Renowned car designer Chris Bangle explains why he is getting animated, quite literally, about the future of automotive design and how if, as he fears, designers are about to be replaced by software, that their unique talents could be the key to bringing a human feel to robotics instead.
"I am concerned that the culture of car design as it has been evolving for almost 100 years is coming to an end," says Chris Bangle. He has researched the subject thoroughly - even publishing a thesis - and believes the profession could cease to exist at some point between 2025 and 2040.
"We are closing in on that date," he continues, "and as the handwriting-on-the-wall such as self-driving cars and the UBER-ization of the customer landscape appears with greater intensity, I have been wondering how much longer the exclusive relationship between car designers and the automobile will last?"
Bangle now runs a design consultancy company but was one of the world's most powerful and influential car designers of recent times. As chief designer at BMW he completely reenergized the brand, shaking off its conservatism and pioneering a new aesthetic that seemed avant-garde to many in 2000, but today is a core design element of almost every modern car.
In 2009, after 17 years in the role, he quit BMW and the industry. Yet he is more focused than ever on the essence of design and trying to understand, communicate and articulate what makes the profession so unique, important and emotional - car designers can give "life" to an object without referencing nature.
And through animation, he may have found the ideal way. "I penned a series of cartoon characters who are all derived from the 'things' around us," he explains. These things include an egg-beater and a truss-and-strut tower and the main character, a triumphal arch called ‘Arky Arch.'
Although ‘the Adventures of Arky Arch' is growing into a three-chapter, 13-episode-per-chapter cartoon and is about to be translated into Italian, it was born out of Bangle's attempt to express the tenants of car design via another medium. "What if we could help kids find excitement in the 'things' around us by giving those things the personality and character we put into cars? But as car designers we would not resort to the standard Disney and Pixar tropes of putting eyeballs and hands and feet on them; what if we only had gesture to work with? Could we make one such character a true female personality without using the trite 'gender indicators'-- like hair ribbons and pump shoes?" he asks.
And it's a personality that excites rather than repulses. A new Jaguar car "Embodies exactly the feline grace and predator aggressiveness of the big jungle cat -- it IS a jaguar -- and all this without giving it cute fuzzy ears or a swishy tail," says Bangle.
Therefore, car designers could revolutionize other industries, starting with robotics. "A 50 horsepower machine the size and shape of a man really is scary; Terminator come to life. But car designers routinely create 500 horsepower cars that are not unapproachable at all."
And, if as Bangle says, car design is dying, robotics could be where the industry's biggest stars decamp. "Perhaps as the automobile fades into the horizontal elevator-taxi it was always meant to be, it will be car design's lifeboat."
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