Design Thinking in Automobile Industry

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Case Study
Design Thinking and Innovation in Automobile
Industry
MEC
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Contents

• Design Thinking.
• Elements of Design Thinking.
• Automotive Designing.
• Styling.
• Form.
• Design Thinking and Innovation.

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• Design Thinking is a discipline that uses the
  designers sensibility and methods to match
  peoples needs with what is technologically
  feasible and what a viable business strategy can
  convert into customer value and market
  opportunity.
• -
  Brown

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Design Thinking

• A methodology that imbues the full spectrum of
  innovation activities with a human-centered
  design ethos.
• A discipline that uses the designers sensibility
  and methods to match peoples needs with what is
  technologically feasible and what a viable
  business strategy can convert into customer value
  and market opportunity.

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Design Thinking

• Combines the three spaces of innovation -
  technical feasibility, human desirability and
  economic viability to a holistic team-based
  approach.
• Adapting design principals and cognitive styles
  to business management.
• Design Thinking in organizations varies along
  specific elements - the mindset, team diversity,
  process, tools and environment.

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Mindset

• Described by personality traits (e.g. empathy,
  integrative thinking and collaboration) inhibited
  by design thinkers.
• Also called by designers as the way of
  thinking, thinking as a designer or design
  attitude.
• Design Thinkers to balance intuitive and
  analytical thinking with abductive logic than
  being traditional.
• To focus on the customer needs.

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Empathy Map

• A collaborative visualization used to articulate
  what we know about a particular type of user.
• Externalizes knowledge about users to create a
  shared understanding of user needs and to aid in
  decision making.
• Provide a glance into who a user is as a whole.
• Best used from the very beginning of the design
  process.

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Empathy Map

• Provide a deep understanding of end users.
• Are not chronological or sequential.
• Reveals any holes in existing user data.
• Reflect the mindset of a design thinker.
• Can capture one particular user or can reflect an
  aggregation of multiple users.
• Aggregated empathy maps represent a user segment.

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Team Diversity

• Multidisciplinary team approach.
• May business experts, engineers and visual
  designers.
• Collaboration within the team increased by
  different perspectives and backgrounds.
• Team members to hear and appreciate different
  opinions and viewpoints.

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Process

• Steps to be carried out by a designer to create
  good design.
• Four steps - analysis of the problem, designing
  the solution, the implementation, and the
  evaluation of the solution.
• Analysis, design, implementation and evaluation
  carried out and sequenced differently in
  different contexts.

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Phases in Design Thinking Process
Non-Sequential. Iterative.
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Tools

• Toolkit, tools or ideation techniques, which can
  be used in each specific process step.
• Around 39 tools found used by Design Thinking
  teams.
• Majority of tools used in empathize or define
  stage.

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Environment

• Environment to be flexible, portable and
  inspiring.
• May purposely avoid own offices for a Design
  Thinking project to enhance their creative
  capability by an unknown and inspiring
  environment.
• Use of movable flipcharts and tables to create
  spaces needed to work efficiently together.
• Materials for reference and to build prototypes
  to be provided to the teams.

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Automotive Design

• Partly deals with the visual appearance of
  vehicle exteriors.
• Perception of the vehicle depends heavily on the
  design.
• Automotive designers to use their experience to
  make sure the appearance of the vehicle fulfills
  requirements, such as those of the users, those
  related to market and sales, technologies
  changes, etc.

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Automotive Design

• Design Engineers to develop the visual appearance
  (exterior design) or aesthetic aspect of the
  vehicle.
• Design Engineers to consider engineering and
  business constraints, such as technical package,
  hard points, platform requirements, category,
  portfolio considerations, etc.
• Visible design to be one of the most powerful
  contributors to the branding and marketing of a
  vehicle.

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Role of Design Engineers

• To cater to the increased expectations of vehicle
  quality, reliability, safety and utility and
  survive in the hyper-competitive business
  environment.
• Automotive industry determined to ensure a steady
  stream of product and technology options that is
  developed on the basis of the companys sense of
  where the market is headed.

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Role of Design Engineers

• Task of the design team split into three main
  aspects
• - exterior design.
• - interior design.
• - color and trim design.
• Design focuses not only on the isolated outer
  shape of automobile parts, but also on the
  combination of form and function, starting from
  the vehicle package.

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• Automotive design is the consideration of
  aesthetics during the product development of an
  automobile. This consideration extends to all
  areas of the product readily visible to the
  customer metal, glass, wheels, lamps, mirrors,
  grilles, badges and other adornments on the
  exterior, and all items of visible soft trim
  seats, door trims, instrument panel and controls
  steering wheel, switches, radio, console, etc. on
  the automobile interior.
• - Clements and
  Porter (2006).

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Aesthetics

• Implies visual appearance, perceived
  attractiveness.
• Explores new ways of seeing and of perceiving the
  world.
• Study of sensory or sensory-emotional values,
  sometimes called judgments of sentiment or taste.
• Deals with the nature of beauty, art, and taste,
  and the creation and appreciation of beauty.

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Styling and Aesthetics

• Designer to use skills in applying aesthetic
  treatment to the development of form to enhance
  the appeal factor of a product or vehicle.
• Stylist as a specialist in the process of
  developing engineering design.
• Stylists to use intuitive processes, private
  form (i.e., designers individual interpretation)
  and graphic languages (i.e., designers visual
  linguistic interpretation).

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Styling

• Design managers to control the styling process
  through a number of management intervention
  points which provide a precise objective
  framework for the process.
• Contradictions between designer and design
  manager in relation to decisions on form may
  become an issue once design interpretations are
  subjective.

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Form

• Visual appearance of automotive design.
• Hard to standardize form or to generalize what
  constitutes form in any all-inclusive manner.
• Characteristics of form are subjective.
• Interpretations to depend on the use of form
  language, defining meaning (semantic aspects),
  facts (pragmatic aspects) and structure
  (syntactic aspects).

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Form

• Interpretations to depend individual perspectives
  and the area of specialisation of the designer.
• Designers perceptions depend on his/her
  background training, such as whether it is within
  art or science.
• Form development is skills driven and implicit.

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Form Elements and Features

• Automotive designers to communicate using visual
  language to illustrate the characteristics of
  form.
• Visual elements are point, line, shape/ plane and
  volume.
• Features of form include accelerate line, hollow,
  concave, convex, etc.
• Components are elements such as headlamp,
  radiator grill, bumper, fender, etc.

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Form Designing

• Manual Designing and Hand Sketching.
• Computer Aided Design 2D and 3D.
• 2D CAD for exterior design of automobiles.
• Automated Morphing Systems (AMS) - a powerful
  software tool for facilitating and generating
  visually compelling and fluid form
  transformations.

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Deformation Based Morphing
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Automated Morphing Systems
Shape Averaging Car to Tear Drop
Shape averaging produces a series of novel shapes
that fit between two typical shapes representing
different meanings.
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Design Thinking and Innovation

• Design Thinking in practice to generate
  innovations.
• Team able to come up with new ideas.
• Innovation - idea, practice, or object that is
  perceived as new by an individual or other unit
  of adoption.
• Perceived newness of the idea for the individual
  determines his or her reaction to it.

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Design Thinking and Innovation

• Innovation invention exploitation.
• Invention process covers all efforts aimed at
  creating new ideas and getting them to work.
• Exploitation process includes all stages of
  commercial development, application, and
  dissemination, including the focusing of ideas or
  inventions towards specific objectives,
  evaluating objectives, downstreaming research
  and/or development results, and the eventual
  broad-based utilization, dissemination, and
  diffusion of technology-based outcomes.

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Design Thinking and Innovation

• Innovation encompasses major stages namely
  creativity (invention) and innovation
  implementation (exploitation).
• Creativity - development of new ideas.
• Creativity essential to produce invention.
• Innovation implementation - introduction and
  practical application of new and improved
  products, services, and ways of doing things at
  work.

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Design Thinking and Innovation

• Teams innovativeness - extent to which the team
  is able to generate innovations though the
  application of Design Thinking.
• Innovative if the team generates new and creative
  ideas and are able to implement the outcome.

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Design Thinking and Innovativeness
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Factors Influencing Design Thinking and
Innovativeness
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Influencing Factors
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Organizational Environment

• Organizational encouragement, supervisory
  encouragement, work group support, freedom,
  resources, challenging work positively associated
  with creativity.
• Workload pressure and organizational impediments
  obstruct teams and individuals creativity.

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Organizational Environment

• Organizational encouragement - an organizational
  culture that encourages creativity by fair
  judgments of ideas and recognition for creative
  thoughts.
• Supervisory encouragement - supervisor supports
  the team and acts as a role model at work.
• Work group support - group to communicate well
  and be committed to the work they do.

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Organizational Environment

• Resources - providing the team with sufficient
  resources such as materials, time, money and
  information.
• Challenging work - team member to have the
  feeling to work hard on challenging tasks.
• Freedom team member to have a sense of control
  over ones work.

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Organizational Environment

• Organization impediments - apparent if the
  organization hinders creative thoughts by
  internal politics, bureaucracy, rigidity and
  overemphasis on the status quo.
• Workload pressure - includes distractions from
  work and unrealistic expectations.
• Time limits - Ideas need time to settle down,
  have to be re-considered and further developed.

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Team Climate

• Innovative and open team climate significantly
  increases creativity and innovation.
• Focus on shared objectives and vision, group
  participation and safety, task orientation and
  support for innovation.
• Vision team commitment to the projects
  objectives.

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Team Climate

• Participative safety - interaction between
  individuals in a non-threatening climate.
• Task orientation - shared concern regarding high
  quality outcomes.
• Support for innovation - enacted support.
• Relationship between team climate and innovation
  stronger for research teams than for development
  teams.

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Team Climate

• Research teams have a greater scope for novel
  ideas and team climate increases its importance.

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Team Collaboration

• Multi-disciplinarity is important.
• Teams to profit from the combination of the sum
  of the individual capabilities through
  interaction, communication, debates and idea
  exchanges.
• Brainstorming to go for a quantity of ideas.
• Production blocking, social loafing, evaluation
  anxiety and conformity and downward norm setting
  as potential problems in face-to-face
  brainstorming sessions.

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Leadership

• Management styles of leaders influence the
  creative outcome of teams.
• Design Thinking teams influenced by the
  leadership styles of their principals.
• Transformational leader to positively influence
  teams outcomes.
• Transactional leader to diminish innovative
  capabilities of teams.

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Transformational Leadership

• Enhances project progress and innovativeness.
• Active support to the team.
• Project leader expects the team to be creative.
• Project leader sets realistic project goals.
• Transformational leaders are visionary, inspiring
  and committed to the project team.

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Transactional Leadership

• Leaders do not trust the team.
• Leaders may overly monitor the teams by setting
  up two teams for the case that one fails.
• Project leader skeptical towards the project
  outcome.
• Project leader do not appreciate the outcomes.

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Laissez-faire

• An absence of a leader or carelessness of the
  leader.
• A loose coordination of activities instead of a
  specific project leader.
• No expectations of the project leader towards the
  result of the project.

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Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivation do something from
  within, a positive influence.
• Extrinsic Motivation - overemphasis on the
  deliverables, the individual adhered to
  specifications and limitations, a negative
  influence.

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Once upon a time..

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Design Transformation

• Rethinking, and thinking outside the box.
• Shift from classic car design to a user-centered,
  holistic and unique vehicle experience design.
• Users to experience a car than drive it.
• Growing preference to use cars as-a-service
  solely when required.
• Different cars for different purposes?

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Design Transformation

• Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot invented steam-powered
  vehicle in 1769.
• Carl Benz applied for the patent for first
  gasoline- powered vehicle in 1886
• 117 years to introduce gasoline engine in a
  vehicle!
• The first step towards modern era of automobiles
  that we see today!
• Start of a move towards the design and aesthetics
  of the cars!

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Design Transformation

• Cars of 1900-30 mostly open by design, but
  built for comfort, little more safety, speed, and
  reliability.
• Cars with long hood, big wheels, high ground
  clearance.
• Car racing with improved cars.
• Racing force engineers to think about other
  contributing factors such as aerodynamics, light
  and strong materials, and safety.

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The First Car by Carl Benz
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Earlier Cars

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Tatra T77

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Enzo Ferrari
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Aston Martin Rapide S
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Ford Sierra

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Sports Utility Vehicle
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Current Scenario

• Driven by the customers as the social currency
  is changing the face of the automobile industry.
• Social networks and the internet has led on to an
  increased customer-to- customer interaction.
• Customers know what they want and they know how
  and where to get it.

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Comments

• Design thinking is as much about mind shift
  as it is about innovation. And even though
  implementation might take a couple of years to
  find its ground, the solutions brought about by
  design thinking shall prove to strengthen
  relevance, application and most importantly
  sustainability in the coming days.

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References

• Your prescribed text books and online resources.
• Ellen Simon, The Application of Design Thinking
  in Automotive Industry - An Exploratory Study,
  Master Thesis, University of Twente, 2015.
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vZV88nYG6zsE
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vw6OBf7ngMI4
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?v4nTh3AP6knM

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Thank You