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| 4Car U.K. interview w/ Chris Bangle...
Posting it now before even having read it... Quote:
Feature: The Chris Bangle Interview
Chris Bangle, director of design for the BMW group, is probably the most controversial car designer currently working in the industry.
The first American to head up BMW's design team, he angered many car enthusiasts - and, in particular, Beemer devotees - when BMW introduced revolutionary new designs for its previously conservative cars.
Indeed, such was the ire generated by the radical "flame surfacing" - a term Bangle coined to describe a surfacing technique that allowed light to be reflected differently off the metal - on the 5-Series that an online petition was started to try and get him fired from BMW.
However, Bangle has never been shy about defending the designs he's responsible for, so 4Car met up with him to talk about his work and his design philosophy.
4Car: Did you have a design philosophy or a vision when you first went to BMW in 1992?
Chris Bangle: I think I had a vision about what car design was. I don't think I had very a well-formulated idea of what BMW was and, certainly, things like Mini and Rolls-Royce weren't even on the horizon back then. And I had absolutely no experience with motorcycles. So probably, when I came to this company, I came with a lot more of an open mind than, let's say, a full mind.
4Car: How has that changed in the time that you've been there?
Chris Bangle: I think I've come to have an awareness of what this particular brand means as a group and what the brands in it mean as players within the group.
It's not something that comes overnight and certainly I have to thank a lot of the partners within this company for being great teachers. But, at the end of the day, I would say I have a head full of BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce and motorcycles.
So now I think I have a head full of really where design goes, where it's going for these types of brands and products, for premium products, and what steps are necessary to move it onto a higher plane. I would say the last 13 years have been an enormous time of vision building.
4Car: Is it difficult to juggle Mini, Rolls-Royce, BMW and the motorcycles?
Chris Bangle: Well, I learned many years ago that that equality means not treating different things equally; equality means treating different things differently.
To be able to work with that approach, you have to do it at a very sophisticated level. When you come to some serious differences, it's important to understand those differences and not use blanket solutions for their very specific needs.
That's the point where, I think, I was able to take a concept like a group design, which is responsible for multiple brands, and to not turn it into some type of singular brand approach.
That's very important for the team here. We have a transparent team - very open, very communicative. It's not about hiding things from one another to make brands different: it's about communicating with one another and, in that sense, I think if you don't have that philosophical approach, you've got a big problem. But if you approach it like that then it's not only more interesting, it's a lot more fun.
4Car: So in the BMW cycle of revolution and evolution, where would you say you are at the moment?
Chris Bangle: Well, if you follow the historical precedents, we are concluding a more revolutionary phase and going into a phase where things are more progressively understood. We don't like the word evolution anyway, but it's more a continuum of progression, rather than a large step.
But that's the historical perspective, which is only valid when the historical context is also valid in the future - and that has changed. The car industry is moving at a different pace than it was, say, 15 years ago. BMW is also a more complex animal now than we were 15 years ago, because of our different products and brands and their timing cycles. Our customers are also more diverse, which requires new approaches.
So, just because we happen to have been at this place in the cycle in the past, doesn't necessarily mean we will slip into those routines in the future.
3-Series sketch
Early design for 3-Series was conservative
Some products, of course, lend themselves more towards progressive jumps than other products. When you're dealing with something which is as iconic as a 3-Series you have to be careful how far you stray from what keeps that icon alive. And that we don't want to do. But what we've done with the 3-Series is we've managed to make it very fresh and progressive in its new development.
So I don't really have an issue even with our most iconic of products. It's the products which are new to the BMW product line-up that will allow us also to make different types of steps because they don't have predecessors.
4Car: So what would you say is your favourite car or project that you've been responsible for the design of at BMW?
Chris Bangle: My favourite? That's like asking a parent which is their favourite kid.
If I agreed with the pope who said that because Michelangelo gave him the most problems, he was his favourite artist, you could probably come up with your own view of which product should be my favourite.
But this is a people-oriented job, it's a team-oriented job and my favourites are the experiences with the team, with the designs, during every project.
Some projects that you would think are an absolute dream, actually go so simple and so clean that you just have a nice warm glow from it. But you don't conjure up great war stories and wonderful escapades that somehow colour your memories, like you do on the projects which turned out to be maybe less spectacular, from a customer point of view, but internally required a lot more, as the Germans would say, jumping over our shadows.
So when I think about the progression that we made on the 5-Series, for instance, the E60 was a project which required huge breakthroughs for us in understanding design language, to be able to put these types of surfaces into a very classic car concept.
BMW Z4
Z4 marked a turning point in car design, says Bangle
I think that we were super-successful, but that was a really tough and exciting project.
And when I look at some of the cars that we're doing, like the Z4, like the 5-Series, they stand out because they marked a turning point in car design away from pure rationalism into rationalism-based emotionalism.
The cars aren't any less usable - in fact, they're even more functional - but they have an enormously high emotional content. I think BMW design has turned that corner and since we turned that corner, a whole lot of other people have decided they want to take that corner too.
4Car: If cars are emotionally relevant, does that make the controversy surrounding recent BMW designs inevitable and if so, how do you deal with some of the more pointed criticism?
Chris Bangle: I like the idea that cars are emotionally relevant. I would argue that when there is no emotion from you, then the focus is going to be on the people who are raising the blood pressure.
Sometimes I think that maybe, in absolute terms, what BMW design has been doing in the last couple of years might not be as radical or as shocking as the media would like to paint it. It is just, in relative terms, finally somebody moved on.
There's also a feeling that the whole industry got a little bit energised by what we're doing and that feels good. I get a great deal of positive feedback on that.
4Car: How do you deal with the criticism of some of the recent designs?
Bangle with 7-Series
The 7-Series brought Bangle to the spotlight
Chris Bangle: First of all you have to take all of it very seriously and listen to it.
But at the same time there are certain moments where you have to be confident in the decisions you've made, because you've done your homework and that you have a company that stands behind you because they know the whole story.
I often compare the criticisms that we got earlier on in some of our work to people who walk out of the first act of a play and then start to write a review about it. If you follow through until the third act - and by now we've got the third act out on the road - people have come round to saying, maybe there was a holistic approach here and, in fact, it made sense.
Criticism is always a tough thing to deal with because we are people who like to hear positive things, but I think professionally we all know, if you're going to be in the kitchen, you've got to be able to take heat.
4Car: What's the starting point when you embark on a new design or a new vehicle?
Chris Bangle: There are three phases we go through to design anything.
The last phase we call Seeing, which means the time you need just to look at where all the little details, any little perfections of a curve or surface. That's a whole year, just that.
The phase before that is called the Believing phase, and that's where you go through a number of design alternatives until you come down to the one you believe in. This isn't anything you can farm out to clinic tests. You have to do this by your own convictions. You have to live through this process and come to grips with this so that what you're seeing there is, in fact, the embodiment of what you, as a company, want to make. That also takes about a year to go through that whole process.
In model
The Understanding phase is the most important
But the first phase is the most important, which is the Understanding phase where you just have to understand what the hell it is you want to do. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds, because the worst way to go about it is to say "somebody else did that, you do it too with our brand on it". There is no authenticity in that, and when you come to the Believing phase people are going to walk away from whatever you do.
We had this experience with the 6-Series because for the longest time we felt we were making a 5-Series coupe. In the Understanding phase, we skipped the whole business of what really is a coupe in BMW terms and we just got right to the design competition. It wasn't until we finally sat down and asked what is a coupe all about in BMW terms, we realised it had to have that close connection to a limousine.
So it wasn't about doing a 5-Series coupe at all: it was about doing a 6-Series coupe derived from a 7-Series.
My job nowadays has a lot to do with making sure this company doesn't skip that phase and invests the time and resources necessary to do it the right way which, fortunately, they do.
4Car: So, how much is the customer involved in the design process?
Chris Bangle: That's the phase where you have to take the customer in. The customer has to be foremost in your mind in that Understanding phase.
That's where all the parameters are set up from the customer point of view. The brand point of view, the corporate point of view, naturally, but all that customer input on how people really do think, what kind of things they really want, what they're expecting, what didn't work, what works the best in this context, etc. You've got to get that as the basis for your decision in that very first Understanding phase.
5-Series grille
Customers are involved in the final touches
Later, when you're making the final touches in the Seeing phase, is another point where you want to involve customers who are now much closer to the production. At the beginning they're five years, six years away from when the thing is going to hit the streets. But in those final moments, they're only, maybe, half a year away from this thing hitting the streets, a year at the most.
You have to ask them, is it the best way to launch the car with this type of equipment as opposed to another. These are the direct customer-tuning things for people who are serious about buying this car.
But it's that in-between phase, the Believing phase, where you have to go to your corporate roots. You have to rely on the responsibilities of the people involved in the company to make the decisions. You can't farm that out.
4Car: Do you have a specific type of BMW customer - in terms of their tastes and attitudes - in mind when you're designing?
Chris Bangle: Many, many years ago we tried to decide if there were such things as female buyer and male buyer preferences, stuff like that. At the end of the day, we came down to the decision that first and foremost they're BMW buyers and some distinctions begin to appear, but at that first level, they all have the very same, very high expectations and high standards.
It's keeping that alive which is very important to us and so we always have that in our heads. This is true whether you're in Japan or you're in Lower Saxony or you're in Coventry, these high expectations of the BMW brand are pretty much worldwide too. The same is true for Mini; the same is true for Rolls-Royce. They have their own set of expectations.
It's when you come down a little bit further and you say, OK, we're really not talking about the 3-Series customer here, we're talking about an X5 customer here, then it begins to split, because these people are making choices and you have to be able to tune the BMW to their particular needs without letting go of that first fundamental introduction to the brand.
4Car: How much do engineering and safety regulation considerations compromise a design's work?
Chris Bangle: Our job is to solve problems, so you can't really say they compromise us because that's not our job.
I think one of the real issues we have in the future is not solving the problems that these various constraints or regulations or challenges bring upon us - that's our job. The challenge is going to be making sure the customer understands that we've added value to his product.
4Car: Should designers have commercial considerations in mind when they're designing?
Chris Bangle: I figure if you don't, I suppose, you're just a free artist. Once you cross that line into the industry you better be aware of how what you're doing is impacting everybody in the chain, from the customer's value for money back down to the shareholder.
It starts with the customer and ends with the customer, but has a lot of people in-between.
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12-23-2005, 02:18 PM
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