Designer Interview: Davide Pizzorno, ED | Excellence Design
“Engineering is not a constraint on design, when you have the ability to manage it”
We did not start out as a design company: ED started as an engineering company, and that has helped us develop into a company which handles data and collaboration with engineering extremely well. Manipulating and sharing data with our clients is one of our best assets. My first job was as a freelancer for IBM, training designers on the new methodology for designing with 3D CAD. I worked very hard; I started work in 1996, but I was still studying engineering at university while I worked. I founded ED in 1998 and, after more than 20 years, I’m very proud to be the founder of this design centre of excellence.
Training as an engineer has really helped me to understand what is, and what is not, feasible in automotive design. This has been the key thing that gives me a different perspective on design and a different approach. Engineering is not a constraint on design, when you have the ability to manage it. I always push my designers to work on improving the best packaging, and to share their work with the engineering team collaboratively and early in the process. This all but eliminates costly mistakes in the first step of creativity, and the final products will meet our customers’ goals for their industrial manufacturing processes.
As well as using methodology and our UX know-how to collaborate with our international customers, we also design HMI and UX/UI systems for carmakers, from start to finish. We do HMI systems based on software, hardware and the user interface. Sometimes when people talk about HMI they focus only on what the customer uses, but there’s much more going on beneath, hidden behind the screen. We don’t just design systems that mirror-link from your smartphone, and what we are developing is not only an interface and new software or hardware; rather, we design every single component used in the HMI. We have done this for many automotive brands.
We also specialise in industrial design, and work on both commercial and passenger vehicle designs. We define our work in three different areas: concept cars, one-offs/bespoke and production cars. Our work processes support the definition of strategic and planning objectives in collaboration with our customers.
In all of these areas, for me, simplicity is the basis of my design philosophy. Simple designs are eternal designs. Simple does not mean trivial or easy to do, it is really complex to create something that does not contain many design curves. Well-designed products, services and systems enhance efficiency, improve productivity and security, reduce frustration and increase satisfaction. And unlike often imagined, industrial design does not increase the cost of manufacturing a product, but, on the contrary, often reduces it.
ED | Excellence Design, which started its history in engineering, has evolved into a company fit for the new era of automotive. Our customers have the opportunity to use us as a full service provider and today, we are the only independent Italian automotive coach builder. In our working process, we use our creativity to develop the best solution based on our knowhow supported by big data about design and technical trends. Every development matches the best design trends with the customer’s brand philosophy. After the first rendering phase we start to use virtual reality to involve our customers in the best way for their understanding. During this phase, we provide the UX and UI to collect all the feedback. Our goal is to have real-time integration of all the UX results and build the best solutions tailor-made for the end users.
Once this stage is complete, we move onto the next phase – the physical model, built in plaster, clay and hard painted material, supported with prototyping. During the last phase, the presentation of the styling model, we freeze the model and begin the engineering and value optimisation phase, all the way to the start of production. When I hire designers, I look for people that have passion for this job. Passion means using all your power to increase your knowledge by sometimes unconventional means. That is where passion and creativity meet. And we are very lucky that in our home base, Italy, creativity comes from the environment we live in. We are very lucky to live and work in a special place.
The real growth in our business today comes for those companies who are aligned towards improving things for the future. Italian design, Italian curves and bodywork, are the best in the world, but today I think that is not enough. This is why I am looking for collaborations with US-based information technology companies, and with Chinese brands with automotive electric vehicle experience. That, for me, is the ultimate collaboration. If I analyse the large trends in design, it looks like the exterior design of vehicles is becoming less important and the growth is only in the interior user experience. This could be seen as bad news for Italian companies, with our history of beauty in exterior shapes, but I don’t think it is cause for despair.
In reality, I think we are responsible for matching and blending exterior shape and UX for the users, to create a new harmony of design – but always with the customers’ requirements in mind.