Safety concerns with our lightly-used 25-year old car sent us scurrying for a new car in pre-pandemic 2020. We kept our options wide open at the start which resulted in us trying a gamut of brands and models.

n this age of electric vehicles (EV), we had to consider them. Unfortunately, other than Tesla, the other popular electrics failed our driving preferences and finicky expectations on aesthetics and UX.

I’ll focus my design notes on three cars culled from the pack — Tesla Model 3, BMW 3 series, and Mazda 3.

In 2020, automotive design spans industrial design, experience design, and digital design. It is impossible to cover all aspects of their design. Beyond good handling, these are the aspects of design that jumped out:

1. The Front / The Face
2. The Side and the Rear
3. The Console
4. The infotainment System

1. The Face

Grills (or the lack of them) give cars personality.

BMW’s kidney grill is famous even though it didn’t always start out kidney-shaped. Mazda sports the “apron” grill (or “half-shield”). Electrics can live without it as Tesla does. Made me wonder if BB King were alive to see the transition to EVs, he might have rendered, “The Grill is Gone”.

There is nothing objectionable about the above faces. In fact, there is something to like about each. Until this happens…

The Mazda design looks fine, especially up close. Designers did a great job with the grill. Unfortunately we get to put on the license plate. Voila! The car looks vandalized! I noticed the extreme despair of a Mazda fan who attached the license plate away from the grill on the side. Saddest automotive spectacle that I ever saw!

It used to be that we designed-for-manufacturing (DFM) and we designed-for-use (DFU). This seemed an abject example of designed-for-defacing.

2020 — The Year of the Grillzillas

Before we leave the discussion on face design, I must segue into the trends in grill design. They were striking. It struck fear!

As if Covid wasn’t enough, we have an attack of the car grills. By 2020, some brands have increased grill sizes by more than 40% vs. prior year models.

See examples below.

I looked, cringed, and ran to escape this assault on the senses. It was Scary Movie #5. It was Aliens remake #10.

They each vie for the Top GrillZilla honour, but if looks could kill, Lexus would be my nemesis.

All this has given raise to internet memes on grill-roadmap’ing. See the projected evolution of grills by 2060, starting with the 2020 BMW.

BMW has deemed naysayers like me “Boomers” who don’t like change. Perhaps some tastes do need to be acquired. Horror movies aren’t my thing!

Clearly boomer BMW fans, do not have to reprise BB King, rather double down on, The Thrill is Gone.

2. The Side & the Rear

Variations abound in how the rear is configured.

Tesla’s fastback modernizes the classic hatchback look, but it does give it a tent’ish look. [Guilty, this is a nit. However, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.]

Tesla’s rear visibility is severely limited due to the raised backseats and trunk. It is annoying unless you get used to the rear camera view to see behind the car.

BMW and Mazda stick to sedan’s classic saloon form. Mazda extends the roof a bit closer to the rear than BMW sedan, seemingly a cross between fastback and sedan.

What I found catchy on the Mazda is the “ridge-less” side.

Taking a closer look, you can see how the side flows front-to-back without any bulges or ridges. This makes for a distinctive look for the car where you can recognize a Mazda by seeing just the side. [More on this flowy design later on.]

This is not an easy feat at a time when most cars look similar and the only way to tell them apart is by the logo or other signage. As a bonus, how light falls on the side body makes for nice natural effects as seen above.

The Door Handle

Before we get inside the car, a quick pause at the door.

Tesla has its unique flush door-handle vs. the traditional pull handles. It wins on looks hands-down.

Alas! Design is a compromise between function, usability, and aesthetics.

A few uses of this handle and it becomes apparent it is not meant to be opened by a hand holding groceries.

Nor is it for the arthritis-afflicted. Nor for the left-handed. Nor for those with even a minor temporary hand injury…

Intentionally or not, the designers’ aesthetic sense beat out the engineers!

3. The Console

Other than the grill (sans-grill or grillzilla), the place that has the most visible changes in the last decade is the console. Because consoles have gone digital.

See Tesla 3 and Mazda3 consoles below.

Tesla is all digital with no remnants of the internal-cumbustion-engine days. The minimalist, uncluttered Tesla stuns at first. The vast panoramic front view is expansive too.

That is until you look critically at the laptop screen that juts out from the middle like a billboard. It will take some getting used to, if you are a stickler for unbotrusive designs.

Mazda has a more traditional look. It is partially digitized with even digital dials like speedometer made to look analog. The navigation and infotainment screen is angled towards the driver — a thoughtful touch that fits the display neatly in the driver’s peripheral vision.

The utility of this angled design is immediately apparent if you’ve ever used a navigation system not angled towards the driver, but straight across the driver’s view as below.

Call it pretzel-centric design, given the twisting you’ve to do to get to the controls.

BMW has the best of both worlds. The screen is somewhat angled towards the driver with recessed housing on the console, so as to not stick out like the Tesla.

4. The Infotainment System

Tesla rolls its own proprietary interface for infotainment. Tesla’s closed non-platform approach to infotainment makes it impossible to bring-your-own content and apps to your car. As competition heats up in the EV space, they may have to revisit this.

BMW infotainment controls retain the legacy rotary dial for now, while adding touchscreen and providing wireless Car Play support. Given their 20-year history with their iDrive system, this may well rank high as a full-featured and mature infotainment experience.

Mazda, like others, have opted for Apple Car Play and Android Auto integration — a smarter move given the convenience for consumers and the difficulty in keeping up with innovations in digital interactions (e.g. touch, voice, visual design) from Apple and Google. However, navigating between the car’s built-in menu options and your apps is a long way from seamless.

For all those considerations for angled display screen and human-centric design philosophy (read about Kodo design here), Mazda chose to make its display, not a touchscreen. Navigating the screen is via a knob next to the shift, apparently to enable the drivers to operate it in their normal seated position.

Well, dear folks at Mazda, it’s 2020. We are way past jiggling some proxy knobs and joysticks to get our work done on a computer.

Yes, we are well aware that it is a substantial redesign of the console to have it be angled, touch-enabled, and fit with the rest of the console. Just do it, please!

Finis

After all these observations and complaints, we ended up buying a Mazda 3. I handled so much better than the Tesla. Mazda 3 met our requirements for utility and drivability. Its design was elegant in many respects and adquate in others. Not surprisingly, the BMW outshines the Mazda in driving experience, but that’s not a fair comparison given the consumer segments they each are after.

After rifling through over 10 brands and 20 models we were resigned to settling on some mediocre or expensive automotive. Zarathustra came to the rescue. We thanked the prophet and his Supreme God, Ahura Mazda, for their namesake creation and sparing our pocketbook from years of devastation.

Epilogue

During this shopping episode, Tesla Model 3 repeatedly reminded me of a Mazda RX-7 I had years ago. Comparing a newer Mazda (MX-5 / Miata) to a Tesla 3 does suggest more than a modicum of shared sisterly DNA.

Is it a coincidence, I wondered. Upon researching, I found that Tesla’s designer, Franz von Holzhausen, used to be a Mazda designer. In fact, he was responsible for a flowing 2010 Mazda design called Nagare.

Is the flowing side-body of a 2020 Mazda 10-years in the making? Was it because production couldn’t realize designer’s vision?

How much of Tesla’s design language owes itself to Mazda? Given the same constraints on size, price, and aerodynamics, won’t different designers end up with common elements across their designs anyway?As humans, don’t we carry our sensibilities, skills, and tools across jobs?

Now, for the design and marketing geeks…

Mazda logo and lettering is in itself a study in brand identify and visual design.

The ‘M’ in the logo — suggesting wings that give it flight — is a great design element for numerous variations in print and digital. You can see it accentuated in TV advertisements (in the end-tag of the ad spot).

Why is the ‘M’ circled, I wondered? Most traditional automakers have circular logos. Not Tesla, which has a styled ‘T’.

Was the circle a design compromise for manufacturability in its time and Tesla wasn’t burdened by it? Or was the circle for symmetry or meant to imply “holistic”? I suspect manufacturability had a lot to do with older logos being circular.

For the ultra geeks: Mazda lettering uses the font SF Automaton. This font lets you combine upper and lower case for a uniform appearance. Imagine how out-of-place a ‘d’ in Mazda logo or ‘h’ in my “Ahura logo” would’ve looked with any other font.

The post Zarathustra and the Art of Automotive Design appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.

I was researching cancer. I came across a cancer pathway graphic design by Will Stahl-Timmins. Will had designed a poster to expedite the intervention and referrals for potential cancer patients for BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) and NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) in the UK.

It is a fascinating poster to help the GP’s (General Practitioners in the UK, the equivalent of PCPs, Primary Care Physicians in the US) quickly choose the next best action to treat cancer when confronted by a myriad of symptoms.

The poster looks like this (reproduced from BMJ/NICE):

Detailed view available here.

As I read through Will’s blog on how he designed it and the behind-the-scenes story, I marveled at the entire process of its design, not just its utility.

Three takeaways stood out from the final output and the process to get to this cancer pathway visual design:

1. Function: The poster enables quick intervention for the next-best-action for the patient.
2. Form: The poster by its sections and their juxtaposition distills a complex set of variables down to a navigable chart for a physician — the first line of defense for the patient and the healthcare system.
3. Collaboration: How does a poster like this come to life if not for the droves of subject matter experts behind it?

1. Function

Let’s say you walked into a clinic due to a hoarse voice. God forbid. You are not expecting to walk out of there with a cancer diagnosis. But the doctor was concerned. Wouldn’t you rather if the doctor did the best possible diagnosis as to the cause of the hoarseness?

Wouldn’t you rather the doctor had the best tools to determine the best next step in your diagnosis or cure, taking apart the 20+ different symptoms that might be a cancer-related cause affecting a particular organ in your body?

That is the function this graphic serves for 2200+ GP’s in the UK and the patients they serve: Quickly triaging a patient for the right next step in diagnosis or treatment is crucial to deliver appropriate care and ensure that the health system is optimally utilized.

The graphic lets the physician arrive at a quick “next-best-action” and speeds the patient along a crowded highway to the specialists.

2. Form

There are 3 parts to the design — symptoms, intervention, cancer type or affected organ — as shown in this excerpt below.

These are cleverly (and after many many iterations) juxtaposed and interconnected to make a meaningful pathway from symptom to diagnosis and next step in care.

For example, an unexplained, persistent hoarseness in a person over 45 years old gets an immediate referral (shown by connectors in colour and text) for a potential diagnosis for laryngeal cancer; an unexplained breast lump for an over-30 patient gets an urgent referral for breast cancer.

When we consider the multitude of symptoms — ranging from visual indications to experienced symptoms to the organs involved — it is easy to see how a picture like this can become a spaghetti of criss-crossed lines that is unusable. But not this!

A visual design this elegant and simple does not happen by accident, nor overnight. It takes reviews and iterations. The hackneyed phrase “let’s keep it simple” is often uttered without regard for what it takes to simplify!

The entire iterative process of designing adult cancer pathways for NICE is described hereby Will Stahl-Timmins in his blog, “An Impossible Cancer Spaghetti”. It is a must-read for anyone who aspires to simplify concepts or create simple, elegant, and usable visual designs.

3. Collaboration

In the 21st century, health care needs a redesign for many reasons –from aging and longevity to availability of digital technologies to improve care delivery.

To leverage the medical and information technology innovations to solve the surge in demand for health care, collaboration is essential — collaboration between the clinical experts and the digital technology experts; collaboration across doctors, engineers, scientists, creative designers…

Collaboration at this scale requires expertise and empathy. It requires a humane intelligence that keeps the patients and practitioners at the center of the care pathway redesign.

The BMJ poster is a prime example of that humane intelligence.

The poster and its creation process brings to the fore all the great things that can be accomplished by collaboration to bridge the gap between cure and care — between knowing what to do to care for human conditions and delivering it at the point of care.

Epilogue

During my travels earlier this year, I came across the logo below. It is the logo of the Regional Cancer Center in Kerala, India.

At its center, the logo depicts the Rod of Asclepius (rod with snake on it) overcoming Cancer (“crab” in Latin). Since then I have seen visual designs where the crab is conquered by more violent and explicit means. But this particular logo struck me as profound because of its subtlety.

It suggests the ascendancy of the snake over the crab, but not by a stab or a strike, but just by the rod being in the foreground.

It is as if the snake is coaxing the crab into submission. It is a study in visual design for poignance and meaning.

Thousands of years have passed since Asclepius; more since cancer was first documented by the Egyptians. The BMJ/NICE artifact is a refreshingly practical, day-to-day mechanism to make the intent of this logo a reality. It speaks volumes about how we collaborate to enrich our knowledge and apply it to the job of caring. And that is our very humane intelligence!

The post How an Intelligent Visual Design is Combating Cancer appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.