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As a transportation designer, you might be asked to design a concept vehicle for 100 years in the future. You crank out sketches, renderings, maybe a model, maybe even a life-size one. But the frustration is, you’ll never live to see the thing in actual use.
Yamaha Motor Co.’s design team has experienced a twist on this. They were approached by Netflix, the producers of “Tokyo Override,” an anime series set 100 years in the future. The design team was asked to create a racing motorcycle to be used by the protagonists. Thus they would get to see their creations in action, albeit on a screen, ridden by fictional characters.
“We wondered what kind of relationship between mobility and people would exist in Tokyo 100 years from now,” said Yamaha designer Satoshi Nakamura. The team worked with Netflix on the worldbuilding, learned about characters’ personalities, then designed a bike to suit Tokyo, the characters and the times.
The resultant Y/AI bike, so named because it contains AI, embodies Yamaha’s philosophy of Jinki-Kanno, “The seductive exhilaration of being one with the machine.”
In this video with Yamaha’s team, you can see they actually put a crazy amount of thought into the design:
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“Tokyo Override” is currently streaming on Netflix.