Tandem newspaper helps design

This week I have the honour of appearing on the cover of Tandem newspaper. It's not the first time the Toronto publication has featured my design work and this isn't the reason for writing this entry.

The fact they have published my work a few times is not important because it's my work. It's important because they feature design week after week and have been doing so since the 1990s. While other newspapers feature design periodically, Tandem has a steady design column. This dedication to the field shows a true commitment to design culture and this level of exposure does wonders for bringing its message to a larger audience.

The first line of the article is a quote from me: “I’ve always said everybody loves design – they just don’t know it."

Why do people not know it? Because they never get to see it. Society needs more newpapers like Tandem who can provide interesting commentary on design and on how design fits into everyday life.

Mark Curtis has written all but one of the articles featuring my work over the years. I always look forward to meeting up with Mark at the various Toronto design events throughout the year. His passion for design and his skills at communicating the different aspects of our work are a real asset to Tandem. It was a great pleasure to answer Mark's insightful questions over an iced latte at Dark Horse for the article. He always links design to people and this is so critical in bringing the benefits of design to society.

Thank you Mark and Tandem for the priviledge of appearing in your excellent publication and thank you even more for your continuing support and exposure of design.

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.

Innovation for all

Today’s blog is a letter to the editor I sent to the Toronto Star.

David Crane’s excellent piece in last Friday’s Toronto Star “Liberals need an economic vision” is truly visionary. Two points of the article really stand out for me because they are verification of beliefs that I have held for many years.

First this quote, “…manufacturing must become more knowledge intensive, with greater investment in research and development, as well as training and skills upgrading, design and marketing.”

Nothing could be closer to the truth. Canadian companies need to delete their current short-term practice of not investing in design and begin to act like global players. What is key is that manufacturers can be innovative merely by implementing an alternative approach to how they develop products. With modest investment, a producer can improve their chances of sustainable success in the new post-recession economy by using design. Companies must shed the old approach of getting “a guy in the back” or a CAD jockey to be their product developer and use professionals for these endeavours. They must also employ better and more sophisticated strategies in the branding and marketing of their products.

Secondly, David Crane sees the immense potential of looking to Canada’s different cultural communities for their energy and talent. Our nation has been gifted with a truly diverse society. Immigrants are a treasure trove of new ideas and approaches to problem solving. Also, their link to their ancestral homeland gives access to foreign markets and additional bases of knowledge. My own connection to Italy allowed me to learn the methodologies of Italian automotive and industrial design which were critical to starting a successful design consultancy here in Canada.

Thank you, Mr.Crane, for recognizing the value of Canada’s multicultural mosaic and for linking the word innovation with the word design.

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.

My Eco Epiphany

The word epiphany has come to mean a reckoning, an awakening or an event that can change one’s life or way of thinking. So as we pass this day on Christian calendars, I’d like to share my Eco-Epiphany.

First some background. My dream from as far back as I can remember was to become a car designer. And of course, within a future car designer’s dream there lies that even bigger desire to design big displacement, multi-cylinder, long hooded, super exotic sportscars. When I lived in Turin, working as an automotive stylist in a large design house, I designed for companies that made these. So it is quite ironic that my epiphany happened in the very place where these machines are conceived.

It was just before Christmas 1991. On a typical dull, colourless, Torinese winter day, I boarded a plane headed for Amsterdam. But on takeoff, I noted a strange sight. As the aircraft ascended, I could make out a precise distinction between the purple coloured smog and the cleaner air above it. With each second that passed, this line descended on the window until it was gone. It was as if the plane was emerging from a polluted lake. Looking down a few moments later, I could see this haze, purple like the Hendrix song hanging over the city, a smoggy shroud of Turin.

From that day on, I dreamed a revised dream. My objects of desire suddenly had less cylinders if none at all. The world seemed in need of new solutions very quickly. It was in that moment that my dream machines became leafy green instead of Italian racing red.

I have always retained since that day that people would need new solutions to transportation. Whether it’s mass transit, human powered vehicles or just cars without the petroleum, the world would have to evolve. Sadly, it has not evolved quickly enough. So in this new decade I hope that political leaders and industrialists will have their epiphanies also.

Touched by a Star

Let’s conduct a simple test. Raise your hand if live in a house designed by a famous architect like Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry? How many of you wear a piece of clothing designed by Miuccia Prada or John Galliano? Hands up, please. I would suspect that there are a few raised hands out there but not an overwhelming majority.

Anyone listen to an iPod or drive a Mazda? I would venture that there are a lot more of you now reaching for the ceiling. If you did, congratulations, you are the proud owner of an MP3 player designed by perhaps one of the most talented industrial design studios on the planet or the driver of an automobile conceived by one of the leading automotive design teams in the industry.

While more people recognize architecture or fashion design as professions, few people own things created by the superstars of these vocations. I guess that makes industrial design one of the most democratic design disciplines. What other industry gives the general public so much access to products by its top practitioners? Visionary companies utilize industrial designers for their product development. Industrial designers have designed almost everything you use in your daily lives including even the most inexpensive items.

Take a company like Method Home. Their packaging is exquisite not to mention the great scents and cleaning products they manufacture. In 1983, the great Italian designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, even designed a pasta for Voiello called Marille. So for around a dollar one could purchase a designer object by a hall of famer. How democratic is that?

In today’s celebrity obsessed world, I believe that a lot more people would really get into design if they knew that some of the everyday products out there were designed by the stars of this industry.

Gaga for Design

Today’s posting is a critique, a design review if you will. So for the first critique on Design Confidential I’ve chosen not a car, a furniture collection, a building, an envoronment or even an electronic gadget or work of graphic design. I’m going for the Gaga. Lady Gaga that is. I believe that her video for “Bad Romance” is a good piece of design.

By now you’re probably thinking I’ve sniffed too many Pantone markers. So let’s get critiquing.

The video begins with the title “Bath Haus of Gaga”. This could have easily read Bauhaus of Gaga for its strict adherence to the “less is more” philosophy. This modern, minimalist approach is used throughout the piece creating a strong visual consistency. Everything from the interior spaces, the furniture, décor accessories and the props all work together aesthetically and are of the same theme. Call it futuristic or sci-fi but it all hangs together. The great architects such as Alvar Aalto or Frank Lloyd Wright believed in retaining an aesthetic consistency in their projects. They insisted on designing not only the building but the furniture also. So in this regard, the video holds true to having a very exacting attention to detail.

The interiors themselves while they might seem from outer space do exist in high design spaces. Pick up a copy of Artravel or Frame and you will find domestic environments similar to the Gaga video. The bleak white spaces with endless gridded ceilings and floors remind me of the experimental landscapes of Archizoom and Superstudio, a collaborative of avant garde Italian design thinkers of the 1960s.

Design stars also make cameos. Philippe Stark’s Zikmu iPod station gets actuated by Lady Gaga’s steel-mesh covered fingernail. Stark appears again with his Kartell La Marie chairs while she struts in front of a group of playboys. Alexander McQueen’s claw stilettos even make an appearance.

Lastly any song that has a lyric that stating “I want your design” merits a post in this blog.

Check out "Bad Romance".