Re*Move

"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." *

* Henry Ford - upon the introduction of the Model T

Dan Sturges is a transport visionary. For twenty years he’s foreseen and been tackling some of the transport-related problems the rest of the world is only just starting to grapple with. Sturges isn’t anti-car. He is simply pro shaking up mobility full stop, and believes that far from just moving people in to electric cars, we need to introduce people to a variety of vehicles - ones that are the right size for each journey they make.

A couple of months back, I chatted to him over skype about his current thoughts on his company Intrago, the future of mobility, and what the auto industry is up to. You can see an edited highlight of that video below, and then after the jump I’ve pulled out and discussed what I think are the key points he made.

Finding meaning in Frankfurt - 2009 auto show review

What will the 2009 Frankfurt auto show be remembered for? While you’ve probably read it was all about electric cars, that misses the bigger story from the Messe show floor. This was the moment the auto industry got its mojo back.

Whether this sense of optimism is misplaced (especially when you take into account that scrappage schemes across Europe seem likely to end soon), only time will tell. For now, it serves as an antidote to the damp-squib of Geneva 2009, which was sorely needed.

Carlos Ghosn says "the time for change is now", introducing four Renault EV (or Z.E.) concepts

Back at the turn of the year, people like Renault-Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn were saying things like “I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next month, so don’t ask me about plans for 2010”. In Frankfurt, he assuredly hung Renault’s future on EVs, saying “the time to act is now” before unveiling four electric car concepts, and promising they’d all land by 2012. Whether consumers want them is now the 64 billion dollar question. Should the answer be a full-on no, Renault’s on a very slippery slope. If yes, its alliance with Nissan is extremely well positioned, backed up by its infrastructure partner, Better Place – who placed an order for 100,000 electric Renault’s on the first day of the show.

Alongside Renault’s offerings, BMW was a shoe in for car of the show with the Vision Efficient Dynamics concept. Pictures leaking out prior to the show’s opening didn’t diminish its impact in the flesh, and no-one has missed its relevance to the future of BMW’s M Performance division – previewing a future for high-performance cars in a carbon-constrained world. It’s a great halo car for the Efficient Dynamics campaign, too (which incidentally, is much smarter than the cheesy, over-arching new brand slogan, “Joy”).

BMW's Vision Efficient Dynamics concept, looked terrific from this angle

Images of Frankfurt

I spent just one day at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show and barely covered more than a couple of halls. But here's the stuff I saw that interested me. Click on the collage below or here.

Press day. Frankfurt Auto Show. 15 September 2009.

Posted by Mark Charmer. Mark is managing director of The Movement Design Bureau.

User research on the Ford Fiesta: the view from some real life Antonellas

Ford is proud of the new Fiesta. It's been Europe's best selling car, pretty much every month since its launch. And having spent much of last weekend driving one, and clobbered through the 400 mile Newcastle to London journey in one, in one go - it's easy to see what all the hype is about. The car is good. It looks relatively fast, even when it's stood still. It drives like any contemporary European Ford (which is to say, extremely well), and Ford considers it good enough to be going on sale in the US next year. It's even full of so-called big car features - keyless entry, leather uphulstery, ipod integration - that sort of thing.

But back to that word 'hype'. Part of Ford's aggressive push around the new Fiesta has been to talk about the importance of utilising persona-based design techniques. A design persona is a completely fictional character, created by the marketing and design departments, to which everyone involved in the development of the car can refer. The persona 'personifies' many of the lifestyle attributes that the car's target customer would have. They behave, have the same types of job, same types of friends and like doing the same types of things that the real world customer will do. And in the case of the Fiesta, the persona's name is Antonella.

According to press quotes from Ford designer Moray Callum, who we interviewed earlier this year:

"Antonella is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties. She is also completely imaginary. She was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta."

However, while Ford has been keen to play up the importance of design personae in its current processes, and especially the one behind the Fiesta, many others - including ourselves, are sceptical about their usefulness. As Ben Kraal suggested, in response to the New York Times piece on this subject:

"Are the personae the result of long study of buyers and owners, aggregates of hundreds of tiny specific observations of many real people or are they simply invented from thin air?"

He goes on to suggest that he suspects it's the later, based on the following statement, again from Callum:

"Antonella cares more about the design and function of her telephone than that of her car. Her priorities in the Fiesta are visible in the car’s central panel, where controls inspired by those of a cellphone operate the audio and air-conditioning systems. Designers working on the Fiesta referred to the shape framing the dashboard instruments as “Antonella’s glasses.”"

So when Ford lent us a Fiesta recently, we wanted to try to test this development methodology's success using some real people (among other things - watch this space for more Fiesta content). Believing that, in fact, one of the biggest 'problem areas' that exists in car design today centres around designers rarely getting to spend time with, nor being able to understand the real needs and desires of their customers, we carried out some research in the real world... which consisted of shoving a video camera in people's face, and asking them what they thought.

We don't suggest this is conclusive, nor is it particularly scientific, but this five minute video features eight young professional 25-35 year olds who live and work in London - all of whom are target market customers for the Fiesta. Specifically, we've edited this video around their views on that interior design, inspired by Antonella's phone keypad and sun glasses:

If you haven't watched the video above, then this is your 'spoiler alert' warning. The views we got were quite interesting. Specifically, boys, rather than girls, seem much more won over by the car's centre console design. And judging by our research, the women we spoke to are looking for something in a car's interior that is much more sophisticated and classy than the keypad of Antonella's (presumably now three year old) mobile phone.

Does this illustrate the pitfalls in using design personae, such as Antonella? Partially, yes. While it is easy to see the usefulness of one dreamt-up character around which everyone on the project can focus; a made up character who can't answer back is very different from real people, in the real world who have real lives. Understanding what those people want from their car, asking them the right questions, and then being able to filter the information they provide and turn it into something that they never dreamt was possible, is to me the definition of the role of a good designer.

As one of the people in the video later said, the problem with the Fiesta's interior, is that it feels like something that "was designed by a bunch of male designers, who think they know what women want in the interior of a car", and that "in three years times, it will look terribly dated". Which is a shame, because otherwise the Ford Fiesta is an (externally) good looking, grown up, but still very fun to drive small car.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 26th Auguest 2009

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoing The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009, and the Ford Fiesta was lent to us by Ford UK's press department free of charge. We have an independent brief, and are free to say what we want. If you don't think that's the case, we want to hear from you.

The last 12 months of auto design - Joe's favourite things

I returned from France a few days ago to find Robb and Mark discussing the last 12 months of cars and car design, because they were thinking about which ones ought to be entered into the upcoming Spark design Awards.

While the auto industry’s been in the doldrums for some time now, Spark Awards provides an opportune moment to take a look at some of the more interesting cars, concepts and automotive details of recent times. So without further ado, here’s a scratch list of some Simpson favourites…

BMW Gina

Designed years ago, but then dumped in a secret hanger until such time when BMW needed an on-demand concept to unveil (the opening of BMW-Welt proved to be just such an occasion), BMW’s Gina is arguably the single most innovative thing to have happened in auto design for years. As its mastermind Chris Bangle remarked at unveiling “what do we need the skin of a car for anyway? What is it made out of? Does it have to be made of metal?” Too few ‘what if’ questions are asked in the auto world, and the moments that they do happen are typically hidden from public view – as this one was for so long. But we’re glad it finally saw the light of day, and that like all the best concepts it asks more questions than it answers.

Nissan Cube

In a world where even family hatchbacks are competing to set the fastest time in the class around the Nurburgring, Nissan offers a leftfield approach. The Cube has been around in Japan for years, but now Europe and the US are getting the second generation. Why? Nissan realise that most drivers aren’t interested in the minutae of cornering finesse, or top speed; they’re interested in something that manages to provide huge utility, but have personality at the same time. The Cube has both in spades. Essentially a box-on-wheels, it features a ‘sun and moon’ set of dials, ‘curvy wave’ seating, and asymmetric styling in the shape of one side rear window turning around the corner into the rear windshield. When he had one on test recently, Michael Banovsky noted “I feel awful leaving the cube downstairs at night. He looks so sad”. It’s the kind of car that elicits such feelings. Jean Jennings, Automobile Magazine and long-time Spark friend, raved about it to us recently, too.

 

Audi LED lights

They’re by no means universally loved, nor were Audi first to introduce LED headlight technology, but through smart design strategy and brilliant detailed execution, Audi have taken ownership of the LED headlight. Subtly different on the R8, A6, A5 and A4, the wavy bands of bright white lights, piercing through the daylight when in DRL mode, are now as much an Audi identification hallmark as the shield grille and four rings - leaving you in no doubt as to just which type of car is behind you, and would like you to move over, thank you very much…

Future Influence. When Amy met Drew.

While Ford is busy designing cars (questionably) around a mythical Italian female persona called Antonella, it and other companies need to be adapting themselves to interact with another group entirely.

They may seem virtual, but they're very real, and they come with loyal, influential followers. And they don't wait to be hired - they crave to be hired and have more useful insights along the way than most who already are.

Drew Smith is one of a new generation of commentators, driving conversations online about the future. Subject experts, independent of mind and building their careers around a portfolio - of experience, opinion, connections and commissions. He edits the Downsideupdesign blog.

Amy talks to him below. Listen carefully, because he's exactly the kind of person who is starting to influence how brands are perceived, design conversations happen, and connections are forged. In the past, people either got jobs in an industry or didn't. Once they were in, they got locked behind walls for years, until they got onto a press spokesperson list. Now they can dive into and across industry projects, often hired because they've already articulated problems publicly. They can build their own unique identity, online content and networks of supporters, share their ideas and work together more easily with others than many who work in siloed departments. Many are cross-discipline, combining understanding of product, service and interactive design.

Drew is a vehicle designer and expert in making sense of the future of the autombile and car brands. Check out his views from earlier this summer on the failure of car companies to interest the 'digital generation'. It's important stuff that doesn't usually get talked about.

Drew is unique, but of course he's not - he's one of an emerging group. You might be carving out a similar purpose - in urban planning, product design, social software, interactive design, service design, environment technologies or services. The sky's the limit. If so, we'd love to get to know you.

Amy Johannigman aka @amydoesdesign interviewed @drewpasmith from The Movement Design Bureau in London. Drew was in the Australian outback, on holiday. Monday, 3 August 2009. Want to know more about Amy? Then read her views about the future of design in this piece here.

A Date with Mr Muscle

Sometimes the best encounters are unexpected. It started as potentially the shortest meeting - Ford staffer: "Why would you want to talk about the Mustang? You guys are covering green." - but Rob Gelardi, senior designer on the new Mustang, charmed us a recent visit to Dearborn, Michigan.

But think about it for a minute.

Man walks into a bar.

Bartender: "What do you do?".

Man: "Oh I designed the Ford Mustang."

Cool.

And did I mention that the very first car he rode in as a baby was his mum's '69 gold Mustang?

Cool mum, too.

In the end, Rob gave us loads of his time - in a studio, then out on the road, top down. Even Peter Horbury, the Volvo design chief, came over and started chatting. And the whole thing finished with Mr Gelardi, Mr Simpson and Mr Horbury (hanging out of the window of his Flex) debating which colour we preferred the new Mustang in. Sold.

See our video below (watch for the great exchange at the end about Barbie). There's an in-depth discussion on the Mustang design here too. And pictures below that.

Here's our photoset from the interview:

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Mitch Altman on The Magic of Open Design

We've said before and we'll say again, open, networked forms of design and collaboration are going to change how we solve many problems. They'll also shape the future of our cities, towns and villages, how we work in them, the ways we move and interact in them, the vehicles we design and the way they fit together.

Some of this is about cost - build something once, openly and others can improve it. But much of it is about the culture of open source designers and problem solvers.

Here I talk with San Francisco-based virtual reality and hacker god Mitch Altman, inventor of, amongst other things TV-B-Gone, and Vinay Gupta, open source hardware guru and inventor of the Hexayurt open source refugee shelter.

I ask whether these new networks of designers – often in the form of hackers or open source communities - spend too much time focused on arguing about the need to break down existing structures. Is there more happening beyond that? What can those networks be doing now – to create real value? Do hackers and open source networks have an identity and meaning that can defined by what they are, rather than what they aren't?

I also ask whether the hacker scene has started to build its own financial infrastructure yet?

Design Museum, Butler's Wharf, London. 9 July 2009.

Posted by Mark Charmer.

There's a New Daddy in the Luxury Motor Market

The new Jaguar XJ, Saatchi gallery, Chelsea, London - July 10th 2009

Sticking with our Callum brothers theme today, Jaguar chose Chelsea in central London as the place to launch its new XJ last week. This big cat is what Jaguar's design boss Ian Callum calls a return to the values of Jaguar during the William Lyons era - to "produce the most exciting cars in the world". Callum, impressive and passionate, described the launch of this new car as a "tipping point for the Jaguar brand - one Britain should be proud of".

Tipping points are tricky to pinpoint and if I was asked what was tipping right now, I'd say it was luxury car sales - off a cliff. But Jaguar is buoyant and claims modest recent sales growth, while other makers universally tanked. 

But while the wealthy car buyer is feeling rather less flush, he or she now has something entirely new to angst about. Despite looking from assorted angles like a Maserati Quattroporte, an XF, a Lexus SC (ouch), a Citroen C6, Granada Scorpio, Hillman Avenger and a Morris Marina Coupe, the Jaguar XJ is a quite lovely thing. In a great BBC TV moment this April, writer Michael Smith's documentary "Me and My Car"  featured a scene where Smith sank into the passenger seat of a vintage Jag saloon and said "I'd like to get pissed in this car". Clearly Callum was listening. "People are gonna have a good time in a Jaguar" is his boast. I'd get pissed in the back of this car any day of the week.

The car's got some neat, really focused technology, too - without getting silly. As the great Jean Jennings said to us recently, "If it doesn't make me drive better, make it go away." All of the dash instruments on the XJ (the bit in front of the driver with the speedo, etc) are a screen, with the dials all digitally rendered. In demos it looked fantastic and it's a flexible place where info like where to turn left and what music is playing appears. It's also the place where prompts appear for the voice command features. This is infinitely preferable to putting that stuff in the centre console, as Joe and I had to endure recently in the nervous-breakdown-inducing Ford Sync system.

There's other cool stuff, too. A huge 'dual angle' video screen in the centre dash which can display two different images at the same time, with each appearing clearly to driver and passenger. Which is, well, just so much fun.

The body is aluminium, so is as light as its smaller, steel sister, the XF. The 3.0 V6 diesel is claimed to do more than 40 miles per gallon, gets to 60 mph in 6 seconds and emits 184 grams of CO2. Which is pretty impressive.

Jag has also focused on making the hi-fi sound really good. While recognising you will probably bring your iPod along. But it has a hard disc that rips CDs uncompressed and has a Gracenote database.

But back to those looks, which have thrown the cat amongst the pigeons. Although Jaguar has been saying for months that the new XJ was radical, no one was totally prepared for this long, fast-back look, complete with blacked-out D pillar and a rear end that marks a complete departure for Jaguar design.

Never before has an aspect of a Jaguar's design caused so much kerfuffle...

There's an old adage which says never judge a car's design purely from photos; wait until you've seen it in the flesh, and even then - make sure you see it moving, on the road, and in traffic before you make a true call on the design. This is truly a design to which this applies. I sat at the launch breakfast on Friday morning riveted to the thing rotating in front of me, trying to decide whether it was beautiful. I've concluded that the XJ is quite a looker - with much less of the heavy, lumpiness around the rear three quarters than seems in the photos and with a rear haunch that does, as Callum claims, make it very coupe-like. 

If you, too, fancy staring open mouthed at the thing revolving, you can watch this video I took. And below is a (car-nerd-level) outline by design director Ian Callum talking us through the design.

And if you still haven't made your mind up about whether that rump works or not, check out some of our detailed shots in this photoset (click anywhere on the photos to link through to the original flickr set):

Mark Charmer is a founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Big Brother's Little Brother

If you want to know what the future car’s going to look like, it’s worth having a chat with one of the Callum brothers. On Friday, Ian Callum unveiled Jaguar’s new XJ - which set tongues wagging around the world. But while big brother is grappling with the future of luxury cars, little brother has an even more interesting job – working out the future of mainstream, global car design. So a few weeks ago we spoke with Moray – man behind many recent Mazdas and the new Ford Taurus, and recently made executive director of Ford’s design Americas. Check the video, and then see our take on what he said below:

“What makes a car good is going to change”

Here in Europe, since the Focus I of 1998, Ford’s cars have stood out because they’re fantastic to drive. Ride and handling balance, steering feel, and control weights are all top of the class. It’s true that in the motoring press at least, a car will rarely be deemed “good” unless it drives dynamically well. But Moray believes that “the technologies that make a car good will change” - and he implies that the focus will move into vehicle interior functionality and connectivity. Today’s cars suffer from a problematic mis-match between their development lead times and the pace of technological change. Acknowledging something needs to be done about this, and tallying with what J Mays recently told us, Moray makes clear that Ford is lining up to position itself as top of the tree in this area too.

2009 Focus RS. Steers and handles like no 300bhp FWD car has any right to...

Yet while Ford rhetoric currently focuses on “Sync” and the Fiesta’s centre console (which apes the design of a mobile phone keypad), there’s clearly the potential for a car’s interior to change even more radically with implementation of touchscreens, and soft – rather than hard – ware. A radical vision might be that the vehicle interior becomes a blank, digital canvas. Removal of heavyweight hardware could reduce weight, improving overall vehicle efficiency. If interiors became endlessly reconfigurable, added to or subtracted from with software applications, then individualization and configurability increases massively - allowing users to tailor cars to their precise needs. It may sound strange, but such developments have the potential to make a vehicle more sustainable – by allowing them to be reconfigured for different drivers and usages.

As Moray suggests, what sofware based apps means is that "it doesn't mean to say you need to get a new car to get the new technology". Potentially, this means consumers get bored less quickly, and cars survive for longer. Whether a new 'model-upgrade' culture would be allowed to replace the model-change culture of today's industry, itself a product of the need to maintain mass production, is of course open to debate. But the idea of car companies making money from software services and upgrades, rather than just mechanical maintenance and vehicle sales, is fascinating.

“[Car sharing] gives us the chance to make cars more specific for specific tasks”

We know car sharing’s on the radar at Ford. Sue Cischke surprised us earlier this year when she talked about how the company had been looking at it. But if you ask car designers about such ideas, you’re often met with a blank response - the organisational structure meaning it isn’t what design departments do or think about. At first, Callum does the same, suggesting “it’s outside of the realms of the design side of things”. But as we talk more he seems interested in what the increasing popularity of models such as Zipcar might mean for future vehicle design. What excites him is the potential to design more targeted, specific (and by implication, efficient) cars – targeted at specific usages or users: “if you’re going to use one sort of car to do one sort of motoring, and another to do a different sort, you can really pinpoint the design to something that’s much more applicable to the task, but at the same time much more exciting.”

  A current Mustang Zipcar - but could car sharing allow Ford's designers to develop much more targeted, specific, efficient designs in the future?

What Ford’s designers should do next

As one of the big-name designers now brought together under the ‘One Ford’ umbrella (others that stand out are J Mays, Freeman Thomas and Martin Smith), Callum has both an enviable and unenviable task ahead of him. He’s with some of the best designers in the business, and Ford appears to be on the right track – yet the car industry is rapidly changing (just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, and hadn’t noticed). The past fifteen years have seen an unrelenting march toward ‘prestige’ and a push up market by many car makers. Everyone has chased, but few have made inroads into, the dominance of the Germans - particularly BMW and Audi. The German’s are now ‘micro-nicheing’ - creating new vehicle segments, to questionable effect. Their brand cachet means they’ve got away with it to date, but this questionable nicheing (BMW 5 series GT anyone?) is an entire world away from the sorts of really useful, targetted 'niche' cars Moray mentions which could be developed for specific usage purposes as part of larger car share schemes. Such a policy would make much more sense for a brand such as Ford to be looking at, than some of the niches the Germans are pushing. Today, having sold off its premium lines, Ford is happily 'non-premium' and is instead focusing on a series of core models, creating ‘world vehicles’ or platforms.

Such consolidation looks smart right now. It saves money, and millions of brands probably aren’t that best thing to have today (ask GM). Yet creating cars that are all things to all people – across four continents, is a tough brief. On top of this, the Blue Oval’s core areas - mainstream hatchbacks in Europe, and trucks and Mustangs in the US - are likely to come under increased competitive pressure over the coming years, of the like never seen before. So is the ‘core-line’ approach enough to keep Ford’s head above water in the mid and longer term?

Maybe. Ford has a clear strategy for now, but it needs to go further and really utilize the talents of people like Callum, especially if it’s committed to being a sustainable leader. So while BMW ruminates on Project-I, which has somehow become a “premium” urban mobility solution for cities in 2014, and Toyota tinkers with the ‘I’ Series (iSwing, iReal) of personal mobility concepts chairs, there’s an opportunity for Ford to become the true world leader in the sub-car personal mobility sector. The market doesn’t exist right now, but it will – and this is what Ford needs to see. Not only does the brand carry exactly the right down-to-earth, ‘of the people’ image to suit such an area, but it would instantly give the company a jump on Toyota, positioning it close to the political decision makers and city leaders, and as the car company really thinking about a future generation’s mobility needs in the growing metropolises of the world.

Toyota's 'i' Series. Today people scoff at these vehicles, but Ford is missing a trick by not letting its designers loose on this space

We know that Ford is already looking at urban mobility issues, involved in research at places like MIT and Stanford, and we also know that while existing mobility projects from these teams are systematically and technically appealing and advanced, they hold little aesthetic appeal. So Ford is well placed to let its latent design talent off the leash, to allow them to define and develop a ‘Ford’ look for transportation in our 21st century cities. A Model T for the city of 2020? I’d love to see what Moray Callum thinks that would look like.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 14th July 2009

Images: Focus RS - jonanamary, Zipcar Mustang - charmermrk, Toyota i family - Jedi.RC - all under creative commons via flickr.

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work throughout 2009