Quote:
Originally Posted by snareman
I would be curious to know how the design process went. Someone, Dukec? Vanhooy? said we need a dramatic new design. Designers, come up with some radical new ideas! Some version of the new 4 series kidneys was one of the ideas and they said Yes! That's perfect. Lets go with that.
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Depends on who the Design Director is.
Usually it works almost exactly like you described. Designers all hear the same vision, pitch, research etc etc and digest the same information before going solo into silos to design. And produce concepts based on whatever design direction the director sets...based on any number of things. CEO vision, market demands, brainstorming workshop etc.
The designers then design, with the director....well...directing by giving feedback. After iterating the designers pitch/present their concepts. Then 1 is selected to make it into clay and then concept production. This is pretty close to how BMW works as described by designer Frank Stephenson and the day Bangle picked his X5 concept.
Along the way feedback will come in from internal stakeholders, of course (CEO, marketing, etc). Any requested changes are as drastic as the design director will let them be. Van Hooydonk must have a backbone made out of steel for these grills to have made it into production.
The biggest changes to the concept are made by safety engineers and the penny pinchers ("if you bend that piece of metal it's not a $100,000 car").
So in short: the designers vision (influenced by a number of factors) makes it into concept form largely unchanged most of the time.