Volvo’s Lisa Reeves shares her personal approach to design in this exclusive Car Design Review X interview
When I joined Volvo in 2014, we were going through the first generation of cars that made it premium. Now we’re going through the next generation – featuring more electrification and the benefits that come with that – and also designing for our 2040 circular ambitions. The rate of change in the industry is very different and we’re adapting all the time to find new ways of working. We launched the EX90 at the end of 2022 and the EX30 in mid-2023. They’re the bookends of our portfolio: our flagship with its life-centric tech and our smallest car designed for more sustainability.
Sustainability is a complex topic. On the exterior, our business looks at the energy used to make the car, and at aerodynamics and recycled content. That creates new design opportunities. For example, we’ve reduced the number of components on the EX30 by designing them to be more multi-functional. Then there’s the materials. Developing new ones can be tricky, given the industry standards we have to meet, but it’s really interesting to see new materials coming through – like recycled denim and flax – to create new expressions and textures. These things don’t hinder us, we learn to design with them intelligently.
On the decorative area along the top of the EX30’s doors and instrument panel, we’ve taken waste denim fibres which are too short to be recycled within the denim industry and made a pulp paper out of them, which creates a really nice mottled dark blue material. We also use flax from the linseed plant – a mid-cycle waste crop otherwise – and weave those fibres to create a tactile expression within the interior. Then we have our ‘particle deco’ material made from recycled plastic from household window frames. It gets ground down to provide this speckled visual appearance. These are all areas that before typically featured wood, aluminium and plastic. We’re working for disassembly too, so parts can be quickly divided up into their original states for recycling.
From the beginning with the EX30, we wanted premium quality in a spacious cabin. We intended the EX30 to be a Volvo shot of espresso – a concentrated version of the brand. That quickly led us to group content into the centre of the car, where all passengers could easily reach, and work with that symmetry to benefit tooling. So for example, the sound bar in the front of the instrument panel, is where we clustered the speakers and covered them in fabric. That also meant we could reduce door panel wiring complexity and push the interior door surfaces outward to create more cabin space. On the centre screen we extended the large touchscreen higher so we could add a driver display. It’s highly glanceable there.
Having a CEO and design director from the tech and product industries is playing out in our design
We put the EX30’s glove box in the middle too. Historically the glove box has been on the front passenger side, but now the driver can easily reach it too, instead of its lid opening on to the passenger’s legs. The EX30’s window switches are in the centre as well, to avoid those ‘carbon-heavy’ electrical components being in the doors. In terms of influencing the platform, we all need to work together earlier. Interior design and colour and materials have to come first through circularity and we work with the shapes that suit those materials to integrate them better. UX design is absolutely ‘upfront’ in defining the experience too. It’s very much a deeper company collaboration.
There is no such thing as consistency in our industry. The last three years have been completely inconsistent in terms of COVID, company changes, the brands we’ve grown with, and now new management. The whole platform that comes with electrification allows for more interior space, proportional opportunities and is essentially becoming focused on software and technology. The car has always been designed to be part of your lifestyle, but it’s even more so now, with things like connectivity and bi-directional electrification. So for Volvo to have a new CEO and design director from outside of automotive – coming from the tech and product industries and really looking at consumer aspects more widely – is all playing out in our design.
But Volvo has a great heritage and its responsible values of functionality, safety and proportional design are timeless. What is important in human-centric design is an interior that has emotional flow and a psychological connection to passengers too. Creating a balanced room of well-being and safety is definitely very Volvo. We’re taking away unnecessary decoration and focusing on surfaces to find a ‘new premium’ with materials celebrated through their form language.
The EX30 is really expressive in colour and texture
The precision and the detailing comes from the functions we really need, balancing physical and digital touch points, but putting detail into the physical touch points so that they’re a delight to use. The EX90 is elegant and timeless, with not so much colour, that’s a classic Scandinavian value. Then we have the EX30, which is really expressive in colour and texture. Anywhere in-between is our bandwidth.
Currently I have 23 staff in interior design and the colour and materials team – headed up by Dan Fitchett – has about 19. He came to us from Adidas and I think it can be of really great value to have someone from outside of the automotive industry. We have hired a lot of UX designers from product design too. The thing that resonates with people in my team is the genuine integrity of the brand. Volvo is a very open culture. You are encouraged to speak up and diversity is really valued. It’s a great place to work.
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