Car Design News: Fan, really interesting discussion on stage just now covering all sorts of topics. One thing you mentioned was the idea that designers might be losing momentum in some ways. Could you share a little bit more about that and then perhaps how they may get it back?

Fan Zhang: Yeah, that is what I have spoken about from my personal perspective. I’ve been working for a Chinese state-owned OEM for last 14 years, and at the beginning we as an industry of designers were very proud of ourselves: our work was showing the great strengths of design, and how that will help the product to sell. But in recent years, you hear more about what kind of technology the product has embedded, autonomous driving or what kind of battery mileage. Or how competitive this price inventory will be. It is only later on that people talk about design.

CDN: Why is that?

FZ: I guess for this kind of situation lies in several reasons. One is the overall level of design has been rising up to a certain level and we now face this similarity between products and between brands. Customers now care about the looks a lot less than they used to. For example, right now people buy a phone not because of how it looks but more for the performance of the chips and also the experience they could get. I think a similar situation applies to the car industry a little bit.

We need to use old tricks while coming up with new solutions

But cars are different from smartphones, so I see an opportunity for car designers to really fight back. And one thing is to utilise the global talent and come up with solutions to break this similarity of expression. But we also need to dive deeper into the experience of using a car beyond the graphics of a screen, we need to put everything together and holistically to build up a new working system in order to really create new experiences for customers. And that is something not necessarily related to technology.

I think this is a good way that we could eventually fight back and regain the momentum of design. And for our designers, we are very passionate about our job. At GAC, our team launched “GAC Loves Design” as our label; we believe in that and we are walking the talk. From here, we really need to think about what’s coming in the future rather than what has been done in the past. So we need to use old tricks while coming up with new solutions. To be open, courageous and creative. Those are the major strengths to help us to go into the future.

CDN: Thank you so much for your time.

FZ: Thank you. It’s a great event, I’m very honored and very happy to be here again. 

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