INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
service, continues to hire top talent to make its vision a reality
The latest new recruitment is car design veteran Frank Stephenson, who has previously worked for Ferrari, Maserati and Mini, to name but a
iconic designs such as the BMW X5, New MINI, Ferrari F430, Maserati MC12 and McLaren P1
flying taxis, what his new role will entail more specifically and to dig a little deeper into how he thinks about design and why good design
Designing a modern-day car involves a heck of a lot of people and designing something like the Lilium jet again involves a whole team of
I just have never been able to stop getting my hands dirty
I guess in that respect, the design directors come across often as prima donnas almost and sit back and watch the guys work and every now
But I am more of a hands-on type of director.I like to build small teams
You want to be under pressure to deliver great design
And typically if you think about a design too long, it gets watered down and loses that character, that pureness that you had at the
the brief because that comes from marketing, what product segment or what market segment the product should fit
to deliver in a certain time span
What I do is I meet with the marketing guys, I meet with engineering guys.The engineering guys will lay out what we call a package, where
all the critical components are for the vehicle
And then I work around all those components with the aerodynamic engineers, suspension and everything.What I have to do basically is get the
It takes a lot of brainstorming and inspiration
that we all start pen on paper sketching, because that is really the only way to get a design or a spark out of your mind
come up with great ideas, we work with engineers
We typically create scale models out of clay
We maybe do two, maybe three, different designs, and as those designs evolve one will get chosen as the favorite theme
And then when this clay model is finally approved by engineering, and approved by finance, and approved by marketing, and approved by
And then with Lilium the requirements will probably branch out over into what the Lilium port will look like that you access to get into
So the whole kind of environment from an aesthetic or emotional point of view.TC: Give me more of a sense of the relationship between design
Anything can be made beautiful and should be made desirable, obviously.We have to have constraints because safety and engineering require
legislation and restrictions which make it a challenge
Some people like some designs, a lot of people like other designs
But good design is absolutely not subjective
Iconic designs are typically timeless designs, they last forever
Anything that was designed iconically 40 years ago will still look great 40 years in the future
The design is so good that it just lasts and lasts and lasts
Typically if you design something that works very, very well it looks fantastic
One of the interesting things is people always say that form follows function
If the product works well, it looks great
You look at all these beautiful animals and organisms in nature that work incredibly well, and therein lies the beauty of nature
Horses and cheetahs and all these amazing animals, nobody sat down and designed this amazing-looking animal
Evolution caused it to be absolutely fantastic at what it does, and through being fantastic at what it does, the result is the look, and
That same principle is how I feel about design
The reason behind that is because all the new generations coming along after the old farts like us are basically looking for experiences
And I see that as the future
If you could just take that situation of being inside a capsule, what would you want to occur there You want to relax, you want to
socialize, you want to work, you want to be entertained
imagine something on the inside being the new wave of entertainment
All the new materials that are coming about at the moment in terms of seats, flooring, lighting, buttons, displays, image projection, sounds
You know all the things that we try to shoot into new cars as a next step for luxury, those are just going to become everyday things that
you know very high-speed and all that
documentary a while back that made the point that the world we live in is predominately designed by humans and therefore design can make or
break our everyday experiences
Other people just live it
And design is all about making the world a better place not a prettier place
I think it was more like that
just designing products that nobody really needs, they just desired and want
What was I doing, I was just clogging up the road networks even more and not making the world a better place, probably a more exciting
place, but not socially better
then I heard about Lilium and Lilium contacted me.It was just a match made in heaven
It met all my principles of working for an exciting and incredibly innovative company from the very beginning
To be able to establish a design department for them with a design DNA, a design language, the design team, the studio
Doing something for the future of humanity
Staying with transportation, but making it even better than it ever was
Making something science fiction reality.TC: Are there any particular designers or designs that you can point to and say that designer or
I can tell you specific products for their aesthetic value but I think I have to go deeper than that because you know everybody admires
different designers for different reasons
If you could put two guys together that would be da Vinci and Einstein
I mean da Vinci was probably the guy because he not only could paint and draw and all that but he was also an incredible engineer and he
figured out how to make these things work and he wanted things to look great too
So if I could say one person for me it would be da Vinci more than anybody else just because the guy could paint, the guy could engineer
Anything he ever touched was absolutely amazing
He was doing flying machines way back too
I like his natural approach
He came up with things that never existed before for the benefit of humanity
If he would have been that kind of guy today he would be the absolutely most awesome human being on earth
