Chang Bing: Car design is not good or not, five passes

Written by / Chang Bing

Editor/ Zhang Nan

Design / Shi Yuchao

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Two better mechanisms, which are jointly evaluated by a special committee (a very small number of people), regardless of multiple levels or multiple times, or only by the person in charge of the enterprise himself, are gradually becoming popular among small young enterprises after about 2010.

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The designer's self-satisfaction is the first level to evaluate whether the car styling design is good or not, and it is also the most basic level. Ensuring sufficient work cycles, giving the initial creative design stage sufficient independence (soft and hard environment), so that rough ideas can be fully grown, tempered and even self-denial and innovation, and gradually become a more complete, fine, enough to show others the state, is a necessary condition to ensure that the first level is passed.

The second level to evaluate whether the design is good or not is the boss. The meaning of this "boss" in different enterprises is very different, some are a sequence of high, medium and low levels (many people), some are a high-level group responsible for evaluation and design, a committee (three or five people), and some are really the bosses (one person) who are responsible for the operation of the enterprise. The three different forms of boss actually represent the different understandings and demand positioning of the company's design. In the current context of automobile consumption, roughly speaking, the latter two are superior to the former.

The first form still exists in many established companies today, and its historical tradition can be traced back to the R&D architecture of the Soviet automotive industry. After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, as the victorious power, obtained a lot of technical information on basic models from Italy, West Germany and the United States, and then slightly changed them into its own models. At that time, cars were basically production tools, and it didn't matter whether the shape was good or not.

Correspondingly, the styling work is basically the meaning of the art, just a little beautification of the basic car, its team is basically the body and other departments under the group, in the overall R & D architecture is very inconspicuous. Now, whether it is the Internet or the collector's data, it is almost impossible to find the designer information of the Soviet model, which is also a manifestation of the low status of styling design at that time. As a sharp contrast, the designers of European and American models in the same period are very famous, which is easy to find on the Internet.

Back to the point. Naturally, this Soviet R&D architecture spread to China's First Automobile Factory. At that time, under the huge engineering construction needs of New China, our cars were also complete production tools, and the shape was naturally not important. However, in the later development process of Dongfeng Car and Hongqi series of cars, the design status has been significantly improved. However, at that time, the political attributes of the car were strong, and it had nothing to do with mass consumption, whether it was research and development, manufacturing or use, the range of people involved was extremely small, and the shape design could not form enough cognition and cultural dissemination. Therefore, Dora's fast running and repaired tools have still become the positioning of the vast majority of China's original automakers in the bones of the car.

The impact of this perception spread rapidly with the establishment of other automotive companies such as the second automobile. In terms of time dimension, at least one or two generations of thirty or forty years have passed on, so the styling design belongs to engineering development, and its evaluation decisions from low to high multi-level many people (and almost all from other knowledge backgrounds) have become the habitual understanding of previous generations of automakers. In the historical period of transforming on the basis of ready-made models and fully focusing on the attributes of automobile tools, such a design evaluation system is completely reasonable and correctly set. However, with the rapid development of private automobile consumption in the new century and the rapid development of consumer culture, this decision-making mechanism has shown drawbacks in the early days.

Too many people from different knowledge and experience backgrounds evaluate whether the design looks good or not, which is essentially a multi-layer filtering mechanism with different standards. The understanding of design by people at these different levels is almost blank, and their positions are not professional. The position they make judgments has nothing to do with aesthetics and experience, and is far from the real market demand.

In particular, the aforementioned "good repair and good manufacturing" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and it is extremely difficult for everyone to understand that the design is beautiful and requires unique technology and the necessary cost to support it. Although some of them have strong learning ability, knowing some fragmentary design information does not mean having judgment. For if there is not enough relevant practice, it is almost impossible to transform "knowledge" into "knowledge."

Therefore, the design team came up with a plan that wants to pass these four or five layers of screening, and from the probability point of view, even by luck, it is almost impossible. Then the designer can only be a song and a match, constantly reducing the edges and personalities. Thus, at the highest level of decision-making (one person), even if the leader has sufficient aesthetic judgment and market sensitivity, the design scheme he sees is already a collective hodgepodge of no personality and novelty, and few designers are willing to admit that they are the building blocks of their authors.

That is to say, the first hurdle of "designer self-satisfaction" has long been lost, so no matter how you choose, the result cannot be good. So although many times the top decision-makers see the problem and demand to overturn it, they are only repeating the original wrong process, and the probability of getting better again is still very low.

Two better mechanisms, which are jointly evaluated by a special committee (a very small number of people), regardless of multiple levels or multiple times, or only by the person in charge of the enterprise himself, are gradually becoming popular among small young enterprises after about 2010.

The many new car brands that emerged after 2015 have rapidly promoted this reasonable decision-making mechanism that is in line with the consumer market in the new era and pushed it to a more thorough extreme. We'll explore that in more detail in the next article. (The author is Vice President of Nezha Automobile)

This article was originally produced by Automotive Business Review

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