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DesignSingapore Council IAP II
BY Ninart Lui
BY Ninart Lui
Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Chris Bangle
What we did at BMW Group was to bring emotion into Car Design as hasn’t been done for a long time. Our industry was slipping into a deadlock of Design stagnation. We wanted to show that not only our technology can give you driving pleasure, but that also Design can embody and transfer this spirit. Our designs interpret the highly emotional relationship between driver, car and road. People take BMW seriously because they know we invest so much time into “getting it right“, and when a design challenges them with such confidence it forces some reassessments of their comfort zones.
TAXI >>You once said, “If I were to list my influences in car design, I’m afraid you’d have to think pretty synthetically to make sense of them. Architecture, airplanes, boats, botany, cathedrals, domes…” Do you consider yourself a visionary in car design in this aspect? Or do you think this holistic approach has been around for a while?
Chris Bangle>>I don’t know if I’m a visionary, and certainly holism is an old concept, I first learned it in school from Chuck Pelly. But creating and feeding a holistic approach takes a lot of different in-puts and contexts. Convincing others requires dialog, reference and metaphor, and that is not that easy. I always tried to look around if something else can bring my concept forward. What’s going on in our society, in art and architecture, what’s state-of-the-art of science and technology? It turns out that there are a lot of interesting things in this world! Surprised?
TAXI >>Boyke Boyer says that there is no single language that can express what you guys are trying to do, so you make up your own language. How do you feel about having an entire vernacular (affectionately dubbed “Banglish”) named after you?
Chris Bangle>>If I could be so bold as to speak for Car Design master Boyke, he probably meant structured language altogether! I’ve enjoyed his “squeak”, “gurgle” and “whistle” descriptions of a surface or a line, and added my own noises to the dialogue! What expresses more about the tension of a curve: “Accelerating radius bla bla bla” or “pFFFFFFFFFffffffffffffffffffffffft!”? If you’re going to do cars you have to talk to them, and I haven’t met a clay-model yet that spoke English… “Banglish” is really my version of dialectic-efficiency; whatever word from whatever language seems best… (This is also known as linguistic incompetence) you just have to hope your listener can hang on through the ride.
TAXI >>Rival Designs: My Colleague, My Competitor is an internal competition meant to inspire BMW designers to battle each other to develop concepts for a single new BMW. Apart from this, are there any other initiatives conceptualised over the years to leverage on diversity in opinion and the dynamic exchange of viewpoints within the organisation, and how has this played out so far?
Chris Bangle>>Obviously our open-door policy of keeping the brand design studios informed of each others progress is one of our innovations, and integrating DesignworksUSA as a global profit center partner is another.
TAXI >> I read in your biography that you had once considered becoming a Methodist minister, but later attended the Art Center College of Design instead. What inspired you to consider this career option in the first place, and what prompted the radical change?
Chris Bangle>> Yeah, I discovered car design and joined the dark side of the force! I had always been fascinated by cars, their design, and had creative urges I didn’t know could be useful. I discovered Art Center College as I went into a pre-seminary liberal arts study at University of Wisconsin in my hometown.
The courses I took there, in psychology, philosophy and literature were crucial to my understanding of design management, and it turned out my critical writing classes under Dr. Peter Okray were the best foundation for Design I could have asked for. I tried to give back a bit of this experience by constructing our installation at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich “The Art of Car Design” around the literary theme of truth, beauty and love.
TAXI >>Do you believe in the adage “Imitation is the best form of flattery”? If so, or if not, how do you feel about other automakers emulating your design elements, such as certain Toyotas utilizing your “Bangle-butt” trunk design, or the Lexus LS bearing some resemblance to the 7 series?
Chris Bangle>> How do you want to benchmark a Designers work? Sales figures? Exhibitions in a Museum? To be named in a book with the title: ‘100 Best Designs Of The World’? Car Design is a very complex discipline. You have a lot of technical and functional guidelines, legal stipulations, brand identity marketing, etc. You have to think about trends and future emotions.
Maybe we at BMW Group Design are sometimes a tick more brave when it goes to moving ahead. We believe in context, never in dogma! If you see others following our lead, fine. We have our eyes on the “curve up ahead”, not in the rearview mirror. However, BMW has very clear intentions on protecting its intellectual property; if you pass a broken down look-alike you might assume it is a BMW problem.
TAXI >>You argued that it is necessary for product lines to follow an alternating cycle of revolutionary and evolutionary generations. Why do you think this is so?
Chris Bangle>> Well, I guess no one really wants to life in a world of revolution only. People do also need times of evolution to get some more stabilization in life. A revolution is like a big bang in life, it forces you to do something, to go ahead. Brands and products do need this sometimes to stay alive. Evolution is something subtler. I’m sure we need both. The only things we have to be aware of are standstill periods. If you’re not ready to make a step forward, you suddenly go backwards.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Chris Bangle >> My spontaneous reaction was “cruciferous”, but my team wouldn’t let me use it. I think it is beautiful, packed with meaning. Especially when applied to individuals. Barring that, my gut feel for how design will handle sustainability, global corporate citizenship, industrial humanism, all that comes as we shift from “me” to “we”, is in the word “engagement”.
The artist Olafur Eliasson recently said, “Being is nothing. Being with is everything”. Old deterministic words like “provider”, “user”, “customer”, all imply a one-way structure to what does what with which from whom. The future will demand a simultaneous integration of creativity and experiences. Particularly the cruciferous ones.
..........................................................................................................
Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Dick Powell and Richard Seymour, Seymourpowell
TAXI >>With Dick being an industrial designer and Richard being an advertising creative/ graphic director, what are the different strengths and viewpoints do you feel you each bring to the table?
Seymourpowell>>I It’s a big mistake to categorise people by their training. The most creative people are invariably not what they seem - Rich hasn’t practiced in advertising or graphics for 25 years. To do what we do, which invariably stretches the definition of design way beyond the basic idea of creating new products, requires people who are broad thinkers. Clients usually ask us one of three simple questions “What shall we do? Why should we do it?” and “How do we do it?”. Only the last one is actually about designing products; the other two are strategic and typically involve research and innovation processes. We like the term polymath, because it’s more important to have a wide experience and knowledge (which we call bandwidth), and a broad range of skills.
We both do the same thing, which is looking after our clients and helping them bring innovative new products to market.
TAXI >>Congratulations on your merger with Loewy. Dick once commented that as a schoolboy, it was Raymond Loewy’s work that first enthused him about industrial design. Now that Seymourpowell is part of a larger family, how do you see this panning out for the company in the near future?
Seymourpowell>>The legacy of Raymond Loewy within the new group is one of an appetite for changing things for the better. That’s what we’ve always believed as well. As the ‘product-centric’ element of the new group structure, it is partly our job to champion the primacy of the end product, whilst assisting the overall transformation of Loewy into a 21st Century organism, one which understands that how you promote, communicate and engineer a Brand’s strengths in a world thrown into chaos by the technology of the Web, is very different to how it was done in the 20th Century. The New Loewy was built in the 21st Century, so now we must help facilitate this mutation, whilst never forgetting that people buy products, not thin air!
TAXI >>Seymourpowell was responsible for the concept interior of the Virgin Galactic spaceship. Do tell us more about this exciting project!
Seymourpowell>>We both grew up reading a boy’s comic called Eagle, whose front cover featured a strip called ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’ about a space pilot; this strip was beautifully painted by a man called Frank Hampson, whose vision of the future – the space ships, space ports, suits, people and vehicles - was inspirational. Hampson’s drawings were one of the things which got us both thinking about Design, so it was brilliant to get involved in the Virgin Galactic project.
Virgin are working with Scaled Composites in the USA who are building both the mothership and the space craft. As work progresses, Virgin Galactic want to communicate new developments to their customers (people who have already signed up to fly and people who may be interested in doing so). We were initially asked to design the interior, but we also produced an animation of the complete astronaut experience, showing what it will be like to fly Virgin Galactic.
It has to be completely different to any other craft because of the need to accommodate 6 passengers, in a very small space, during three different phases – sitting upright for landing and take-off, lying flat on their back for the descent, and clearing as much space as possible for enjoying the weightless experience.
TAXI >> I understand “Seymourpowellforesight” uses insight and innovation to develop product strategies for consumer companies, “by helping them see the future first and act decisively by fusing marketing and design thinking from the outset”. Why do you think it is necessary for marketing and design thinking to be fused from the outset, instead of carried out separately as has been traditionally handled over the years?
Seymourpowell>>For many years, companies believed that ‘design’ was something you did at the end of the process, like putting a pretty skin around an already determined object. But as we’ve already discussed, creating the most attractive and functionally-compelling products can’t happen at the end, it must be part of the initial strategic intents of the business from the beginning.
Advertising agencies successfully promoted the idea for years that you advertise yourself out of a product problem by compensating for it’s inadequacies through spin and ‘communications’, but if your product is brilliant from the outset and meets people’s real needs head on, then you wont have to spend all that money. Word-of-mouth is the new 30 second commercial. The world is a village again. As marketers realize that they can no longer rely upon half-truths in their marketing propositions, they come to the understanding that the product’s actual virtues are central to their future. Look at Apple. Are they famous because of their advertising? Or because of their products? Design and Marketing cannot be separated in the 21st Century, because they progressively become one and the same thing.
TAXI >>Seymourpowell has the most impressive design credentials, as demonstrated by your award-winning and groundbreaking designs. How would you describe the designs that you conceptualise, develop and market?
Seymourpowell>>The first US test pilots used the expression ‘nudging the envelope’ to describe pushing their aeroplane beyond its operational envelope to see what happened. They had to do this to learn how to create better and faster planes. It’s how they first broke the sound barrier. And it’s what we do with every project – sometimes you have to push just a bit, and sometimes you have to push a lot and look far into the future. By describing and mapping the future, you can help build it – this was one of the drivers behind ENV, our hydrogen fuelled motorcycle. ENV is ahead of its time, but it’s here now.
TAXI >>You are both industry luminaries and leading speakers on design, and hold significant positions outside the company with Dove and Samsung. If there is something you would want to be remembered by the next generation of designers, what would it be?
Seymourpowell>>Making a difference! The design world is changing under our feet; it always has done. Seymourpowell helped drive these changes; changes which put better products into the lives of ordinary people, and which were good for business.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Seymourpowell>>Dick: Creativity – that’s one thing which never changes!
Richard: Truth – 20th Century advertising is dead, Long live the truth of the product.
..........................................................................................................
Read OTHER INTERVIEWS on DESIGN LEADERS
Steven Heller, Chip Kidd & Stefan Sagmeister
Sara Little Turnbull & Darrel Rhea
Adelia Borges & Linda Fu
..........................................................................................................
© 2003 - 2008 by TAXI Design Network. All rights reserved.
Interview with Chris Bangle
 | TAXI >>Hello Chris. Congratulations to your team on receiving the red dot award this year. The initial brief given to you was pretty straightforward: Design cars that give people the motoring spirit. Along the way, your designs have also garnered massive praise and criticism, winning new fans and alienating avid BMW supporters. What do you think sparks such raw emotions and interest in design?
Chris Bangle>>Thank you, this is really a fantastic team, and I am very proud to be with them, running to keep up with them! Design is all about meaning, and for dynamic designs like cars, the meaning is full of emotion. To create something is an emotional process within itself. And I believe, if you’re doing something out of your heart, people will always feel this passion, this love. |
What we did at BMW Group was to bring emotion into Car Design as hasn’t been done for a long time. Our industry was slipping into a deadlock of Design stagnation. We wanted to show that not only our technology can give you driving pleasure, but that also Design can embody and transfer this spirit. Our designs interpret the highly emotional relationship between driver, car and road. People take BMW seriously because they know we invest so much time into “getting it right“, and when a design challenges them with such confidence it forces some reassessments of their comfort zones.
TAXI >>You once said, “If I were to list my influences in car design, I’m afraid you’d have to think pretty synthetically to make sense of them. Architecture, airplanes, boats, botany, cathedrals, domes…” Do you consider yourself a visionary in car design in this aspect? Or do you think this holistic approach has been around for a while?
Chris Bangle>>I don’t know if I’m a visionary, and certainly holism is an old concept, I first learned it in school from Chuck Pelly. But creating and feeding a holistic approach takes a lot of different in-puts and contexts. Convincing others requires dialog, reference and metaphor, and that is not that easy. I always tried to look around if something else can bring my concept forward. What’s going on in our society, in art and architecture, what’s state-of-the-art of science and technology? It turns out that there are a lot of interesting things in this world! Surprised?
TAXI >>Boyke Boyer says that there is no single language that can express what you guys are trying to do, so you make up your own language. How do you feel about having an entire vernacular (affectionately dubbed “Banglish”) named after you?
Chris Bangle>>If I could be so bold as to speak for Car Design master Boyke, he probably meant structured language altogether! I’ve enjoyed his “squeak”, “gurgle” and “whistle” descriptions of a surface or a line, and added my own noises to the dialogue! What expresses more about the tension of a curve: “Accelerating radius bla bla bla” or “pFFFFFFFFFffffffffffffffffffffffft!”? If you’re going to do cars you have to talk to them, and I haven’t met a clay-model yet that spoke English… “Banglish” is really my version of dialectic-efficiency; whatever word from whatever language seems best… (This is also known as linguistic incompetence) you just have to hope your listener can hang on through the ride.
TAXI >>Rival Designs: My Colleague, My Competitor is an internal competition meant to inspire BMW designers to battle each other to develop concepts for a single new BMW. Apart from this, are there any other initiatives conceptualised over the years to leverage on diversity in opinion and the dynamic exchange of viewpoints within the organisation, and how has this played out so far?
Chris Bangle>>Obviously our open-door policy of keeping the brand design studios informed of each others progress is one of our innovations, and integrating DesignworksUSA as a global profit center partner is another.
TAXI >> I read in your biography that you had once considered becoming a Methodist minister, but later attended the Art Center College of Design instead. What inspired you to consider this career option in the first place, and what prompted the radical change?
Chris Bangle>> Yeah, I discovered car design and joined the dark side of the force! I had always been fascinated by cars, their design, and had creative urges I didn’t know could be useful. I discovered Art Center College as I went into a pre-seminary liberal arts study at University of Wisconsin in my hometown.
The courses I took there, in psychology, philosophy and literature were crucial to my understanding of design management, and it turned out my critical writing classes under Dr. Peter Okray were the best foundation for Design I could have asked for. I tried to give back a bit of this experience by constructing our installation at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich “The Art of Car Design” around the literary theme of truth, beauty and love.
TAXI >>Do you believe in the adage “Imitation is the best form of flattery”? If so, or if not, how do you feel about other automakers emulating your design elements, such as certain Toyotas utilizing your “Bangle-butt” trunk design, or the Lexus LS bearing some resemblance to the 7 series?
Chris Bangle>> How do you want to benchmark a Designers work? Sales figures? Exhibitions in a Museum? To be named in a book with the title: ‘100 Best Designs Of The World’? Car Design is a very complex discipline. You have a lot of technical and functional guidelines, legal stipulations, brand identity marketing, etc. You have to think about trends and future emotions.
Maybe we at BMW Group Design are sometimes a tick more brave when it goes to moving ahead. We believe in context, never in dogma! If you see others following our lead, fine. We have our eyes on the “curve up ahead”, not in the rearview mirror. However, BMW has very clear intentions on protecting its intellectual property; if you pass a broken down look-alike you might assume it is a BMW problem.
TAXI >>You argued that it is necessary for product lines to follow an alternating cycle of revolutionary and evolutionary generations. Why do you think this is so?
Chris Bangle>> Well, I guess no one really wants to life in a world of revolution only. People do also need times of evolution to get some more stabilization in life. A revolution is like a big bang in life, it forces you to do something, to go ahead. Brands and products do need this sometimes to stay alive. Evolution is something subtler. I’m sure we need both. The only things we have to be aware of are standstill periods. If you’re not ready to make a step forward, you suddenly go backwards.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Chris Bangle >> My spontaneous reaction was “cruciferous”, but my team wouldn’t let me use it. I think it is beautiful, packed with meaning. Especially when applied to individuals. Barring that, my gut feel for how design will handle sustainability, global corporate citizenship, industrial humanism, all that comes as we shift from “me” to “we”, is in the word “engagement”.
The artist Olafur Eliasson recently said, “Being is nothing. Being with is everything”. Old deterministic words like “provider”, “user”, “customer”, all imply a one-way structure to what does what with which from whom. The future will demand a simultaneous integration of creativity and experiences. Particularly the cruciferous ones.
..........................................................................................................
Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Dick Powell and Richard Seymour, Seymourpowell
 | TAXI >>Hello, Dick and Richard. Seymourpowell has worked across an incredibly diverse range of products, from everyday household items, to large-scale vehicles and even conceptual projects. What constitutes the main driving force behind all these projects?
Seymourpowell>>Seymourpowell has worked across an incredibly diverse range of products, from everyday household items, to large-scale vehicles and even conceptual projects. What constitutes the main driving force behind all these projects? We have always had the same basic credo: that Design is principally about making things BETTER - better for people, better for business, and better for the world. All of us in the business feel this: it’s driven us to find new ways of doing things and has taken us into new sectors where we had zero experience. Also, as the business has grown, we have taken on young talented people who bring different experiences and ideas. The result is that we never stand still; and each new project still feels like a learning experience. |
TAXI >>With Dick being an industrial designer and Richard being an advertising creative/ graphic director, what are the different strengths and viewpoints do you feel you each bring to the table?
Seymourpowell>>I It’s a big mistake to categorise people by their training. The most creative people are invariably not what they seem - Rich hasn’t practiced in advertising or graphics for 25 years. To do what we do, which invariably stretches the definition of design way beyond the basic idea of creating new products, requires people who are broad thinkers. Clients usually ask us one of three simple questions “What shall we do? Why should we do it?” and “How do we do it?”. Only the last one is actually about designing products; the other two are strategic and typically involve research and innovation processes. We like the term polymath, because it’s more important to have a wide experience and knowledge (which we call bandwidth), and a broad range of skills.
We both do the same thing, which is looking after our clients and helping them bring innovative new products to market.
TAXI >>Congratulations on your merger with Loewy. Dick once commented that as a schoolboy, it was Raymond Loewy’s work that first enthused him about industrial design. Now that Seymourpowell is part of a larger family, how do you see this panning out for the company in the near future?
Seymourpowell>>The legacy of Raymond Loewy within the new group is one of an appetite for changing things for the better. That’s what we’ve always believed as well. As the ‘product-centric’ element of the new group structure, it is partly our job to champion the primacy of the end product, whilst assisting the overall transformation of Loewy into a 21st Century organism, one which understands that how you promote, communicate and engineer a Brand’s strengths in a world thrown into chaos by the technology of the Web, is very different to how it was done in the 20th Century. The New Loewy was built in the 21st Century, so now we must help facilitate this mutation, whilst never forgetting that people buy products, not thin air!
TAXI >>Seymourpowell was responsible for the concept interior of the Virgin Galactic spaceship. Do tell us more about this exciting project!
Seymourpowell>>We both grew up reading a boy’s comic called Eagle, whose front cover featured a strip called ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’ about a space pilot; this strip was beautifully painted by a man called Frank Hampson, whose vision of the future – the space ships, space ports, suits, people and vehicles - was inspirational. Hampson’s drawings were one of the things which got us both thinking about Design, so it was brilliant to get involved in the Virgin Galactic project.
Virgin are working with Scaled Composites in the USA who are building both the mothership and the space craft. As work progresses, Virgin Galactic want to communicate new developments to their customers (people who have already signed up to fly and people who may be interested in doing so). We were initially asked to design the interior, but we also produced an animation of the complete astronaut experience, showing what it will be like to fly Virgin Galactic.
It has to be completely different to any other craft because of the need to accommodate 6 passengers, in a very small space, during three different phases – sitting upright for landing and take-off, lying flat on their back for the descent, and clearing as much space as possible for enjoying the weightless experience.
TAXI >> I understand “Seymourpowellforesight” uses insight and innovation to develop product strategies for consumer companies, “by helping them see the future first and act decisively by fusing marketing and design thinking from the outset”. Why do you think it is necessary for marketing and design thinking to be fused from the outset, instead of carried out separately as has been traditionally handled over the years?
Seymourpowell>>For many years, companies believed that ‘design’ was something you did at the end of the process, like putting a pretty skin around an already determined object. But as we’ve already discussed, creating the most attractive and functionally-compelling products can’t happen at the end, it must be part of the initial strategic intents of the business from the beginning.
Advertising agencies successfully promoted the idea for years that you advertise yourself out of a product problem by compensating for it’s inadequacies through spin and ‘communications’, but if your product is brilliant from the outset and meets people’s real needs head on, then you wont have to spend all that money. Word-of-mouth is the new 30 second commercial. The world is a village again. As marketers realize that they can no longer rely upon half-truths in their marketing propositions, they come to the understanding that the product’s actual virtues are central to their future. Look at Apple. Are they famous because of their advertising? Or because of their products? Design and Marketing cannot be separated in the 21st Century, because they progressively become one and the same thing.
TAXI >>Seymourpowell has the most impressive design credentials, as demonstrated by your award-winning and groundbreaking designs. How would you describe the designs that you conceptualise, develop and market?
Seymourpowell>>The first US test pilots used the expression ‘nudging the envelope’ to describe pushing their aeroplane beyond its operational envelope to see what happened. They had to do this to learn how to create better and faster planes. It’s how they first broke the sound barrier. And it’s what we do with every project – sometimes you have to push just a bit, and sometimes you have to push a lot and look far into the future. By describing and mapping the future, you can help build it – this was one of the drivers behind ENV, our hydrogen fuelled motorcycle. ENV is ahead of its time, but it’s here now.
TAXI >>You are both industry luminaries and leading speakers on design, and hold significant positions outside the company with Dove and Samsung. If there is something you would want to be remembered by the next generation of designers, what would it be?
Seymourpowell>>Making a difference! The design world is changing under our feet; it always has done. Seymourpowell helped drive these changes; changes which put better products into the lives of ordinary people, and which were good for business.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Seymourpowell>>Dick: Creativity – that’s one thing which never changes!
Richard: Truth – 20th Century advertising is dead, Long live the truth of the product.
..........................................................................................................
Read OTHER INTERVIEWS on DESIGN LEADERS
..........................................................................................................
© 2003 - 2008 by TAXI Design Network. All rights reserved.
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