2022: The year of the supercar!

2022 was an incredible year for the BMW Group + QUT Design Academy. As we emerged from the covid crisis we were able to travel to expand our initiatives including invite BMW Group colleagues to Australia, as well as take a trip to Germany to meet our BMW Group and idealworks friends. Further, we have been lucky enough to send a large group of interns to Germany at the end of 2022 as a result of the covid travel restrictions lifting. All of these activities have been prohibited the previous 2 years so we were very excited to be able to do these and continue to build this unique collaboration. We are so thankful for the continued support from BMW Group and idealworks. Overall, our partnership grew substantially in 2022 with major key milestones achieved. Our Internships and Special Projects Programs grew once again since the previous year, while in our Research Program we had a significant year with James Dwyer, our Research Associate, completing his research Masters. Our team expanded as well to gain two new members including our Technical Associate Mike Lepre, and a new Design Associate, Mo Faramarzian, who helped on a range of key projects. Of course our existing staff members; Design Associate, Jordan Domjahn, as well as two new talented Junior Design Associates, Tim Lim and Epi Pereira, all contributed and worked on incredible projects at the Academy. 

Without doubt, the highlight of the year was the launch of the BMW M8 Competition Coupe in April, which was endowed to us by BMW Group. This incredible supercar will enable us to undertake collaborative real-world projects on cutting-edge automotive technologies. The BMW M8 will allow us to investigate the integration of future tech such as ultrasonic haptics, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and others, into BMW Group vehicles and manufacturing processes. For undergraduate students the M8 will provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn about design including aesthetics, materials, manufacturing, ergonomics, human-machine interaction and many other important design knowledge. For research students, including Masters and PhDs, the car will provide a unique platform to explore some important questions such as; what is the future sports car HMI in an autonomous world? and how will emerging technologies like the metaverse and ultrasonic haptics impact the future of car interfaces? The gifting of their top-tier car is a further signal of the depth of the cooperation between the partners and highlights the value of QUT’s contribution to a company of this calibre.

Our Internship Program continued to forge ahead during the year with 18 interns working at the Academy including 11 through the Internship Program, 6 through the Impact Labs and 1 Industrial Design Capstone student. This represented an increase in capacity from the previous year and highlights the strength of the Academy program for student learning and development. This year was the first time we offered Summer Internships as well, and three students took advantage of this opportunity. The projects students worked on included collaborations with existing teams across BMW Group, idealworks, BMW Motorrad and MINI - and the level and quality of the projects improved substantially overall, which was pleasing to see. The work included explorations for future autonomous mobile robots, robot packaging concepts for tradeshows, in-car gaming explorations, and advanced safety systems for motorbikes among other cutting-edge projects. Some of these are now being considered for deployment by BMW Group and we look forward to updating you on this.

In even more exciting news we were so pleased to re-launch our BMW Group Internship Program and send a large cohort of students and graduates to work in Germany and the UK. This included 8 QUT design students and grads; 2 to idealworks (Germany), 2 to BMW TechOffice (Germany), 2 to Logistics Innovation and Robotics (Germany) and 2 to Hams Hall (UK). We are thrilled to once again reinitiate this critical part of the internship Program, and send so many students to work and make a positive impact at BMW Group internationally.

Our Research Program this year saw the culmination of James Dwyer’s work come to a successful conclusion with the completion of his research work. James completed his Masters on a very important topic titled; Using communication mechanisms derived from social cues in industrial autonomous mobile robots to improve interactions. His work adds the area of human-robot interactions generating novel findings and knowledge that will be of great use for BMW Group, idealworks and other companies. The outcome of this research has the potential to create safer, more efficient and engaging collaborations between humans and autonomous robots in industry 4.0 settings. We congratulate James on his superb research and we look forward to seeing his career develop as he begins his PhD with the Australian Cobotics Centre. We are excited to be announcing several new research projects at the Academy across Future Automotive HMI and Design Thinking.

This year the Special Projects Program grew substantially with our key contacts at BMW Group and idealworks. We can only discuss some aspects of these projects as many are commercially sensitive. One project we can discuss involved an important contribution to the development of SORDI (Synthetic Object Recognition Dataset for Industries) project, the worlds largest open-source dataset for super-efficient AI applications in production. We also initiated a new collaboration with Hams Hall in the UK where we contributed to the digitisation efforts of this significant BMW engine plant. Thirdly, we worked on a very cool AR project with our Brisbane BMW partners and helped them launch the sublime BMW 7 and BMW i7 in Brisbane. We always have to pinch ourselves when we recognise the incredible impacts our projects are having within BMW Group and its subsidiaries. Although we can’t say much given the sensitive nature of the projects, you may hear about some of these through our websites, newsletters and updates, so make sure you stay connected.

Beyond our key Programs, we’ve had other successful achievements across the year. This includes the launch of our BMW Group + QUT Design Academy 2021 Photobook. If you haven’t already done so make sure you download it! It’s one of our most popular publications which catalogues the year in awesome photography and imagery.  We also organised a host of internal and external events as part of our external engagement drive this year. Some of the highlights included being invited to RACQ MotorFest, hosting a design session as part of the QUT Future You STEM Summit, and hosting the German-Australian Science and Innovation Day just to name a few. It was also great to celebrate the success of our previous and current interns and Design Associates win international and national design awards such a Good Design Award and Design Institute of Australia Graduate of the Year Award. 

We look forward to 2023 with excitement and confidence. We will announce exciting new initiatives, launch our 2022 Photobook, and reveal new Special Projects and collaborations with BMW Group as our partnership continues to grow. The team and I are immensely proud of our progress and achievements to date. Although we have had some very successful few years already, this was under the limitations of covid restrictions. Now that we are out of these restrictions we are beyond excited to see where we can take this partnership! 

We are so thankful to all the student interns, collaborators and supporters throughout the year who have made much of this possible. A partnership of this calibre and scale is not possible without significant support from many people across QUT and BMW Group. I also want to personally thank the growing Academy team who are central to the ongoing success. Finally thank you to our amazing partners and colleagues across BMW Group in Germany, especially to our friends Jimmy Nassif, Marc Kamradt and Dylan Sheppard. 

Rafael Gomez
Founder and Head of BMW Group + QUT Design Academy