Jesse Diephuis

The purpose and application of Industrial Design is currently being questioned in unprecedented ways. With the advent of Climate Change and the need for appropriate sustainable solutions, automotive Design must respond to this specific pressure point in our industry.  The impact of this will be felt long after the Choices made in the Design process have faded from memory and therefore must bring about difficult choice in materials, recyclability and circularity.  Artificial Intelligence has the potential to affect Design long-term into the future as the current introduction and wider use predicative analytics in creative fields like as Industrial Design and Transportation Design are still too new to observe significant impact, but will continue to increase strength and depth of augmented creativity and will likely upend that traditional Design process that served our industry for so many decades previously. At the intersection of all the forces is the fundamental topic of why we are Designing products in the first place…who the intended audiences are, and how to make them customers of a brand. The fight for brand loyalty is no longer fought in the dealerships and single point of sale, so the future prosperity belongs to those brands and organizations that can best leverage unmet need. The human-centered Design approach has long been used in Big-tech firms like Apple and IDEO, but now this competency is becoming native to the Traditional Automotive Design Industry.  Moving forward it will take center stage, as the creative process become more augmented, and the business models strive form more category-based innovation that engages customers beyond a life-stage and instead becomes a generational legacy.