Project Chameleon: Designing a Superyacht in One Hour
Press · FutureYachts, Volume 01 · Boat International Media, 2017
Project Chameleon: Designing a Superyacht in One Hour
Boat International’s inaugural FutureYachts publication put some of the industry’s sharpest minds through the Superyacht Design Symposium, a live event that turned designers and yacht builders into competing teams and gave them a single hour to design a yacht for an entirely imaginary client. Fiona Diamond was drafted in as a team captain, working alongside Steve Gresham to lead a project that would come to be known as Chameleon.
FutureYachts, Volume 01, Year 2017. Boat International Media.The Brief: A Reluctant First-Time Owner
Each team was handed a fictional client dreamed up for the occasion: a young New York billionaire commissioning his first yacht in time for his fortieth birthday, with budget no object. He had never owned a boat before, wanted to be noticed by his peers without courting attention from the public, and cared deeply about sustainability. His interests ran from snowboarding and archery to kite-surfing, secret passageways and keeping a pair of pet lizards, named Larry and Other Larry, on board. Owner’s yacht Lord Bentley was played, for the day, by fellow designer Tim Heywood.
Chameleon
Fiona and Steve’s team, which also included James Drysdale, Bart de Haan and Harun Kemali, proposed a 70 by 30 metre diesel-electric explorer with the option of a detachable hull, capable of 25 knots at full speed and 10 knots cruising. True to its name, the hull was designed to shift colour like a chameleon adapting to its surroundings, and the team tucked a vivarium for the owner’s iguanas beneath a glass-bottomed spa pool.
Project Chameleon concept sketches. FutureYachts, 2017.
“We have the option of a detachable hull.”
Team Chameleon, on the design’s most playful idea
The detachable section, the team decided, would double as private quarters for the owner’s children when needed and could just as easily be left behind to keep engine noise away from guests, a small solution to the very real challenge of designing for a client who wanted his boat to be quiet, private and endlessly adaptable, all inside sixty minutes.
It’s this kind of fast, collaborative problem-solving, dreaming up a workable answer to an outlandish brief under real time pressure, that Fiona brings to every project at Seymour Diamond.
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