Designers are from Neptune and Engineers are from Jupiter

The relationship between designers and engineers is often a challenging one but when a common language is found the resulting products can be masterpieces. Plasan's Design Director, Nir Kahn discusses how to make it work

I often give talks to engineers and engineering students about vehicle design and the role of designers in the process of vehicle development. I will usually open explaining what design actually is with this quote from Steve Jobs:

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

This never plays well to a room full of engineers who invariably look at me with a serious, and even slightly condescending, expression that says "but that's our job, yours is to make it look pretty". So I press them to better define the difference between design and engineering.

As I see it, and how we divide the responsibilities in Plasan, it is a question of interfaces. Engineering deals with mechanical interfaces between the product and itself or the product and its environment; gears to shafts, doors to hinges, tyres to the road, or materials to weather; while design is about human interfaces; the driver to the seat, the hand to the handles, the way that people connect emotionally and physically through touch and sight to the vehicle. As soon as you settle on this definition, the division of responsibilities and indeed the relationship between designers and engineers becomes much clearer. This reduction of what is often a natural friction between designers and engineers is a big part of what makes our vehicles noticeably different from our competitors. It also makes it clear that there is no such thing as a project that doesn't have a need for design. Are there users? Customers? Then there is a role for designers in the process.

When a designer and engineer work closely together, magic is made. Richard Rackham and Julian Thomson who created the Lotus Elise, or Gordon Murray and Peter Stevens who worked together to develop the McLaren F1 understood each other perfectly. They had a very clear shared vision of what their cars were going to be, and collaborated closely to combine the design and engineering into a single focused and well-resolved product. If they'd worked less cooperatively in the all-too-common "over the fence" development style where people work on their part and then throw it "over the fence" to the next person, the result would have been so much less cohesive as to make it unrecognisable. Like the children's game where each child draws a part of a person and then hands the paper, folded to hide their contribution, to the next child, the finished work is a disjointed mess. A collaborative effort, arguably, but not truly integrated teamwork, and it's integrated teamwork that creates great products, not merely the combined efforts of many individuals, no matter how talented each one is on their own.

Getting talented people to work well together is a skill in its own right. It involves trust, communication, and I believe also clear definitions of boundaries of responsibility. Development of complex products and systems usually starts with writing what's known as an Interface Control Document (ICD). The ICD defines very clearly what the interfaces are between the various sub-systems and acts as a sort of flag-raiser throughout the development process. It ensures that if an individual or team makes a change to something that will affect another sub-system, that the other team knows about it and has the opportunity to offer input and respond. This mustn't be in a passive informative way; "we've changed the bolt-spacing, deal with it"; but in an interactive and cooperative way; "we'd like to change the bolt-spacing, is this OK or how could we better solve this issue?". As long as this is the nature of the conversation and interaction, intelligent multi-disciplinary decisions can be made that ultimately improve the product, and the company's ability to profitably manufacture and sell it.

Getting talented people to work well together is a skill in its own right

This is why we find our definition of design so useful. Because engineers can easily get bogged down in details of bolt-spacing and software protocols, and not notice that there is also a human-interface involved, and that the designer's input regarding that could affect the decision. Sometimes it's the small things that build up to give a car its aesthetic impact. To stick with the simple and relatively superficial example of bolt-spacing, on Plasan's bolted and bonded "Kitted Hull" vehicles, the positions of bolts can have a noticeable contribution to the appearance of the finished vehicle, beyond their basic mechanical properties. We might want to try and hide them, or if that's not possible, to at least arrange them to work with the natural styling lines of the vehicle. A few millimetres here or there won't make any difference to their ability to fulfill their mechanical requirements, but can make a difference to the cohesive design details that make the product look right on the road. This level of attention to detail involves close cooperation between designers and engineers, it involves communication and trust, and it involves each person understanding what is important to the other.

If you are an engineer, ask yourself "is there a human-interface that could affect this decision?", and if there is, ask a designer for their input. If you're a designer, try explaining your role to engineers in these terms of interfaces, in a language that engineers can appreciate.

It is often hard to establish true collaboration between designers and engineers and it involves building up relationships. Even teams that are experienced in working together get it wrong sometimes, but if the will is there, they will always strive to make their next product even better.

Nir Kahn is the Director of Design for Plasan and has been responsible for vehicle design in the company for almost 20 years, including the design of the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP, Oshkosh M-ATV, and the Plasan SandCat