h2RESTARTING CAR DESIGN/h2
Peter Naumann
As Munich-based Professor Peter Naumann sees things, the current crisis in the automobile industry has to be seen as an opportunity for a new beginning. In this article, originally published in form, he makes a case for a new type of automobile designer, one who is involved in the entire development process and adopts a problem-oriented approach to his work instead of merely specialising in styling.
"Criticism is subjective," is how Otl Aicher prefaced his passionate book "Kritik am Auto" (Criticism of the Car) back in 1984. And it is definitely time to start asking a few critical questions once again. A quarter of a century has now elapsed and we once again find ourselves in a situation that could not be more dramatic. The age of petroleum is coming to a dramatic end and we can assume that all accompanying crises are directly or indirectly connected with this.
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks about a past decade of frivolity and intoxication. After repeated booms we are now experiencing to a massive extent what Sloterdijk calls the "resistance of the real." And this also applies to the automobile industry which finds itself, something that comes as more or less of a surprise, in the middle of the downward spiral caused by the financial crisis, climate crisis and energy crisis. Similarly to the banks, the automotive industry is losing its inviolability.
As everybody knows, every seventh job is dependent on the car. Over the past decades the car industry has grown massively, raking in very good profits. But making provisions for bad times was never an issue that was seriously addressed. In times when people have other problems than thinking about nice cars, the car companies are threatened with becoming victims of their own success.
Looking back, it somehow comes as no surprise that things could not continue like this forever. But as everyone knows, it is easy to be wise after the event. Sales are tumbling dramatically and the sector's leaders are looking directly into the abyss.
Various nations are putting together rescue packages that frequently only prolong the rot. In the final analysis, the market will consolidate itself into only a few survivors, as we have already witnessed in several other sectors.
From all sides people are trying to shake the protagonists out of their drug-like torpor and even the German Automobile Club ADAC, as guardians of the Grail of unrestricted travel for free citizens is vehemently demanding a radical new approach.
But what do designers have to do with this? Can they contribute anything positive or is it even the case that they are partially responsible for crimes such as the unbelievable waste of resources and global warming, something that now appears to be irreversible? What really happens in the automotive industry's hermetically sealed, top-secret design studios? How could designers here influence the development of new products? As recently as the 1980s, hardly anybody knew exactly what a designer actually does. And today the job of automobile designer has become a dream profession.
Fixated on the unbroken appeal of automotive ecstasy, highly-motivated graduates of the appropriate faculties are betaking themselves to the arms of awe-inspiring automobile corporations. No wonder the latter engage in cherry-picking and demand uncritical loyalty. Then, from their golden cages, well-paid as they are, these designers file away at ever-new interpretations of the relevant brand's "DNA."
At first, this does not sound too bad, but it is grueling, too, and in no other area of product development is so much shelved or lands up in the trash can at such great expense. And it is often the case, that fear is widespread.
Nowhere else is a designer's half-life so short, the competitive pressure and the workload so great as in the automobile industry. Here, the objective is to develop new models in ever more rapid cycle and to throw them out at the market to keep buyer interest and that desire for the newest of the new and the hottest of the hot buoyed up.
The competition among car designers has long since become global, meaning that creative minds from all over the world are to be found in one and the same studio. With presentation techniques that display ever-increasing virtuosity they attempt to make the same thing appear new and exciting every time. Regrettably, in the process, it is their ability to work in a problem-oriented way that suffers.
The designers in the automobile industry are embedded in an exactly-structured work process in which they represent a specialised arm. They receive precisely-defined instructions and work using an almost entirely solution-oriented approach. The scope accordingly remains minimal, often a matter of only a few millimeters, for the implementation of formal ideas.
However, a vehicle's design should be the most important feature differentiating it from the competitors, who, at the end of the day, are manufacturing products identical in functional and technical terms. But at the same time no provider wishes to stick his neck out too far. The reason: a polarised design such as the one offered by Renault a few years ago, for example, may possibly not appeal to enough target groups. And so everybody keeps a sharp eye on their competitors and it is quite common for different manufacturers to feature astonishingly similar design elements.
But in actual fact the number of outstanding automobile designers is not infinitely large. Many of them are on the payrolls of premium German manufacturers, where they attempt to set themselves apart from the ubiquitous mainstream. Audi managed this particularly well in the 1990s with models such as the TT and the A6.
Nowadays, the value of design in the automotive sector is no longer questioned, but this means that now anyone who has any say in the company wants his opinion on the matter to be heard. And this does not make the designer's job any easier. So it can happen that the CEO sits down next to the designer and dictates how the design should look. Then it comes as no surprise that often the horizons are limited.
The result is that we are confronted with a mainstream that makes cars look more and more banal and uniform. Everybody wants to look sporty, dynamic and that little bit aggressive. And the feel is becoming increasingly reminiscent of a grimacing animal. At the international motor shows visitors are stared at by nothing but gaping jaws and headlights with an evil glare. The manufacturers are vying with one another to produce increasingly unimaginative variations on this unchanging theme.
Only in the case of trainer manufacturers is the situation comparable. A kind of specialisation that runs through all conceivable variations on the styling theme has become established. The same way that in the fashion business new dresses are churned out regularly, here, it is new car bodies; but nowhere is an innovation to be seen. On the contrary: the vehicles are coated in sugar frosting that completely ignores functional aspects such as collision protection and circumferential visibility. They look good at the motor shows but it is a different story if you are trying to park the car or maneuver in an underground parking garage. The sales crisis is in part the result of a crisis in automobile design.
All of these stand in contrast to the developments in classical industrial design. Whereas in the 1990s everybody went far too far, particularly in furniture design, nowadays, with a refreshing practicality and an archaic minimalism in evidence, there is once again room to breathe. More than any other company, Apple has led the way in moving away from those expressively crazy shapes and colors. For the blinking of an eye in motor history terms we were able to observe this new direction, which rejected superficial technological features and in-your-face performance characteristics in the Audi A2, which is now threatening to become a cult object. This ingenious car was far ahead of its time and was flattened by the approach of SUVs.
Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution talks about "the survival of the fittest" and a remarkable change is visible in response to the crisis. The corporations have discovered the EV, the electric vehicle, and have scented an opportunity to escape from the dilemma caused by dwindling fuel suppliers.
If you think that electrically propelled vehicles were very successful in the 1940s you can try to imagine how cars and our environment would look today if there had never been such a thing as a combustion engine. And these are the very questions that designers working on the design identity of future EVs are asking themselves. And already there is disagreement about whether cars should be changed at all in terms of design or whether they should merely be fitted out with the new technology.
Some people think that it is enough to paint the car green or provide it with a floral decoration. Mercedes dared to go slightly further with its study Blue Zero at the beginning of the year in Detroit, but they became entangled in irrelevant styling. The designers at VW displayed a much more daring approach. Back at the last IAA they showed a charming study - Up. This design managed to get right away from the formality of automobile design and its Cubist design references icons of industrial design such as Algol, the TV by Marco Zanuso.
The noticeable schism between designers at the various automobile manufacturers is particularly interesting. Indeed there is a small but extremely lively group of creative minds who are not unconditionally in love with cars and who are now getting the chance to question everything. Think the unthinkable and you are on exactly the right track. Who is going to crack the code of the electric car's visual identity? BMW has a top-secret project, if, in progress, and at Audi it is something known as the E-series. Here they have understood that perhaps they will never again have the same chance to create something entirely new. What is at stake here is nothing more or less than the survival of these marques.
Sergio Marchionne, the Fiat boss, thinks there is only enough room on the global market for six corporations. Designers at the large motor corporations are slowly getting the unpleasant feeling that they have signed on the Titanic, a ship whose promised unsinkability throws up questions. Already, the first studios are being shut down as part of rigorous economies. The future will tell who has already rammed the iceberg. It is not the case that nobody saw the crisis coming, but as long as everything was going well criticism was frowned upon.
This dream job could turn into a nightmare. As in the financial world, the politicians even promoted this fatal development in the car industry. In the final analysis, it was a wrong traffic policy that meant that the wrong products were developed for far too long. Just being able to show the others that you are capable of over-taking them on the highway cannot be a sustainable concept for contemporary automobile development. Our confidence in a perfect world, where prosperity, unrestricted mobility, status consciousness and unlimited resources are a matter of course has been shattered. Now, after the financial bubble, the automobile bubble is about to burst.
The automobile industry must and will reinvent itself in order to survive. However, in times of global economic crisis consumers are bound to free themselves from the idea of a car as a status symbol. The new virtues in the designs for the car of the future will be a compact, light quality, paired with aesthetics and sustainability. And already, quite openly, a new kind of designer is being sought for the new emission-free driving concepts.
The abilities of this new designer are expected to be much more closely involved in the entire design process and to be used more broadly. He must be able to work in a problem-oriented way and to be involved in coming up with solutions in interdisciplinary teams. He must use his abilities to immediately translate complicated ideas into images and develop a logically consistent storyline for the vehicle in question. After all, there is no other product with which people associate such individual experiences and such a multi-layered emotionality. Our cars are a private space, a sheltered place where we can pursue our objectives and experience our own worlds.
What we need from our education system is now a new approach so that we can tune in to the correct wavelength, develop the right attitude. Concentrating almost exclusively on developing stylistic skills in the vehicle design courses results in the kind of specialisation that is now out of date. Quite apart from the fact that the number of car designers required will shrink considerably, there really still should be a plan B.
Of course, it is not that easy to explain to young motor car enthusiasts today that they have simply come along a few years too late to be exclusively involved in fuel-guzzling, high-powered fast cars for testosterone-driven pleasure seekers. Even in his studies, a modern designer should turn his hand to a broad spectrum of topics, including, of course, automobiles. This gives him the confidence to be able to work anywhere and to respond to an unsure future. Otl Aicher put forward a case for a designer who sees cars in relation to the environment, to society and to people. As an object for people and not for the economy. The time is ripe for this!
This article originally appeared in form 225 / 2009, and has been republished with permission.
About the author
Peter Naumann (47) is Professor of Industrial and Automobile Design at Munich University of Applied Sciences and has been interested in cars since he was a student. He took a postgraduate course in Transportation Design at the Royal College of Art and is now head of a studio, Naumann-Design, in Munich.
www.naumann-design.dewww.hm.edu
