Faurecia Clarion Electronics: Making an interior complete

”Everybody talks about user experience, but you can only really translate that from Powerpoint wisdom into tangible product when you are mastering the relevant cognitive science, the technologies and the full design implementation. Like isolated storytelling, technology on its own doesn’t make sense – it needs to be partnered up with business and user centred design in the bigger picture.

We are now able to get rid of the frontiers between digital technology products and the traditional instrument panels, doors, seats and so on, to make sure that we get user interaction happening all over the interface: no matter if it’s a screen, or in a part of a seat, or part of an instrument panel. A decorative part can blur into a screen, and as a user, you won’t even know where it stops being decorative, and it starts being a screen. You won’t see the product boundaries any more, and that’s the job of design.

By acquiring Clarion, we have not just added another company to our portfolio, but are fully integrating it in in terms of product offer. Clarion is very strong in infotainment and HMI. It has already shown its ‘Quadview’ concept in a previous version, and together we are developing this into its next generation: this is basically a touchscreen on which you have several areas, and with just your fingers sliding, you can take the crossing point of the lines between those areas of the screen and make different parts of the screen bigger or smaller, and increase the part that you want to interact with. And it’s not just adjusting the size, it’s adjusting the level of detail, and that’s a unique concept at the moment. We will show this next generation at CES in January 2020, and an earlier prototype at the Car Design News event in Tokyo.

Clarion has a whole studio of between 25 and 30 designers, mainly user interaction, UX, UI, HMI designers and some product designers as well, just outside Tokyo in Saitama. We are really leveraging this and integrating it into the wider Faurecia global design network. We have two big design studios in France – I myself am based at the headquarters near Paris – and also in Germany, China, India and North America, in the Detroit area and in California, in the Bay Area; and small outposts in South America as well as an existing facility in Japan. And Clarion has, as well as their team in Japan, designers in China, India and Malaysia.

We will merge these activities – it won’t just be the team in France working with the guys in Japan, but all our designers across the world collaborating. We have now found the element which means that we can now offer an entire interior, with an entire, seamless user experience.”

Andreas Wlasak will be speaking at Car Design Tokyo Forum 2019.