Industrial Designer, Henry Dreyfuss’s Deere tractors designed during the first half of last century stands testimony that design is more than just surface treatments; it’s about establishing harmony between form and function and adding up the ‘emotional’ facet onto it. Design is as essential for a van as it would be for a super car. Automobile manufacturers who appreciate this naturally imbibe this non quantifiable element into their business process, simply because design translates its understanding of the human side onto the car and its constituents, and by exciting our senses it renders them into commercial gains.
Given that Design creates desire and that in turn fuels business it is surprising then that our Automobile industry as a whole is yet to embrace it with open arms. Maybe the reason lies in the reservations that executives hold to talk about emotion, an unfamiliar term in the boardroom given that the benefits of Design would be difficult to put down figuratively, making corporate types that much alien to it.
Admittedly it’s not a one sided challenge. If the designer confines within the realm of art and craft then he would fall short of appealing to the other talents that are involved in rolling out the motor car, and produce work only so much as to meet the brief put forward to him by the management. To move a few notches higher he would have to be part of the diverse team involved in building a car from a drawing board. That said, have company decisions ever been influenced by the residents of the design studio of companies that do have them like their counterparts from the finance department?
To have a design conduct of following a pattern is alluring for businesses, but at the cost of judgement and imagination. This is so because it does not seem ‘business sense’ to reinvent the wheel, so what do we end with? We are left with a choice of cars from different brands with the same level of equipment for a given price. And instead of using design to get ahead of competition the manufacturer tries to lure the customer by say incorporating a VCD player inside the car or providing variations in bumper colours or have an option of sticking a celebrity’s signature on the bonnet and try being an exclusive brand in a move to out manoeuvre risk.
In their emergent years companies like Ford were driven by innovation, but once established they tended to have decisions based on numbers from market analysts. This would only ruin a car manufacturer if not in a few years’ maybe decades. In order to make a mark in the market place before the foreigners arrive with their arms and ammunition, some of our automotive companies may have to make that fundamental change. The change would not involve the designer alone but demand those skills to think like chalk and cheese and the willingness to take risks. How else would India see its own edition of the Megane-scenic, Fiat 500 or the Escort Mk-1 in areas of family car, small car to rally cars?
Perhaps if we looked around there is a car that could have only come from the subcontinent, which fulfils their vast majority’s demand best, a segment that is likely to come to light in India and China (for the many similarities in both cultures) and has yet to be revealed. Hold on Automotive historian there’s one more coming…