I'm Unimpressed with UnEmotional

The following blog is a letter sent to the Globe and Mail late last week following my reading of their article on Industrial Design and Toronto's new "state of the art" streetcars.

I applaud the Globe and Mail for featuring Industrial Design prominently in Friday’s business section. However, I’d like to point out a slight oversight. Industrial design involves the creation of products. Vehicles are designed by Transportation Designers. While the two disciplines cohabitate liberally there is one overriding difference: Vehicles must have emotion. Ask any car designer in any company in any country in the world, and he or she will speak about the “styling theme”, the “flow” the “character”, the DNA of the product.

Yes, good design must encompass functionality on all levels including sustainability. However, without emotion, these object become appliances. The 2013 TTC Streetcars are a good example. The design though professionally executed and competent is devoid any real character. I firmly believe Toronto needed a more daring design, something to celebrate our city’s great diversity. We are a population of vibrant cultures not robots. As well, many of the “innovations” listed in the article have been used on trams for many years. The City, as paying client, could have demanded more gusto from Bombardier’s designers. After all, this was a very large contract.

Some of the example listed in the piece are not beacons of car design either. Toyota is hardly considered a styling leader and spacecraft are honed by aerodynamicists. The innovations wrought in some of the examples came more from the braintrusts of engineering teams rather than the emotions and passions of vehicle designers.

Canadian International Auto Show High-Low

As I didn’t manage to post a good auto show review from Detroit, I’d thought I’d head over to the Toronto Convention Centre to check out the rides at the Canadian International Auto Show. I should start off by saying that this event is really more of a local dealer show than a major car happening. Without a real automotive industry in this country I guess it’s all that we can expect. However, it does give Torontonians a chance to see the latest and upcoming hardware and even look at a few recent (as in 1 to 2 years old) prototype vehicles.

There were some standouts for me. The Infiniti Essense concept was superb. Its graceful shapes and unique bulging beltline stopped many visitors for a closer look. As well, the Lincoln Concept C was a great vision for an upscale small car. Its futuristic interior in white with polished aluminum accents was beautiful. On the other hand the much anticipated Honda CR-Z hybrid sportscar disappointed. Somehow, the body just doesn’t hang together well and I find the front overhang makes the car look heavy. The forms seem mismatched. There are organic bits mixed with tighter tense lines. The mashup doesn’t play very well.

Two vehicles though illustrate how to and how not to dream up cars. The Volkwagen Up Lite concept was my favourite vehicle in the show. This concept for an ultra-high mileage automobile is functional and also very sophisticated. The simple shape has aerodynamics in mind yet it doesn’t bore the viewer as many low air drag vehicles do. There is no homage to ugly anatomical aero-shapes. The lines are crisp and they interrupt the two box design in the right places. I love how they tapered the roofline for low drag not only in the side elevation but the plan view also.

From the sublime we travel to the ridiculous. When I mentioned in the first paragraph that Canada doesn’t have a real car industry I meant it. Tucked away in a corner of the show was some good ole CanCon. The Plethore is Canada’s Supercar that begs the question, why do we need a supercar? While car companies around the world are trying to reduce fuel consumption, this Quebec-based enterprise is trying to take on the Bugatti Veyron. This car was the opposite of the Up Lite not only in purpose but in looks. It truly is a plethora of design details. I see styling hints from Ferrari, McLaren and Peugeot and this mélange is not pretty. The front view looks like a cartoon villain saying “can I look meaner”. It’s really too bad that all this great engineering went into a fuel burner that few people can own rather than an intelligent transportation solution that this over-polluted planet is in dire need of.

Photo: VW Up Lite

A Matter of Process: CargoMAX600 Part 2

So how does a designer find a solution? Well, there’s no straight forward way to achieve this. Light bulbs just don’t turn on. And sometimes the harder you try the worse the outcome. The CargoMAX 600 certainly posed a challenge. The more I sketched, the more frustrated I became. By Sunday midnight, all I had were some very pedestrian designs, things that any competitor could envision. I needed something unique. After two full days of freehand drawing, scaled side views and long thinking sessions, I was nowhere closer to a design than I was on Friday. Time was running out quickly. I needed something to show the manufacturer by Monday morning at 8.30.

Finally at 4am, I caught a glimpse of the vision. By creating a protruding feature line that grew gently out of the front of the cabin and then got more pronounced as it moved backward, I could retain a consistent width of the narrower cabin all through the roofline. This was important in creating a dominant “core”. A core is rounded corner between two principle surfaces and they are particularly important in automobile design to establish volumes. This core would define the vehicle as being tall and narrow like the Sprinter. The feature line which I called Line “D”, would break from the volume created by the core and establish the wider cargo volume. Also, it would visually slim the side view and create a sleeker look.

With this thought sketched out, I retired to a couple of hours of sleep. Early Monday morning I was back at the drawing board. Armed with a refreshing nap and a huge sense of relief that I’d found the magic styling bean, I set out to finish the rough design. At 8.30, I scanned my sketches and emailed them to my client. Approval was swift but I wasn’t out of the woods yet. We needed to put together a more formal presentation for my client’s customer by 5 pm.

Six hours to do a couple of sketches? Seems easy right? Not quite. Because of the aggressive timeline, I needed to make sure that the lines that I created were doable from a functional standpoint. Without this verification, the design could get ruined in the engineering stage. Hence, I began frantically drafting two dimensional cross sections to assure that it could work.

After a grueling afternoon session and no lunch break, I had the truck roughly worked out. Our meeting with the customer went incredibly well and we got approval to proceed.

The next six weeks were spent detailing and engineering the body. It did not change very much from the original sketch and ten weeks from that first initial idea I watched the truck motor out of the factory.

Watch the CargoMAX 600 movie.

A Matter of Process: CargoMAX600 Part 1

As stated in the trailer to Design Confidential, this blog promises to take readers behind the scenes of a design project. Designers talk frequently about “process”, the activity we engage in to create products. This process can be very complex with multiple phases ranging from research and information gathering to ideation and sketching to prototyping and validation. Sometimes, it’s linear as described above and sometimes it’s a circle, a zigzag or any combination of these.

What’s important is that every good design project has some kind of process. This series of blogs called “A Matter of Process” will take readers into this activity one project at a time. For this first installment, I’ll choose a simple one, the CargoMAX 600 cargo van that I designed a year ago.

While vehicle projects tend to be very involved, the CargoMAX was straight forward and had a textbook linear approach. The main reason for this? Time. The design team had 10 weeks to take the truck from sketch to prototype. This adventure began the week before Christmas 2008. A local truck body manufacturer was tasked by an American company with designing and building a first prototype for a new vehicle. The design brief was to create a cargo van with the same interior volume as the Mercedes Sprinter but built on an American chassis. The business case was that while the Sprinter was very practical and attractive, its chassis was not rugged to take the punishment that vans go through in North America and it was expensive. Also, by utilizing Chevrolet equipment, purchase and repair costs would be lower. To compete with the Sprinter, however, the van had to possess an attractive body, something quite uncommon in the truck body industry.

The first step was a daylong meeting the Friday before Christmas at the manufacturer’s facility to fine tune the vehicle specification. In that session we laid out the basic dimensions, the type of doors we would use, how many fiberglass components would make up the body and some basic design features. With this schematic in hand, I set out that weekend to create the rough design and styling.

Needless to say, it was not an easy task. The cargo body walls needed to be fairly upright in cross section to provide adequate volume but the cab of the Chevrolet had a large amount of tumble-home, meaning its upper cabin caved in toward the centre of the vehicle. This was my primary design challenge: how to neatly transition from the inward sloping cabin to the boxy cargo area. There are several easy ways to accomplish this but since the client wanted an attractive automotive look, I had to find something that broke from the norm.

To be continued...

The movie below tells the whole story.

Bono: Popstar to CarCzar

Bono’s latest editorial in Sunday’s New York Times on the state of automotive design certainly struck a sweet chord with me.

The auto industry’s dismal collection of minivans, SUVs and un-sexy sedans of the last few decades has stuffed our roads with a lot of visual jalopies. His proposed installation of figures like Marc Newson, Steve Jobs and Frank Gehry as auto-supremos might seem flighty but we need only look back to the automotive heyday to see that these new hires could really make the industry rock again.

In the 1960s, Detroit was run by the engineering departments. Born of these development teams were products like the Mustang, the GTO and some very elegant Lincolns. All became icons of American ingenuity and creativity. The 1970s saw direction go from the gearheads to the beancounters and what we have is our present day tedium. We have our “safe” solutions, our “family feeling” where all the cars in the brand share the same styling flavors. The big problem is that all the world’s brands (with a couple of exceptions) are getting their flavor from the same spice rack.

The important difference to acknowledge is that the 1960s had a more design-driven approach while subsequent decades opted for a corporate approach with shareholders affecting the decision-making. This is an environment that stifles the bold solitary visionary while embracing a design by committee product development method.

There is abundant talent in the car styling studios of the world. Note ex-BMW design director Chris Bangle. His flame surfaced Z4 is still the coolest BMW of the last decade and his “Bangle butt” 7 Series while the butt of much criticism continues to be copied today. Mazda consistently holds up the design torch and can make even a smaller car like the new Mazda 3 Sport look lovely.

The ability is there but its fruits are not always sold to the market. For example, Renault continues to captivate with its show cars but the latest Clio and Megane models are quite dull.

So Bono, I vote with you. Let’s make the designers the vocalists and lead guitarists of the auto industry and not the background singers.