Has new tech made traditional design skills obsolete?
Car design has long been a trade of traditional human skills: sketching, rendering and hands-on clay modelling. But is new tech making such methods obsolete? By Ben Miller
Astronaut, racing driver, car designer – these are the careers of boyhood dreams. It’s hard to imagine a better way to earn a crust than conceptualising new supercars all day, first on paper, then as a full-size model in clay.
But, just as becoming a racing driver is now as much about simulator work, social media and telemetry analysis as it is putting away champagne and nailing 130R at Suzuka, so car design has become digitised, with tablets instead of sketchbooks and virtual reality threatening to replace clay modelling.
So, how useful are these tools? We ask Ivo van Hulten, director of interiors at Porsche, Bugatti design director Achim Anscheidt, and Land Rover creative director Massimo Frascella.
TABLET OR SKETCHBOOK?
Ivo van Hulten, Porsche: ‘The best way is always a combination. To be honest sometimes, to share a quick idea, there is nothing faster than grabbing a piece of paper and doing a fast scribble. You know, “This is what I mean…” Or, “Why don’t we solve it like this?” But when you’re trying to achieve a perfect impression of how the car will look at the end, then you go into Wacom tablets [capable of transferring pen strokes into rendering software on the computer].’
Achim Anscheidt, Bugatti: ‘I agree. There is still a place for sketching. It is crucial to establish an early theme; one which you, as design director, are in love with. Then you work to ensure that everyone around you falls in love with the idea too.
Sketching is key for this. Many of the young guys use a tablet and stylus, with a keyboard for their left hand. It’s amazing to watch them work. The right hand is sketching and the left hand is working the keyboard, switching between different pen weights, size and style of nib, from pencil to marker… It is like watching a pianist. They also flip the image as they work, and this is useful. The sweep of your hand left-to-right creates an accelerating curve, which is the kind you want to translate to your car. For most people, sketching conventionally, this is easy from left to right, but it’s harder to do the return curve. But on the tablet you can flip the image, so it’s easy.’
Massimo Frascella, Land Rover: ‘I really encourage the young guys to sketch on a pad. It is the most direct way of putting an idea across, without the software getting in the way. I fear some of the traditional methods are being lost, and that this is one of the reasons perhaps a lot of new cars are beginning to look the same – with the technology you can lose some of that individuality. You can become more driven by the software than your ideas and personality.’
VIRTUAL REALITY OR CLAY MODEL?
Achim Anscheidt, Bugatti: ‘Since I joined [in 2004] we have been talking about taking our design development process completely virtual. But it’s only recently – in the last few years – that we are reaching this point. With virtual reality, the HoloLens glasses [mixed-reality smartglasses through which you can see rendered forms in the space in which you’re standing], you can see almost everything, letting you walk around the car and evaluate the proposal. It’s a very useful technology. A full-sized clay model costs maybe €500,000, with five clay modellers working all day for weeks to create it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m in love with the romance of the clay process; manipulating a surface by hand. But with the glasses we can get 90 per cent there, with maybe two models to prove a new concept at, say, €80,000 each. So that’s €160,000 versus half a million, and maybe 30-40 per cent of the time.’
Ivo van Hulten, Porsche: ‘The 3D glasses help you avoid mistakes that are hard to see when you’re working on a small screen. When you scale up the proposal it makes these issues easy to spot, because you suddenly see the idea at life size. But I also think that somehow the human body is not 100 per cent adapted to the technology; it does not feel the same as seeing a car when you’re standing next to it.’
Massimo Frascella, Land Rover: ‘We’re keen on retaining a strong human interaction in what we do. You can’t replace the skills and the touch of an experienced clay modeller, or the fact that you can walk around a clay model and run your hand across it to understand whether a surface is too full or too flat. These are subtleties that make a difference in the end so, while we are using new technologies, there is always a part of what we do that must remain human.’
‘To be honest, to share an idea, sometimes there is nothing faster than grabbing a piece of paper and doing a quick scribble’ IVO VAN HULTEN