the cliff sides did a good job of portraying that. I did not consider the difference between a car of the future and a bus of the future, so seeing the comparison of how many more people a futuristic bus could carry (based on one picture, at least) was interesting to me. One piece of constructive criticism I can offer is that in my opinion, the repetitive use of the Ken Burns effect on every slide got a bit tiring after a while. At the same time, I did enjoy the use of the transitions, which I thought helped alleviate that problem.

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Eric Martocci says:

April 27, 2014 at 3:10 pm

I thought the presentation did a good job showing representations of the cars of the future. All the ideas for future cars follow along with the society of the day. With almost all military aircraft of the 1950s having jet propulsion the idea of a turbine powered or flying cars is not that far-fetched. The concept of the nuclear car is not surprising either since the 1950s were the glory days of fission reactor development. Efficiency and leisure time were an important part of society during this period and the idea of the self-driving car allowing people to do other things during the commute follows this idea. The 1950s were also a big decade for the automobile industry. By the end of the decade about one out of three people owned a car so the slides about the parking issues make sense. I found the picture showing the cars being placed in a rack by a fork truck as a solution to the parking problem interesting. The concept is not far off from the modern day, multilevel parking garages.
The only criticism that I would have of this presentation is the dead spots in the narration on almost every slide. I found myself sitting and wondering when the presentation was going to continue.
On a side note, the gold colored turbine car in the slide was actually a Chrysler that was produced between 1962 and 1964. They never really caught on due to performance reasons but a few still exist in collections.

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Dani de Lucio says:

April 27, 2014 at 8:05 pm

I found this presentation to do a great job on representing the cars of the future. I found it to be interesting that not only was the futuristic car the only focus, but other factors such as futuristic highways and forms of public transportation were highlighted as well. The images that went along with the narration were very relevant and helpful in understanding the common themes of efficiency and the strive towards reducing labor. I did appreciate that the initial picture of the color changing station was shown for two slides so that the audience was able to take in what the presentation was going to be about and get a good grasp of it from the start. My only criticism is that it was a bit awkward with the large chunks of silence and no narration between the slides.

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Mike Fogarty says:

April 27, 2014 at 10:44 pm

I really like watching your slidecast. You did a very good job of finding pictures that described the topic your chose and were of the time. I liked your information, although there could have been a little bit more on each slide. I felt like there was a lot of extra time in each slide that could have been filled more information, or even elaborated a little bit more. I really like how you tied in the negative impacts of more cars on the road. It was a nice transition from talking about how great the self-driving, flying vehicle would be, to something that today is still a major problem. You also did a very good job of explaining why the need, and increase, for cars became such a phase during the 50s and 60s. Not only was there a increase and boom of the middle class, the house wife, and gender roles, played a large part in the increase of cars. Overall, you did good job.

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Megan Reiling says:

April 28, 2014 at 3:41 am

I thought you did a great job of explaining each picture because for some of them it wasn’t completely obvious what they were depicting. The images you chose were great. But, I thought they offered so much more to talk about, and all of the slides had a lot of extra time where you could have done this. You could have answered more of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions. At the beginning, you posed the question of whether or not a car can be considered a car if it has wings. This seems like a great place to talk about progress and how people thought cars with wings were progress. Maybe talk about the two questions about progress: progress towards what and progress for whom? The definition of progress also changed as the future visions of cars cars changed over time, so you could have brought up the same points throughout the presentation. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the presentation, good job.

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