Strategic Automotive

This course aims to bridge between styling and strategy and make form giving strategic. The automotive industry is internally and externally undergoing unprecedented transformation.

Designers must become strategic to embrace internal developments such as new propulsion technologies, new human product interaction, new ownership models and vastly increasing competition from new market entrants.

Designers must also become systemic as car companies are transforming into ecosystems to adapt to the emerging holistic mobility paradigm which rebalances the design rationales for all mobility modalities.

To accommodate this new design paradigm the automotive design process, which is traditionally rooted in tacit knowledge, requires a methodical framework. In this course we synthesise design methods and new styling management tools into a comprehensive set including tools and methods such as Form Strategy and Form Hierarchy, Buys, Porter and VR, Systemic Visualisations and the Metaverse.

Note that while this elective's case studies and exercises are rooted in the automotive domain, its learnings are equally applicable in other (mobility) domains.