Car design just-rightness
Design that stepped from the firmament of just-then, nailed the answer of their own time, and disrupted the future ahead of them
Car design just-rightness is the unspoken holy-grail of car design.? It isn’t design that is expressive or very innovative — design that takes risks and polarises — but design that steps from the firmament of just-then to nail the answer to right-now.? Design just-rightness moves forwards the discourse in a way that both connects to what has been said before whilst being a new take — it is MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), but it is also new not just a degree of ‘advanced’ or extreme, and it is immaculately resolved.? ?
In car design, designs most liked by the most people tend to be sports-cars; many people like the look of the current Porsche 911, Ferrari 296, Lotus Emira, they literally turn heads as they drive down the street.? And they do this broadly because, compared to other cars driving down the street, their designs express more of the positive essence of ‘car’ as products that move through space through their overtly dynamic form — as cars go, sports-cars are ‘very car’, the richest representations of their genre.
The other type of car designs that are widely liked are those that over time have come to be regarded as ‘classic cars’, such as a Citroen DS, Fiat 500 or Willys Jeep.? These, beyond being singularly amazing designs, benefit from having had plenty of time for us to accommodate their rich and distinct identity and form (they are liked more now than they were in their day). ? To reaffirm how classic and sports car are the types of car design liked the most by the most, they combine to make the zenith of celebrated car design: the classic sports-car, designs such as the Jaguar E-type, original Porsche 911, Corvette C2, Ferrari 308, which sits at the top of the tree of car designs most highly rated by the lay-person and car designer alike.
Yet beyond these acclaimed expressive car designs is a less celebrated and more cerebral form of good car design.? Those that hit a sweet-spot of ‘just-rightness’ but are not sports car or classic cars or cars that are overtly expressive or unusual. Designs that are quietly distinct and faultlessly handsome — designs that attain the whole grail of being ‘just-right’. ? When they debuted, these designs received widespread acclaim within the industry, hit market sweet-spots with customers, and quietly pivoted the future of our street-scapes so much so that when we look back they almost disappear into the scenery.
Knowing how most of those that might read this are unusually well versed in car design, I thought I would not just share my singular view on what cars might best exemplify this rare quality of car design just-rightness, but glean a few views from others on what constitutes design just rightness, and what its best exemplars are.
Pierre Leclercq , Head of Design at Citroen emphasised the distinction of this type of good design as being routed in how the design succeeds commercially over time and the result impact it then has on the discipline, writing:
“I have lots of admiration for car designs that, even if they did not make it at the level of icons that we all love, truly inspired me because of what they brought to the car industry. For me a car is not a success when it comes out but after its lifetime: customers and its result in terms of sales is what defines how much it brought to the brand and the industry.”
This combination of affecting the discipline, and delivering on the unspoken wants of the customer are points that Ian Cartabiano , VP Advanced Design at Calty (Toyota’s West Coast Design Operation) shares:
“Just rightness is key to producing a timeless vehicle that can last a generation while providing happiness, smiles and a bond that transcends “a car”…. Creating a vehicle designed around the customer’s needs and values, while still embodying breakthrough design (as well as good looks) that can also create a new genre — that is true design in its best sense. They may not be in most top ten list of designs, but these just right vehicles have stood the test of time and changed how and what we drive today.”
Paul Wraith , Bronco Chief Designer at Ford aligns with Pierre and Ian and emphasis the subtle, tacit, alchemy of unmet desire and design solution that underpins this idea in the way he frames car design just rightness as “Cars that hit the zeitgeist providing the right answers to questions we hadn't previously realised we'd asked, and which slip in to the consciousness then popular culture - but most of all spawn imitation, pivot the industry in their wake.… They need to stand out as individuals but also slip in to all of our lives.”
And car design strategist Drew Smith takes these intangibles Paul touched on into the heart of users’ experience of these designs: “Just rightness, for me, manifests in a felt sense. It’s a dialogue between the car’s presence and purpose in space and my own….I feel it standing next to a VW Phaeton, its gravity gently warping me like Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I feel the Phaeton in my guts.? In short, I guess it’s about how a car’s spirit animates yours.”
Drawing up a perfect list of exemplars of car design just-rightness is impossible (it’s become harder the long I compile it, painfully so - and I realise that this surely has to reflect my personal as well as professional view…) so I’ve drawn up an imperfect list of a 15 designs less than forty years old but more than ten years old (with sufficient time to see how their impact, but still recent enough to recall it), trying to spread age, nationality, brand, vehicle type across this also. By definition there are no sports cars, or expressive classic / iconic designs or ‘unicorn’ outliers that are unusually advanced or distinct (such as the Range Rover, Fiat Panda, Ford Sierra, ‘new’ Mini’ etc).? These just-rightness car designs are all designs that don’t raise their voice yet properly delivered value to customer and brand, and shaped the wider trajectory of the discipline.? In their time they stepped from the firmament of just-then, nailed the answer of their own time, and disrupted the future ahead of them.
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[With thanks to the above named designers and also to Ajay Panchal , David Hilton , Klaus Busse , Christopher Butt and Michael Banovsky for their suggestions and thoughts that shaped this piece and list also.]
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7 个月Interesting piece Sam Livingstone. Particularly from the perspective of an aerodynamicist always 'messing' with a 'perfect' design! I understand how difficult it is to articulate the 'just-rightness' of a design. However, it was always the designers who were open to the discussion and communicating the key elements that expressed what they were aiming for that had the best engineering outcomes too. However subjective and emotional that was, we would do our best to bend physics to that goal, although we would always push the limits. It was a far more painful process when gatekeepers kept us away from the studio and designers. Without that explanation there would be eternal loops of our best guess of what we thought they might find acceptable changes, which was almost always nothing whatsoever. I genuinely don't understand pick-ups as design exercises, despite working on NASCAR pick-up trucks, which are a thing. I would throw the BMW 3 Series E21, Renault Espace III and the Talbot Matra ahead of the 1989 BMW 5 series, Jeep and the Infiniti. all completely subjective of course, and what else are lists of 'bests' for except to disagree?
Self Employed at Giesecke+Devrient
9 个月80s/90s had the best looking cars for the most part. Nowdays they either look like bubbles or are going for the electric shaver image.
RTE/Scrum-Master for Airbus Commercial Aircraft
9 个月Nicolas Esposito Jean-Fran?ois Mougnot
Project Engineer Logistiek Sif Group | Eigenaar Van Beek Detailing
9 个月Great read and funny to see the topic picture looks ‘identical’ to my E34!
Founder and President of Mauro Usability Science / Neuroscience-based Design Research / IP Expert
9 个月Sam Livingstone Interesting post. My research team has been developing neuroscience-based methods for testing and scaling the visual/aesthetic aspects of products. Our methodology, known as the Empirical Ordinary Observer Test, is focused on bringing objective research to design patent litigation. Our methodology has recently been formally accepted by the court. As a component of our methodology development we examined in detail the neuroaesthetics of automotive design. It turns out that one can predict how a consumer will judge a design of a product by understanding their structured "Design Sensitivity" as measured by validated scaling methods. It turns out that in a large population of car buyers design sensitivity is statistically normally distributed. It is very likely that what you identify as "Car-Design Just Rightness" is a set of design attributes that appeal specifically to consumers in the center two percentiles of the design sensitivity scale or those who cluster around the Mean. One could decompose the design using Gestalt Theory or shape perception science and correlate those data points with design sensitivity ratings for car buyers. Lots of exciting science going on related to neuroaesthetics.