Chris Bangle from BMW on Design

I recently had the opportunity to hear Chris Bangle speak and love him or hate him Chris Bangle has profoundly changed automotive design. His reinterpretation of the classic 7 series caused an uproar in the automotive community. But just a few years later virtually every luxury car has adopted the styling cues of the BMW.

But Chris Bangle also did something profound in a way too, he merged the passion, innovation and intuitiveness of design back into the automobile and merged it with a pragmatic and systemic process. What can we learn from him?

Some of the things that stuck with me about Chris Bangle was his focus on 'do the doing' which means I think that you need to stay close to your craft. Many of the car designs that work with Chris (and in automotive design in general) are still using many of the same techniques that sculpters use. They work in clay and they touch and feel the 'spirit' of what they are creating. This raises a nice existential question, can you feel the spirit of something when you create software? I think you can. For example, check out this quote from Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language.

“For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy. I consider a programming language as a user interface, so it should follow the principles of user interface.”

I think Chris would agree with the above statement and I think we can see evidence of this in alot of places. Historically for many of us the purchase of a car is an emotional choice--ie a car is who you are. We see that in jewerly, and even in consumer electronics such as cellphones. Could software be next? Hasn't it already happened? I suspect it has when one looks at some of the social networks and online communities across the continumn of the internet, from MySpace and FaceBook to SecondLife and World of Warcraft or even games like Viva Pinata.

Chris also spoke about brands and how they evolve and can't stay in the same spot forever, we've all seen companies that get 'stuck' sometimes (ahem). Other concepts that Chris touched on was about how beauty can often be about utility and inspiration (but perhaps I suspect, not all at once, at least not all the time). But this also brings us to the issue of equality in design, an important concept, that is tied to simplicity I think. Chris says...

"Equality means treating different things differently."

Which is a powerful statement but how do you act on it? In Chris' case humans are on the connecting side and what got the autombile industry in trouble is when (in his words) the automotive companies replaces culture with rationalism. Whey they became so process oriented that designing cars became akin to moving "icing around on a cake" or "adding more icing" to cake. The most analogy to software in this case is the superficial 'styling' and 'skinning' that gets added to applications and that is incorrectly called UX. Bangle also talked of his displeasure with carmaking being turned in to sausage making. With companies making what is basicall the sam car in different sizes.

So Bangle began to explain the process at BMW with a quote from O.W. Holmes...

"A mind expanded to fit a new idea never returns to fit its orignal shape."

At BMW they use a process that is similar to what many designers would be familiar with that breaks down into three phases.

Understanding. Believing. Seeing.

These concepts were illustrated by a simple scenario. For example the hardest part was actually in the beginning, regarding understanding...

"I'm making a glass."

"What kind of glass?"

"A glass for drinking out of?"

"Drinking what?"

"Wine."

"So we're making a wine glass."

Getting those answers right at the onset was the first big step. Bangle talked about how long they spent in each phase, a year! It sounds like a luxury but he defended it saying your process has to scale to humans and how it takes them to think and process information (I think he's on to something here).

It also relates to how they go about seeing. Bangle says...

"Reality is real."

His teams get outside to look at the car, they craft and sculpt designs with their hands. They are contantly on the lookout for new ways that they can make things, they spend as much time thinking about not the actual creation but the TOOLS they use to create with too. Sound familiar?

Finally, as for seeing, what Bangle is really talking about is the act of creation. His advice here was more vivid. He used the analogy of folks have a child. Where you may ask all your friends about what parenthood is like and what kids are like and you might go validate that what you've seen is correct, talking with parents, etc. But when it comes time to actually making a child, you're DONE asking for advice and you need to simply do the deed.

I found this illustrative becasue we often don't start asking for the right advice or input until exactly the wrong time in software design. I've got more from this talk but I was impressed. I wish more people like Chris Bangle were in the software profession.

Comments

[Steve Portigal]

I'm also reminded at how absolutely different the discussions about design are in software vs. product vs. architecture. Each group has its own culture around the discourse, different cliches, different tropes. Since I skirt the edges of at least the first two, I see the disconnect quite regularly. It's almost a measure of whether or not I have a real compatibility with someone; can they talk about this stuff without revealing themselves to be single track? If it's all AJAX or all radii, then I need to move on!

Great post, once again.

[David Armano]

Nice piece. This is one of my favorite whitepapers and it's written by Chris.

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/04/bmw_creativity.html

[John Miller]

Shortly, now days most of automotive designers do the cars look aggressive or stupid, inside and outside. Often both together. It's inevitable.
The design mirrors the human.

[Alex]

One of the pillars of BMW's greatness is the design of their cars, and one amazing thing is that with every new evolution of the models they achieved to innovate and modernize shapes and style without losing the core essence that really defines the brand (Look for example the change from E36 to E46) ... Until Mr Bangle came.
This guy is an excellent designer (who denies it) but he's not for BMW. His aim was to revitalize the BMW desing, give new strength to the BMW essence, but instead of that he just changed that essence for one of his own.
Maybe a blond longhaired Superman would seem cuter but he wouldn't be the true Superman anymore, right?