A car accident can be traumatic, even deadly, to everyone involved. According to one group
of designers, the human body could survive most crashes – with a few horrifying tweaks, anyway.
No one wants to be hit by a car, but how fast does a car need to be going before it does serious
damage to your body? It's a lot slower than you might think. According to Victoria's Transport
Accident Commission, if a pedestrian or a cyclist gets hit by a car at only 19 miles per hour,
the chances of the incident being fatal start to rise. By the time you reach 37 miles per hour,
you're almost certainly going to lose your life in the matchup.
"At just 20 miles an hour, the impact damage here is staggering."
With this in mind, the government of the Australian state of Victoria
decided to run a campaign called Towards Zero, with the idea that if they raised awareness
of the human body's frailty, people might drive more carefully on Australian roads.
Human beings didn't evolve in environments with fast-moving boxes of fiberglass and steel.
With that in mind, the Victorian government decided to pose an interesting question
in a set of public service announcements: what if human beings evolved over time and
developed characteristics that would be beneficial for surviving car crashes?
With a goal of going towards zero fatalities due to collisions, officials knew they needed to make
a big impression with their campaign – and they certainly succeeded in capturing our attention.
"The human body has a limited capability to absorb the energy that's encountered in crashes."
Evolution is the process through which organisms change over generations.
Charles Darwin is credited with pitching the idea that evolution occurs thanks to natural selection.
This is when organisms with traits better suited to survive live,
while others in the population do not. The traits that helped the living organism survive
are then passed on to its offspring and over time — a lot of time — the entire species can change.
According to Britannica, humans first emerged around 315,000 years ago after developing traits
that were better suited for their environment, like the ability to develop and use tools while
walking upright on two legs. Evolution is a slow process that unfolds over thousands of years,
this is why in the short time that cars have been around humans haven't yet adapted to
the danger they can pose. However, at some point, thousands of years down the line, they just might.
In 2015, when the state government of Victoria decided to launch their Towards Zero initiative,
they decided to put together a campaign to raise public awareness. Traditionally,
these kinds of campaigns rely on heavy displays of shock and gore — cars rocketing into the air,
people mangled, and so on. The team wanted to focus on the scientific aspects of their goal
without losing the visceral quality.
In an interview with marketing operations firm Simple,
Head of Planning at DDB Group Australia Matt Pearce said,
"We needed to find a way to communicate that to people but not make them feel like it was a cold,
clinical data point. We decided to just focus on the human form. It's something
everyone can relate to because it's about how we're all built."
And so, they developed Graham, — a composite model of what a human
man may look like and be built like if humans evolved to survive car crashes.
Pearce said,
"Through Graham, we could talk about why we need airbags,
seatbelts, speed limits — he allows us to address all of these things."
By illustrating how radically different we would look if human bodies had evolved to
include the biological equivalents of automotive safety equipment,
the team hoped to display just how important it is for real, modern humans to drive carefully.
Visitors to the Towards Zero website can click on different parts of Graham's body, like his brain,
to see how the team – composed of a trauma surgeon, a crash expert,
and an artist – redesigned the human body.
Patricia Piccinini, the artist who created the life-sized Graham sculpture,
described one part of the body in detail, saying:
"Graham's brain is the same as yours, but his skull is a lot bigger,
with more cerebrospinal fluid and ligaments to brace the brain when a collision occurs.
His head offers greater overall safety, effectively protecting the brain
and reducing the damage caused on internal impact with the skull wall."
Similar measures were taken for the other parts of Graham's body which are frequently injured
in modern humans, including a strengthened rib cage with small airbags between each rib
and an ultra-sturdy neck to protect against whiplash.
According to Simple's profile on Graham and his designers,
77% of those who saw images of Graham or who saw the model in person
reported it made them realize how fragile their own bodies are in the context of road safety.
Graham was originally displayed at the State Library of Victoria but then went
on tour around the country as a traveling display to spread Towards Zero's message
on the importance of road safety and reducing traffic fatalities.
Of course, given Graham's unusual appearance, he and the campaign were eventually spoofed.
"The human body doesn't have the physiology to withstand the impact of a career in advertising."
A few years after Graham made his rounds, a parody of Graham was released. He was called "Grant,"
and he was described as "designed to survive the trauma of a career in advertising," by physically
evolving to endure "dangerously long hours, self-induced stress and rampant alcoholism."
Those evolutionary traits included "Ears that filter out conflicting opinions,"
and "An auxiliary liver to process copious amounts of alcohol." As this parody shows,
apparently nothing is too serious that it can't be spoofed, at least a little bit.
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