► Automotive designers looking to other industries
► Some find non-car design experience essential to make good cars
► Others think automotive design is too restrictive so look outward
Car design blends and merges with designing appliances, furniture and fashion way more than you might think. In the mood board-filled world of design, those shaping the future of the car world will take inspiration from anything and everything to stand out or innovate.
‘For a brand like ours, we’re always quite progressive on that front,’ Kerstin Schmeding, Mini’s head of colour and trim, tells CAR. ‘We’re inspired by a lot of different things besides automotive, but at the same time we have to be aware of our competitors. It’s important to look at innovations in the car world but be inspired by other industries like architecture.’
Automotive design houses and car makers alike have strayed into crafting things that aren’t cars. Pininfarina, as well as designing furniture and appliances, has an entire department dedicated to home design. Pagane Arte creates living room and lounge furniture. Porsche Design creates everything from smartphones to watches and soundbars. In fact, we have a whole list of things car makers have created besides cars right here.
Stellantis, the mega multi-brand automotive giant, has an entire design studio dedicated to non-automotive projects. The Stellantis Design Studio has, for example, helped develop an electric aircraft for Aura Aero and a cable car system named Orizon with French industrial powerhouse, MND.
The studio is led by Klaus Busse, who also heads up Maserati’s design strategy, who believes that it’s quite freeing for automotive designers to be able to get involved with such ventures. ‘Given we design cars, it’s quite natural for us to look at projects like planes or a cable car system and apply some automotive thinking,’ says Busse. ‘And when we’re designing a car, particularly the interior, we’re constrained by such restrictions and regulations – maybe only the cockpit of a fighter jet is more complicated. Automotive designers have so many skills, and it’s our job to think beyond cars.’
Others in the industry believe having experience in design sectors besides automotive primes you for one hell of a range of skills when you do actually develop cars.
‘You’re a more complete designer if you’re not only designing cars,’ Andreas Mindt (pictured above, left), Volkswagen design boss, tells us. ‘Compared with myself, or colleagues around me, that is a very single-minded approach [to only focus on automotive]. But I see this changing, and for the better.’ So much so that Mindt tells us he actively looks for those who have been involved in different sectors when he’s looking for new hires in the design team.
‘It’s a good thing from a sustainability point of view, too,’ adds Mindt. ‘We want to be really good at being sustainable, and there’s so much drive in our sustainability team. Designers constantly think about materials and what to do with them; how to bend or treat wood, for example, and then you do a matching design. This is how furniture designers work – they don’t sketch an idea for a chair while on a plane or something! They start with the materials first, then do the architecture second.’
Schmeding agrees, pointing out that ‘going more towards recycled and recyclable materials in cars is one thing, but it’s now basically about focusing on fewer materials because that makes recycling much easier. The whole industry has to look into that right now, and it’s also a big trend in how you can easily disassemble a car.’