Sorry the other night, guys. You were chatting with a ym dummy.
I can see you've pretty much mapped out the path for setting up a full-fledged auto corporation. Kudos. If ever, sali ako, pero specifically sa design aspect ang entrada ko. Pero cuidado dapat. We shouldn't really blow the bugle too early. We can be noisy, but among ourselves lang muna.
Kung tuloy yung EB natin sa Mar25, maybe we should deliberately focus on design issues, inputs, and programming. As architect said, product dev muna, kundi, it will take a several-day live-in planning conference to cover the gamut of issues.

For the benefit of budding & freelance designers, let me input a broad consideration re design in general: It's a process that balances functionality (aka "utility") and appearance (aka "styling").
Which of the two should have ultimate priority? Functionality of course -- your car has got to work for you first, before it makes you look good in it. You can have a great look, pero kung walang pakinabang, sayang lang.
Design does not begin on the drawing board. It begins out there in the field -- the land upon which you intend to roll your ride. Geography and Climate. Then you have to check the market where real people have real needs and wants and purchasing power for their rides. Market reasearch, Economics, Culture, Ergonomics. You then proceed to survey available technologies that will help satisfy those needs and wants. Physics, Engineering, Materials Science, Industrial Processes, etc.
Only then can you sit down and confidently translate all these factors into visuals and spatials. This is what it means to design "from outside-in to inside-out". Sinukatan mo muna yung mga gagamit so it can "tailor-fit" them.

But how about those who start with drawings agad? OK din naman 'yon -- if you have a spark of visual inspiration, why not sketch it, no? You can file it in your album of visual forms for future reference. But you might find it hard later on to squeeze in what the end users are really expecting. It's like buying a stylish and expensive suitcase for a friend before you even ask what they will be packing. Baka mamaya balikbayan box lang pala yung kailangan niya.

If you start with a drawing and later discover that some requirement will upset your initial sketches, the temptation will be to sacrifice the requirements in favor of your pet style feature. As it is in buildings, so it is with cars. The designer's impulse is to push his style at the expense of the end-user. It becomes designer-driven instead of consumer driven. Ingat din dapat tayo diyan. I've seen designers quarrelling to death over style issues, when in fact, the impasse could have been resolved earlier had they given precedence to requirements over styling.

ERGO, Design is the process of translating needs and wants into visual/spatial form, with the use of existing technologies.
Keeping your pencil away from the paper until all the data is in is a sign of designer maturity. To give you an idea, Ford designers have a full blown research group that continuously feeds the design departments. Once the data is in, the basic design emerges quite rapidly. For example, about the new Mustang, Doug Gaffka (with J.Mays) said: "We basically put this car together in about three days, and then we spent a year finessing. What I like to do is to put together a car quickly, understand where we are going, and then spend a year making it perfect."

A true designer is one who can validate every curve and surface in his/her work. And if you listen first before you sketch, you might just come up with something really new, because necessity is truly the mother of invention, and market inputs can be an incentive to design "out-of-the-box".

On the other hand, Filipinos are generally suckers for style and appearance. They will choose magara over mapakinabang, and will go into debt to get the magara, kahit mas konti ang benefits compared to cost. But social responsibility and prudence tells me that I shouldn't exploit that weakness just to get rich quick selling a bongga vehicle. Why entice the buyers into investing their cash into superfluities, when they can invest in more fundamental needs in life? I don't see the justice in being luxurious when Mang Pendong still has to padyak his family daily. Low cost and propriety are perhaps the only thing I will impose as a designer. But there's also the pragmatic reason that the market is bigger down there.

BTW, the exterior shell is meant to entice the visual sense. Let's not forget that auto design very much includes auto interiors, which address all five senses. People ride inside 'di ba? and only on rare occasions do the 'sabit'.

Having said all that, please allow me to formulate the design challenge to the (still unnamed) group:
  • After factoring in the various requirements and expectations of the market,
  • and using readily available technologies,
  • to develop, sketch and model an enduring vehicle style that will
  • appeal to the visual sophistication and automotive taste of Filipinos
  • from all economic levels,
  • and be affordable even to C and D level Filipinos.


Here's J.Mays* reflecting on his college years: "I was going to prove to myself that even though I hadn't done well in journalism school, I was going to be outstanding at designing cars. I just had it in my head that this was going to be the case. ... It had a lot less to do with brains than with perspiration."
"I guarantee you that a lot of design is just stick-to-itiveness -- being able to stay in there, to have the stamina, and, when everybody else gives up, to just keep going."

Mays is currently the Group Vice President of Design and Chief Creative Officer at Ford Motor Company (See www.designmuseum.org/design/j-mays and www.okcareertech.org/pio/champs/mays.htm).
Wanna know what he would say about our "open source" design approach? -ITUTULOY