EP28 - The Identity Issue Pt. 2

Looking Out - The Podcast

The episode explores the tension between 'identity' and 'character' in automotive design, using the concept of 'uni-context' to explain why mo

Key takeaways

• Identity is universally legible (e.g., an EV looks like an EV), whereas character is specific to personal and local context.
• The 'uni-context' theory suggests that products are being flattened to appeal to a global, risk-averse market.

Main topics

• Identity vs. Character
• Uni-context theory

Notable quotes

Character is something that is not born of uniformity. Character is almost, it's the antithesis of identity.

Conclusion

True design innovation requires moving beyond data validation toward a

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hello and welcome to Looking Speaker 1 (0:02) Out the Podcast, in Speaker 2 (0:04) which we connect the dots between mobility, design and culture. My name is Drew Smith. I'm a leadership coach and pilgrimage guide with more than a passing interest in the automotive industry and more specifically, design strategy Speaker 3 (0:17) within it. My name is Joe Simpson and I am a design strategist based in the UK working for a automotive OEM whose views I do not and have never represented on this show. And I'm still talking to Drew, which is a bit of a surprise given that we've just been talking for about 40 minutes and been actually quite coherent for us. And Drew's just realized that he didn't press record. So the second time will be better, folks. I promise. You know, we're going to be on fire tonight. Anyway. Speaker 2 (0:50) So the reason we're recording this show is because we dropped an episode a couple of weeks ago, drastically increasing our batting average of episode drops over the past 18 months, in which we started talking about the idea of the unicontext, which is a philosophical concept developed by Agnes Callard. And how it might provide an explanation as to why. Speaker 2 (1:20) automotive design and design in general, perhaps even culture in general, is feeling increasingly flat. And we wanted to come back and revisit the topic because after we finished recording, I hopped into the Lexus and a few thoughts started bubbling up and I sent a couple of voice notes to Joe. We then had a bunch of back and forth on text. Speaker 2 (1:49) We wanted to share these voice notes with you and then see where our conversation goes from that point. Because based on what we've been hearing from people on Blue Sky, this is an interesting topic. And yeah, we'd love to share a little bit more with you. So I'm going to play the voice notes first and then we're going to dive into some conversation. Here we go. Speaker 1 (2:19) um we were talking about in the podcast this morning and yeah like i feel like i properly butchered the distinction between like identity and character and i wanted to share this thought with you very messy as it arises because it actually seems really pertinent to where i am kind of on the whole sort of gender thing And if we take kind of trans, like transgender as an identity, that sort of this globally understood term, you know, that depending on where you sit kind of has positive or negative associations, maybe even neutral associations. And I... Speaker 1 (3:11) you know, as a non-binary person, again, kind of an identity that sits underneath trans, and made internationally, globally, uni-contextually legible by virtue of the identity trans, or by virtue of the sub-identity non-binary. And yet, the specific character of my experience of, you know, life as a transgender person or life as a non-binary person is entirely specific and unique to the personal context of me and is not something that is legible without... kind of sharing that context and space with me and you know, having the opportunity to kind of understand transness and non-binary-ness through my perspective. My character or my flavor of non-binary is going to be very, very different from the next person and the next person after that to the extent that it's not actually Speaker 1 (4:38) useful in a unicontextual world because there's too much nuance to it. And, you know, I have to spend time to understand that. It's not something that can be captured in a soundbite or a single image. It's something that requires contextual understanding, like local contextual understanding. I think the other thing is that Speaker 1 (5:08) character can shift depending on the context in which I place myself. Now, you know, this tends to happen in a, largely in a negative way for trans people and for non-binary people because we tend to mute the part that considered you know unsavory or dangerous or might cause us danger depending on the context in which we find ourselves and you know we can kind of dial character up or down Speaker 1 (5:53) the identity never really goes away. Like, the identity is kind of permanently and globally legible unless we choose to kind of completely and fully deny ourselves and deny our existence. And so I think that's interesting to think of in relation to what we're seeing with cars. I'm trying to think about how this relates to something like the Luce or something like the Nuvolari. It's like what is the internationally recognized symbol for EV? Well, it's basically the Luce or a NEO or a BYD. Like, you know, all of those cars to a greater or lesser extent. Speaker 1 (6:48) the same characteristics. I mean, for God's sake, even sort of the nose configuration of something like a Polestar 3, you know, it's just turned up to 11 on the Luce, but it's there. Okay. It's an EV. We play with aerodynamics in an interesting way. The Nuvolari, like what's the globally understood symbol of, well, it's the Lamborghini. like the the you know some might say miura i would probably say that kuntash and the evolution of the kuntash form is like the globally understood symbol for supercar whereas the r8 was not like the ra was a Speaker 1 (7:41) locally, local context, very specifically kind of engorged that take on what a supercar could look like and therefore remains a bit of an outlier. Wrap something in a proportion or build something on a proportion like a Countach's and immediately, like at the global level, you're like, yeah, okay, cool, supercar, job done. Speaker 1 (8:07) Anyway, just a few brain farts I wanted to share with you in the wake of our chat. Hope you're sleeping well. Bye. Prius. Prius became the identity for hybrid for a period of time. Speaker 3 (8:32) Thanks, Speaker 1 (8:33) Chaka. So, you know, like second generation Prius came along, established a globally recognized identity for hybrid vehicles. What did we get after that? We got the Honda Insight, we got the original Hyundai Ioniq, and for a period of time, anything that was hybrid, you know, basically had the truncated slipper look. It's interesting how that identity has died as, you know, a hybrid is kind of no longer the flavor du jour. But for a period of time, if you wanted to be recognized as... If you wanted to have the identity or if you wanted your product to have the identity of a technologically advanced, ecologically aware product, what did you do? You made it look like a truncated slipper. Yeah, just another thought on the topic there. Speaker 3 (9:46) So this led to a cascade of texts and conversation. And there's many places that we visited and want to kind of revisit on this podcast, part two of this idea of what identity means. But I guess, Drew, my takeaway from what you were saying is that Speaker 3 (10:11) Essentially, identity is identity and it will be more or less the same anywhere. Something's identified as a supercar, it's going to be a supercar, whether it's in Modena or Atlanta or downtown Delhi. But character is quite different. Character is specific to context. Character is specific to the... the person who is relating to it, probably the person who's using it. And I think importantly, the character fundamentally comes from the place that that product was created and an understanding of the specific context or local context that exists there. Speaker 2 (10:54) Yeah. And I think one of the things that we've been tossing around is Chris Bangle's idea of the car as an avatar, right? And It was this very powerful idea that he introduced during his years as design chief at BMW. And it's this idea that when we look at a car. Speaker 2 (11:19) We kind of size it up to see whether it is kind of this external manifestation of the character that we have or the character that we want to have. We want, Speaker 3 (11:32) yeah. Speaker 2 (11:33) Right? The character that we want to sort of project out into the world. Speaker 2 (11:39) And what's so interesting about that is, you know, character is something that is not born of uniformity. Character is almost, it's the antithesis of identity. Character is something that is nuanced and detailed and made just as much of what is kind of, quote unquote, wrong. or say uncomfortable about an object or a person as much as it is about what is quote unquote right or good. Right. And if we think about. Speaker 2 (12:20) what BMW was doing at that time was producing like an orgy of cars that pushed on all sorts of different wrong and right buttons in all sorts of different ways, right? You know, the first Bangal 7 series, it's like, holy shit, is this really what a luxury car Speaker 3 (12:48) is meant to look like? Speaker 2 (12:49) should look like or you know the z4 huh i Speaker 1 (12:53) didn't know a roadster could Speaker 2 (12:55) do that is yeah is that actually even a sports car and so there was a lot of surface area there was a lot of kind of grip points if you like for individuals who are wanting to express a certain kind of character to kind of like hook into the products and see whether these things were a fit for them Speaker 3 (13:17) Exactly. I think it's important. You know, Bangle talks about cars as being great avatars. He talks about being closer to clothing than architecture because you wear a car and then it sort of becomes a projection of who you are and who you want to be. And he's also on record. I've actually shared this with a few designers recently in something I did in work. I was saying. Speaker 3 (13:42) Car design isn't about the art of dressing a chassis and a platform in a bunch of volumes and surfaces and details. It's the art of creating something that has a character that means that people look at it and go, that thing is me. That's who I want to be. That's how I want to project Speaker 1 (14:08) myself. Speaker 3 (14:10) And what's interesting about this in the context of where we are in the world today and where we're coming at this from is that I think. Speaker 3 (14:23) car makers are in this kind of paradoxical bind where Speaker 3 (14:30) They're trying to make products that are, to use your sort of phraseology, you know, universally international. It's an identity that's universally understood. Because we can't afford to get things wrong. We need to sell things everywhere. It's a hyper-competitive market. And yet, I'd make an argument. that the three major car buying regions so broadly china europe and