10m redesign: airstream nest

I read an interesting article on engadget about a futuristic airstream trailer which was a new direction for the company…more “minimalist” in their words. And here it is:

A couple of thoughts:

If your company is lucky enough to have made one of the, say, top ten most iconic products in American history, maybe don’t change every single detail and lose any sense of heritage. I understand and endorse the need to innovate, and new materials are a critical part of that, but there’s not a single element that carries over from what I can tell.
To call the above more minimalist than a traditional airstream seems pretty far off the mark. When one pictures the classic, it is essentially a riveted metal tube on wheels. The material and its manufacturing process make up the design–the “honesty” of the design is quintessential. For the nest, above, the fiberglass shell has been formed into a variety of soft & sharp edges. It might not have been effective, but it might have been interesting to see the material more (unpainted white fiberglass?) as with the classic.
If you really have a clean slate design, how could one possibly end up with the mess of interconnect that you see along the bottom panel. Nothing corresponds with anything else. There are oblong reflectors next to circular ones. The labels are slapped on wherever convenient. I admittedly have no knowledge of the underlying constraints here, but it looks downright criminal to me.

With all that in mind, I took 10 minutes in photoshop to try to clean it up some. I’m still not in love with the wheel arch, but I ran out of time to fix that. The general idea was to clean up the mess, bring in a touch of heritage, and make it seem more cohesive (the AC appendage was especially galling). The branding change is more of a shot in the dark–I just think it should be bolder & say airstream on there. I know that this redesign would likely be more informed if I’d ever stayed in an camper trailer, but I’m still a tent guy. Anyhow, I would have loved to spend more time on this one and delve more into the overall form, but I think it was still an effective ten minutes.