Transport Design: A Travel History (review)

Over the last decade or so, “mobility history” has increasingly addressed transport from the perspective of the consumer, encouraging a richer and more nuanced understanding of modal shifts as a process negotiated between disparate groups of users (and non-users) on the one hand, and the providers, manufacturers, and regulators of transport services, vehicles, and infrastructures on the other. Historians are now more sensitive to the cultural factors which inform, and in turn are informed by, changing patterns of mobility. In particular, vehicles and more specifically their interiors are coming under increasing scrutiny as meaning-laden spaces in which people “perform” the act of movement. But most of this scholarship still focuses on specific modes such as the automobile or the passenger train, and it does not very often make more than superficial connections with the wider historiographies of industrial design, of architectural interiors, and of domesticity.

In reaching out to all these spheres of scholarship, Gregory Votolato’s primer on the history of the design of vehicle interiors has much to offer historians of technology and transport. Writing primarily as a design historian, Votolato’s conceptual framework is fully congruent with current thinking in the history of technology. Vehicles are technologies which even in their most basic uses are to some degree cultural artifacts as well as functional ones. He understands the interlinked roles played by designers, manufacturers, operators, and users in the co-construction of the semiotically rich technological spaces in which we move, while not ignoring the structural reality that, both historically and in the present, governments and corporations have the greatest control over transport systems. And Votolato’s empirical reach is commendably ambitious, embracing most major forms of mechanically propelled transport, and some animal- and wind-powered varieties too, by land, sea, and air in the industrial era. Although he focuses for the most part on transport in the rich northern countries, there are neatly framed asides looking at the ways in which southern societies have adopted and adapted industrialized vehicles to their own mobility needs and traditions, emotional as much as functional.

The book divides into three main sections, dealing with vehicles designed for land, sea, and air. Although this division follows the traditional modal taxonomy, each part covers a wide range of vehicles, from the most utilitarian to the luxurious. The emphasis is very much on passenger transport, although some military developments are included, particularly when these are relevant to understanding either the subsequent trajectory of vehicular design in the civil sphere or the wider evolution of transport systems. And Votolato is good at bringing out both the continuities and fractures between the design practices of different modes—as, for example, with the heavy, luxurious finishes applied to interwar aircraft, emulating the comforts of contemporary railway carriages, interiors which eventually gave way to the stripped-down, modernist spaces of the highflying jet. The part played by technological innovation of a more traditional kind is constantly woven into the fabric of such stories, with new materials and devices opening up possibilities which designers, operators, and manufacturers exploited in their efforts to encourage still higher levels of mobility among the increasing numbers who could afford it.

Ranging across more than two centuries and a wide variety of transport systems, Votolato occasionally slips up at the level of detail, but his fundamental theses concerning the trajectory of mass mobility are surely correct. First, growing the market for discretionary mobility has produced a near constant tension between the need to make transport a desirable experience and the need to make it affordable. Technological change can help to deliver an acceptable compromise: bigger and more efficient vehicles reduce unit costs as long as capacity is maintained, while the development of smaller but equally essential technologies such as ergonomic seating and at-seat entertainment produces an increasingly individualized experience of “immobile mobility,” particularly in the air. But the citizens of the rich north now expect practically unlimited mobility, an expectation which is almost...