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Design legend and visiting professor to the Royal College of Art, Peter Stevens, was as entertaining as ever, urging students to become better all-rounders, stating, "making the design is not enough, it's about selling the design too". He also implored designers to question the status quo more often in order to bring about fundamental change and better design, citing Machiavelli as well as Einstein in the process. The latter's quote "imagination is more important than knowledge" was a suitably uplifting ending to his speech, but in the Q&A - chaired by yet another design luminary, Stewart Reed of Art Center, Pasadena - some students questioned the feasibility of such an attitude within the workplace. Stevens was quick and insightful in his reply: "Of course you need an awareness of the technical solutions, but you absolutely should not inhibit your design ideas. Aim low and you can only achieve ‘low'. You will come across plenty of people who will want to knock you down without you doing it too."
Session 7 - Understanding the importance of brand identity
The final session of the day looked at how all brands need to stand for something and how emerging domestic Chinese brands might develop distinct identities to differentiate themselves from their local and global rivals.
Jason Castriota, the new design director at conference sponsor Stile Bertone, explained just how hard it is even for established brands to differentiate themselves on similar car packages once headlamp regulations and other restrictions have been taken into account. He showed the similarity between front grille and headlamp treatments of numerous different sedans by showing photographs of them taken from the exact same angle. His presentation then illustrated this further by overlaying each front grille ‘signature' - as white outlines on a black background - on top of each other to ram home the point: the market is busy and differentiation is increasingly hard, thus requiring careful attention.
Lotus' head of design Russell Carr continued with a brief history of how Lotus has built up its specific road car brand in-house over the decades by drawing on its historic racing car pedigree, with racing function often dictating road car form, and even in the repeated use of some of its iconic race car colors (green and yellow and gold and black are just two examples).
Sebastien Stassin, partner at design consultant Kiska, then looked at branding from an outsider's perspective. He explained how his firm had been able to understand, improve - and in the real-world case study of KTM motorbikes - resurrect the meaning and image of a brand not only through honing the product itself, but also in the story of its marketing and advertising.
Dr Mike Ma, new VP and design director at Geely, then rounded off the conference with an explanation of the company's new trio of fledging brands: Gleagle, Emgrand and Shanghai Englon.
In the case of Shanghai Englon - and the GE concept car that represented it at the Shanghai auto show, with its blatant copycat Rolls-Royce design cues (see Geely GE Shanghai show highlight here) - Ma had a little more explaining to do than with Geely's other, generally much sharper concepts. But in the healthy if sometimes-heated debate of this specially extended final Q&A session, he responded candidly and with dignity.
Finally, two days, seven sessions and 27 design experts later, it was time to wrap up the conference. Thanks again go out to all the chairmen, speakers and delegates (especially the more vocal ones) that once again made the Interior Motives China conference such an essential fixture in the car design calendar.
[Click here to read our report from Day 1 of the Interior Motives China Conference 2009]
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