Re: Design Leadership

BTW: for anyone interested in Nuccio Bertone, the complete interview can be found here:

http://www.enjoyclassiccars.com/Interview-Bertone.htm

It gives the reader a little taste of what it was like to be in the Design House business back in the day. Interesting times!

Back to the subject of this thread! Which countries/companies have dominated and influenced global design in the last 30 years?

Re: Design Leadership

B&N: Thank you. That works for me!

Moving this thread forwards now, I'd like to focus on the last 30 years and go down into the next level of discussion,  looking at where the ball bounced. Again, I would like to keep things at a high level, so that we do not become overwhelmed nor find ourselves going too deeply into one area. Perhaps this discussion will only take a few posts in total.

Re: Design Leadership

You are quite right Sam, greater legislative regulation has shaped vehicles, but the best designs incorporate the regulations into the overall form and not allow themselves to be dictated by it.

It may seem trite and obvious, but BMW's bravery in allowing the 7 series penned by Bangle's team was a clean break with the simple forms so elegantly described by B&N. It made other companies braver and affoorded their designers greater freedom.

Here's a question though: will electric cars ever be braver than they are now in a design sense?

Re: Design Leadership

Sam, I agree with you about the Germans in the 00s. They had been very conservative in the early 90s, until they took notice of just how much a threat the Japanese might be. In the last decade, I think the Germans have realized that they won, and this has given them confidence. They are now really just competing with each other for world domination. The Italians were very influential in the 60s and 70s. Many significant German, French and British cars from this period were either designed by or influenced by Italians, and these cars formed the pattern for the cars of today.

Electric cars are deliberately designed to look different so that they won't sell. Every one is sold at a loss, so manufacturers try to sell as little as possible. Their real purpose is publicity. If a company has an electric car on it's books, they get green cred, and this keeps the politiicians off their backs. Ghosn may be serious about electric cars, but this only proves he does not know much about how to run a car company. He got lucky with his Nissan turnaround ten years ago - just  as Mulally got lucky with the opportunity at Ford a few years ago. Both Nissan and Ford had been basically sound businesses that had been run into the ground by bad management. Ghosn and Mulally both just got things back to a more normal level of activity. Having done that, they are both struggling to make further progress.

Having re-read the posts in this thread, I'm even more convinced that B&N got it about right. I think he has achieved "the simplicity on the other side complexity" ie after much thought over the years, he has been able to boil things down to a balanced clear summary. That's the kind of knowledge that interests me in today's environment of information overload.

Re: Design Leadership

Thank you Areader for your kind remarks.

My view of the leadership in design is derived from seeing how since the 80s there has been a fragmentation in a lot of areas of creative endeavour. We haven´t really had an "-ism" in Art since the 1970s. There is no house style for architecture any more. Anything goes. You pick an architect not a style these days. Popular music is now a rainbow of genres. The last really powerful new movement was "hip-hop" but since then there hasn´t been a fresh wave that made people say "sod what I am doing now, I´m gonna do that!" Fashion is the same way. There seems to be little consensus on what properly dressed means anymore.  It´s a function of where you are situated in our more diverse societies that determines what´s right or not. There have been bigger players in car design these last 30 decades and Sam is correct when he says the Germans have been significant. But there is little sense that anyone is compelled to style cars that look German (with notable exceptions). Who´s done anything remotely Audi-esque other than other VAG makers? And the German cars don´t look German any more. Was there anything so Italianate as Bangle´s lovely 5 with its convex and concave surfaces? The Japanese are ploughing their own furrow and the three French firms are muddling along with styles ranging from Teutonic to French to technicalesque. Only Maserati seems to know how to make an elegant car among the Italians. Fiat, Alfa and Ferrari look nothing like as chic as they did in their heyday.

No, I think the theme here is that there´s very little theme. At most I think changes in manufacturing and legislation are having an effect on the way cars are put together. This is a more deterministic view of change in styling though. Paradoxically, I don´t rate much of what´s been done now.

More later...