EP28 - The Identity Issue Pt. 2

A few weeks ago, we introduced the uni-context—a theory that might explain why every new car is starting to look the same.

This week, we go one layer deeper: identity versus character.

Identity is what lets you recognise a supercar as a supercar, whether it was built in Modena or Atlanta. Character is something else entirely—it's specific to place, specific to person, and made just as much from what's "wrong" with a thing as what's "right".

We talk about Chris Bangle's idea of cars as avatars, why Hyundai and Renault seem to have held onto character while so many premium brands have lost it, and how a data-obsessed, insight-hungry corporate culture might be quietly killing off taste and discernment.

And we ask the harder question underneath it all: what does it actually take—for a brand, or for a person—to trust yourself enough to be different?

That's it for this episode! Thanks for listening.

If you like what you hear, please leave a review for us on your favourite podcasting platform. It helps other folk like you find us!

And you can sign up for Looking Out - The Newsletter, the sidekick to our podcast, here: automobility.substack.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Hello and welcome to Looking Out the Podcast in which we connect the dots between mobility design and culture. My name is Joe Smith. I'm a leadership coach and pilgrimage guide with more than a passing interest in the automotive industry and more specifically design strategy within it.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

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 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 gonna be on fire tonight. Anyway.

SPEAKER_03 0:51

So the reason we're recording this show is because we dropped um an episode a couple of weeks ago, um, drastically increasing our batting average of episode drops um over the past 18 months. Um in which we started talking about the idea of the unicontext, um, which is a philosophical concept developed by Agnes Callard, and how it might provide an explanation as to why 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, um I hopped into the Lexus and a few thoughts started bubbling up, and I sent a couple of voice notes to Joe. Um we then had a bunch of back and forth on text. Um we wanted to share these voice notes with you and then see where our conversation goes from that point. Um because based on what we've been hearing from people on Blue Sky, this is an interesting topic. And uh yeah, we'd love to share a little bit more with you. So I'm gonna play the voice notes first, and then we're gonna dive into some conversation. Here we go.

SPEAKER_04 2:15

I have just been reflecting on something that um we were talking about in the podcast this morning, and yeah, like I feel like I'd 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's sort of this globally understood term, um, you know, that depending on where you sit, kind of has positive or negative associations, uh, maybe even neutral associations. And I, you know, as a non-binary person, again, kind of an identity that sits underneath trans and made internationally, globally, um, unique, 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-binariness through my perspective. My my character or my flavor of non-binary is going to be very, very different from the next person's and the next person's after that, um, to the extent that it's not actually useful in a unicontextual world because there's too much nuance to it. Um and you know, people have to spend time to understand that. It's not something that can be captured in a sound bite or a single image, it's something that requires um contextual understanding, like local contextual understanding. I think the other thing is that 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 for trans people and for non-binary people because we tend to mute the the parts of our character that are considered, you know, unsavoury or dangerous or might cause us danger, depending on the context in which we find ourselves. Um and you know, we can kind of dial character up or down, but the identity never really goes away. Like the the identity is kind of permanently and globally legible unless we choose to kind of completely and fully deny ourselves and deny our existence. Um and so I think that's interesting to think of in relation to what we're seeing with cars, and I'm I'm trying to think about how this relates to something like the luce um or something like the Nuvolari. It's like, what is the internationally recognized symbol for EV? Well, it's it's basically the luce or a Neo or a BYD. Like, you know, all of those cars to a greater or lesser extent share 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, right? It's it's okay, it's an EV. We play with aerodynamics in an interesting way. Um the Nubelari, like what's the globally understood symbol of supercar? Well, it's it's the Lamborghini. It like the the you know, some might say Mura, I would probably say that Kuntach and the evolution of the Kuntaz form is like the globally understood symbol for supercar. Where the R8 was not, like the RA was a locally local context, very specifically kind of engulf stat take on what a supercar could look like, and therefore remains a bit of an outlier. But wrap something in a proportion or a or build something on a proportion like uh a Quintash's, and immediately, like at the global level, you're like, yeah, okay, cool, supercar, job done. Um anyway, uh just a few brain parts I wanted to share with you in the wake of our chat. Uh hope you're playing well, right? Another thought. Um, Prius. Prius became the identity for hybrid for a period of time. Thanks, Chucker. Um 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 uh the Honda Insight, um, uh we got the original Hyundai Ionic, and for a period of time, anything that was hybrid, you know, basically had the truncated slipper look. Um it's interesting how that identity has died as um you know a hybrid is kind of no longer the the flavor de jour, but for a period of time, if you wanted to be recognized as, you know, if you wanted to have the identity or if you wanted your product to have the identity of you know a technologically advanced, ecologically aware product, what did you do? You made it look like a truncated slipper. Um yeah, just another another thought on the topic there.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

So this led to a cascade of uh texts and conversation, and there's many places that we visited and want to kind of revisit on this podcast a uh part two of this idea of what you know what identity means. Um but the I guess Drew, the my takeaway from what you were saying is that essentially identity is identity and it will be more or less the same anywhere. You know, if something's identified as a supercar, it's going to be a supercar, whether it's in you know Moderna or Atlanta or you know downtown Delhi. Um but character is quite different. Character is specific to context, character is specific to the um 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_03 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 uh design chief at BMW. And it's this idea that when we look at a car we we kind of size it up to see whether it is kind of this external manifestation of of the character that we have, or the character that we want to have.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

We want. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

Right? The character that we want to sort of project out into the world. And what's so interesting about that is you know, character is something that is not born of uniformity. Character is is is almost it 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 right. Right and if we think about what BMW was doing at that time was producing like an orgy of uh cars that uh pushed on all sorts of different wrong and right buttons in all sorts of different ways, right? You know, the the the the first Bangle 7 series, it's like holy shit, is this really what a luxury car should be should look like? Or, you know, the Z4. Huh. I didn't know a robot could do that. Is that 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 were 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_01 13:17

Exactly. I think it's uh important. You know, Bangle talks about cars as being great avatars, he talks a bit 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 he's also on record, uh I've actually shared this with a few designers recently in something I did in work, of saying 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 uh uh 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 myself. And what's interesting about this in the context of where we are in the world today and where you know we're coming at this from is that I think car makers are in this kind of paradoxical bind where 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. Um because we can't afford to get things wrong, we need to sell things everywhere, it's a hyper competitive market. Um and yet I'd make an argument that the three major car buying regions, so broadly China, Europe and North America, they're further apart than they have been at any point in perhaps the past twenty-five years in terms of what the respective consumers are looking for and the attitudes. So we have in terms of a you know what people are seeking in terms of the character and the identity of vehicle and the identity of themselves that they want to project. Um it's de-globalized. So we're we're kind of in this bind, this paradoxical bind, where the international bland premium techie identity is creating this thing that fewer people perhaps can sort of see themselves in.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Yep. Yeah, and I mean I don't know, I I would probably argue that the the entire current generation of Mercedes-Benz product uh sort of would would would fit into that sort of bland international unicontextual kind of kind of mould. Uh it's really interesting, I think, also to look at the counterpoint because it's not as if uh every brand is is suffering from this. No. Um, I'd say the the the brand that has most successfully uh sort of followed BMW's strategy from the Bengal years is probably Hyundai.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

You know, and they have particularly Ionic products.

SPEAKER_03 16:52

Yeah, like the Ionic products. But there's also I mean there's also just some of the regular Hyundai line that is you know, you're starting to think, oh my god, that's that's pushing really hard at the edges for a mid-sized family sedan. Yeah. And you know, certainly anecdotally here in Australia, there hasn't been a negative reaction to that. You know, I see a lot of a lot of the the new Hyundai product running around. So it's not it's not that character is dead, it's just that uh brands I think have to be extremely intentional about uh developing it, maintaining it, building it over time in a way that seems antithetical to a lot of uh how corporate culture operates these days.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Right. And I was gonna say, we were talking before about how I think this is a the Hyundai approach is a virtue of sort of confidence and leadership, and having got to a point where the design team have managed to really get the buy-in of their leadership, but not just get the buy-in, where I think everyone has a sort of sense of where they're trying to go and a shared vision which is pushing in the same direction, and they really want to kind of lead in this area, and they're willing to push boundaries, and yes, some of them are more successful than others. I think the Ionic 5 and the Insta have been doing very well, the Ionic 6 perhaps less so. Um, but Simon Loseby, who's kind of head of Hyundai design in in South Korea, I think he's on record. He was in an interview, maybe, that I've read saying, you know, we've now got to the point with our chairman and our CEO and our C-suite, where when they come for design reviews and we're at the kind of uh go with one direction, they're now picking the most radical, the most bold, the most progressive model that we put in front of them. And that's that sort of I think really comes from um a sense of somehow having got your design you know got got the trust of your leadership and having them trust the design team, but also having the leadership team have vision and be prepared to kind of take some risks.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

I'm I'm super curious uh from your perspective as a as a design strategist how how a brand like Hyundai gets there, or conversely, what is it that leads to a brand essentially losing its sense of character and succumbing to you know if if what you're saying is true, right, and I think broadly it is, that we're seeing a sort of a deglobalization of the automotive industry and we're seeing sort of distinct uh tastes uh re-emerging or sort of being reified in in the three global car making regions. What is it that has caused this trap of like let's just go for the identity uh i uh uh for the sake of character or or or in in the forsaking of character?

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I can't really talk about how Hyundai have uh booked the trend. Um but I think I can talk in general terms, and I'm not really talking about my lived experience per se, but just in terms of what I know, where the industry's going, the things I've read, the people I talk to. I think that the role of data plays a huge um factor here. So we've moved to a point in time now where companies are absolutely swimming in data. They have more data than they know what to do with, and everyone or many companies, and it's not just the automotive companies, don't talk about being data-led. The issue with this is, as I see it, is that data as it exists at this point in time is only looking backwards. And what we're doing in the automotive industry is trying to project the future and trying to create something that somebody is going to want. And is going to feel right for them and be appealing four years from now. So if you're data level.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

The future is completely unknowable, right? And in order to try and shape the future, we're going to look at historic data.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Patterns. When the industry's probably changed more in the last 15 years than it did in the previous hundred. And I think this has been I think this has been part of the problem. I think people have got people have got spooked. And I think what tends to happen in large corporate organizations is when they get spooked, they kind of like retrench and they don't want to take risks and they pour over data and they look at the numbers. And it's understandable. The stakes are massive. The competition has never been more fierce. But what I find problematic is that I think there's been a loss of confidence in design leadership. And now I'm talking beyond the automotive industry. The loss of the chief design officer or the chief creative officer, as we've seen it in the Silicon Valley companies, and the sort of loss of confidence in design thinking, where what designers had to offer, what design teams had to offer was a creative vision. What designers had to offer was new ideas. What designers had to offer was a lived experience of observation, understanding customers, and anecdotes, which didn't form big, big data patterns and sort of financial certainty. And what these companies have started to do, I think, is lean very heavily on those things in kind of difficult times. I think the the danger is it's very easy then to take out the ideas, the features, the differences which create character. Either because they're risky and you're worried that they might put some people off and you're trying to swim in as big a pool as possible, or simply because they have a material cost to them. And what's happened in the past few years is many, particularly legacy automakers, have struggled with their bill of material cost because there's so much money being spent on the battery and the tech and the new platforms. And I think this is why we've seen, you know, say the premium German brands in their first and second generation EVs, why they seemed so bland, so lacking in quality, so devoid of character. Because they probably had those ideas there. They've been removed probably largely, you know, for reasons of cost.

SPEAKER_03 24:49

You're gonna have to remind me of it, but I I think it's particularly relevant to this conversation, and it's how Patrick LeCamel has talked about the use of research, right? And insight in the design process.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Um about how he talks about um insight uh um and and the the sort of parallel of the drunk and the lamppost. And he says, you know, insight's like a drunk and a lamppost. The drunk uses it for support. Um, whereas the lamppost can also be used for illumination of where we want to go. Yeah, so the insight is the lamppost.

SPEAKER_03 25:39

You can either use it for support or you can use it for illumination. For illumination. Yeah, and I think, you know, I I got my start in the design strategy space in this wonderful little organization called Sense Worldwide in London. And we used to talk about research for for inspiration, not research for validation. And I certainly noticed, I mean, I was I was part of the problem for a number of years, you know, I was selling this idea of data-driven design. And what what this idea of being data-driven sort of feeds into the false narrative that the future is knowable, that the future is controllable, and if we simply have the right data and the right volume of it, we'll we will be able to control for all possible outcomes. And it's no wonder that designers and design leadership within this context have perhaps lost their sense of confidence. Because what that drive towards data does is it deprecates this idea of discernment, this idea of taste. Um discernment and taste aren't developed through pouring through reams of historical data. Discernment and taste come from being out in the world, being in connection with the world, being in connection with, you know, community, you know, probably your customers in this in this sense. Um, but also kind of being in connection with yourself, like being able to tap into this internal source of wisdom that says, you know what, I reckon this is this is the way we should go. I don't I can't I can't give you a perfect perfectly rationalized reason for it, but I have a felt sense that this is where we're going. And good design has always been about that. It doesn't make for an easy presentation per se, because you can't do the tuk-tik-tick-tick-k and and right.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

So I I think Erica Hall's really good on this. And you know, she talks about how you know you shouldn't, as a designer or researcher, don't let people, particularly in a corporate world, say, here's my chart, my spreadsheet with all my numbers and all my kind of insight, quote unquote, on it, because it's not insight, it's simply data. Yeah. Don't let that be held up as this is more concrete, this is more scientific, this is better than the design team with combined God knows how many years of lived experience, projects, understanding customers, seeing products like launch into the world, how they do it, etc., etc. And then them saying, here's our idea, here's where we want to go, here's how it's different to the competition, and why we think people are then going to really be drawn to it. Because what we're trying to do at the end of the day is we're trying to create appeal. And I think part of what character is is that it's very difficult to write down on a spreadsheet, it's very difficult to write down in numbers. One of the arguments I've had in everywhere I've worked is people from marketing or product or the consumer insights team, consumer insights teams I shouldn't sag off, they're usually very good. Um, coming and going, yeah, well, the number one reason this car is bought is because of design. It's like, great. I make some coffee while we discuss what that means. Oh, we've got 7,000 respondents and 42% of them said they bought it because of design. What the fuck does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 29:43

Right. Right, right. Design of what? You know the colour?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

You know, I I so it's it's this is I think one of the issues we're starting to experience with data and AI, and I think one of the roles we need to play as kind of design strategists is about how do we create, how do we capture sort of foresight rather than insight? And then how do we how do we analyze and how do we put together great stories, great narratives, which actually bring together different departments, bring together companies behind a vision that everyone then sort of focuses on. And in my experience, when you have that, leaders and then particularly design and engineering people can tend to really get behind that and you tend to then have a product which has these qualities of character and ultimate desirability.

SPEAKER_03 30:50

I I I yeah, I mean the thing that I keep coming back to, and it's the thing that I work a lot with, with my clients, right? Is that that ability to create a vision, that ability to sell it, that ability to connect with people in a way that helps them feel viscerally what it is that you're pointing to and and the the way you might imagine the future to be. It comes from a d deep-seated self-belief. Yeah. Right? It comes from a place internal to the design leader or the design leaders where it's like there's just this thing bubbling up from inside of me, and holy shit, like I we just need to get this out into the world, and here's how we're gonna do it. And I really want your help in kind of making this happen. It's not like let's look at a spreadsheet of attributes, right, with a percentage weighting against each one. Like that doesn't bring people's hearts alive. That doesn't bring people's guts on board, which is where this store of lived experience is and so desperately wants to be expressed in the world. The only thing that is I was just gonna say the only thing that the data-driven approach does is kind of taps into our intellect, which is fundamentally a very superficial lens through which to see the world.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

Um The problem is we have more data, and in the car industry context, we have more data than ever before, but we also know what everyone else is doing more than ever before, and we can benchmark and clinic and sort of insight the next couple of years to shit. And there is I think, and it relates back to the identity kind of point rather neatly, perhaps a sense among many people who work in the industry that there's a sort of best standard for each vehicle segment, and that then you should conform to that because there'll be a proven recipe for how you do something for what consumers in that segment want and expect and what your competition is doing. And trying to break out of that, trying to persuade people to do something different that's even sort of slightly apart from that, in this market where the stakes are so high, where investment levels are so high, and it's like you know, many programs feel like a bet the flipping farm thing, it's very hard then to persuade people to do things differently. Um, and you end up in a scenario you know that I observed at the Beijing Auto Show where you have these wonderfully resolved 5.2 metre SUVs from all the Chinese brands. And they're literally all with a nine in their badge, all with a nine in their names, and they're literally identical down to the fact that all of the top-level models are the you know, dual-tone bicolour, purple lower, silver upper, and they've all got this sort of Mercedes monoblock aping wheel design. And you literally, I did a trend report, you can line them up, ten of them next to each other, and they're literally identical. And let's not get into you know that, but the point of like that's an arrival, there's a there's a there's a template here, you follow that, and you'd be mad to step apart from it. Now, the alternative strategic sort of point of view is well, if you don't step apart from it, what is keeping your customer with your product and your brand? Because unless you're providing like Lexus-like levels of service, and fairness, some of the Chinese brands are doing that, what's the reason to pick one brand over another? It then just becomes a kind of cost race to the bottom.

SPEAKER_03 35:35

So I there's something really interesting that's bubbling up for me here, which is around like self-trust. And are designers and consumers operating in an environment of high self-trust, high self-trust on the design side to be able to say, actually, we're gonna make a punt in a different direction. Right? And consumers operating in a sufficiently high self-trust capacity that they're like, actually, I'm I'm I I actually want to buy something different because it says something different about me. And I mean, it's interesting to think about the concept of self-trust within the cultural context of a place like China versus historically, this may be changing like the cultural context of a place like Europe, which is perhaps not as individualistic as the United States, but certainly more individual individualistic as China. Like the safe thing to do, both as designer and consumer in China, is to do the thing that the other person is doing. Yeah. Historically, culturally, there was far more latitude in in I'm you know painting with broad strokes here, but within the European context, to be like, actually, we're Italian, we're gonna do the Italian thing. And the French person goes, actually, I'm not feeling super French when I go to buy my car, I'm gonna buy the Italian thing. Like, you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

No, I I think it's a really, really important point. And I think my you know, my perspective is I reckon this is why we've seen this proliferation of retro-inspired models and historic nameplace. Because if you're gonna step apart, well, then the little bit the hand holding can come from hey, we did this in the past, people remember this, this was distinct. Um nostalgia's really powerful. Let's resurrect that, and there you go. Holy shit. You've got something that's distinctive and stands apart a bit, but you know, you've got the sort of safety of, oh, we we can see that that worked for us in the past. Um I think this is gonna be a long road, but one of the things I wrote down in my notes, it just says pivot point. And it's it's kind of your it's what you've just said. I wonder whether we're at a pivot point or a point of inflection where with everything we said on the previous episode, people are starting to get to the point where it's like, this is very samey. This is not actually necessarily enriching, fulfilling me. This is not actually how I want to project myself. This is just a sort of banal numbers change it every three years game. And some brands may say, hmm, we can make a business case for stepping outside of that and doing something different. And this does come back to even things such as how much tech do you want to have in the car? Is there a point to be made of like we are distinctly lower tech? Now that's really, really complicated and difficult to do in the context of something else we talked about on text, which is just how regulated things are, particularly in Europe.

SPEAKER_03 39:10

Um look, if I I mean if I if if if a car company was one of my coaching clients, right, and I was talking to them if if if if if they were on a journey of building self-trust, if they were on a journey of building discernment the way they would be doing that with me is basically running experiments, you know, every fortnight, just running a a different little experiment that allows them to gather data to build trust in their capacity to understand the world on their own terms and make decisions from a from from an empowered place. And like I don't know how that scales in the automotive context, but it does feel like that willingness to experiment, that willingness to kind of go out and and place lots of small bets. And I I understand this is like really difficult to do when you're talking about like two, three, four-year product development cycles and billions of euros invested. But maybe it's not happening at the level of production cars, maybe it's not even happening at the level of of of concept cars, but there is this internal process of learning to trust again in the capacity of the individual, the capacity of the design organization, the capacity of the design organization plus leadership to have taste, to have confidence that actually going in a different direction is the right thing for us to do.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

I think it does happen with some brands. Um I think they're not very good necessarily at talking about it. Um I think to me a lot of it comes back to finance where you know you've got BMW making 8,000 people redundant this week, they've announced. And yet that's the brand that has actually has been doing quite a good job. It is in the ascendancy compared to Mercedes in terms of sales. Um it's got its new generation EV products broadly. If we look at the sales on the IX3 and the sort of early hints of reviews on the i3, you know, it's got them right and it's gonna sell well and they're gonna make money on those cars, and yet the China situation is so stark and their profits are reducing because of that, that they've decided to get rid of a chunk of people. So I think in that context, brands uh really struggle with how they communicate. You know, so BMW just pulled out of the Paris show, for instance, I think because of this. So like we can't be seen to splash a load of money on an expensive, you know, piece of marketing and PR when we've just made loads of people redundant. Um it's why I always admire brands like Renault, who I think have consistently over time run well, maybe not the smaller programmes and things that you're talking about, but experimental, quite out there vehicles. Um, you know, they've got a new the Renault 53E turbo thing, you know, that's a sort of spiritual successor to the you know Cleo V6, and you know, it's sort of this mad and going to be low volume, highly expensive thing, but it it acts as an interesting innovative and yet sort of referencing the past Halo car that I think has a lot of power for the brand. But I think you're talking about something you're talking about something different, right?

SPEAKER_03 43:40

I am talking about something different because I'm talking about how okay. Not to bring it back to me, but to bring it back to me. How I I I came out as gay uh as a seven. year old or as an 18 year old, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:04

What is it? What makes it so that at 44 um I finally realize oh there's actually a whole lot more to this than you know just kind of having a preference for men. Right? It it it it it it has been a series of experiments that I have been running Christ. If I think about when this actually started maybe for seven years at this point. Every time something has kind of bumped up inside of me and gone, oh I don't I don't think you're as kind of you know mask as you think you are there'd be some little experiment that I would run and every time I ran those experiments this the this the feeling of space that I would have to play in would get bigger. So probably the most explicit example was um after Mardi Gras last year, like the big Pride Festival in Sydney I came out as trans to like two, three people who are very very close to me. Yeah as an experiment what happened oh oh I have more space to play in that feels really good and then you know there was basically like 12 months of integrating that experience and like playing within that slightly more expanded space and then it was you know maybe six weeks ago I was like oh what happens if I use the term non-binary? What happens if I share that with a few more people? Oh there's more space again so what I'm talking about with the experiments is what are the small things that you can do kind of relatively low stakes things that you can do that allow you to feel the joy of expansion to feel the joy of pushing into a new direction My experience of working in car companies is that they were by and large fucking joyless places a lot of the time precisely because of the the the things that you're talking about like the financial constraints the the the the the the stakes that feel so high the joy of playing the joy of collectively sensing into a new direction I think that's kind of what I'm getting at here.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Right. I mean oh God there's so many things here I mean I don't want I really don't want to rain on your I really don't want to rain on your parade. I think there's a I have a little bit of difficulty with the comparison between an individual experience and the way a large corporate works.

SPEAKER_03 47:12

It's a bit like when people compare you know household finances with kind of governments is it really though like aren't we talking about cultivating an environment where by the individuals that make up that organization being able to be more themselves, express more of themselves because ultimately that's what we do as designers by being able to do that individually then collectively as an organization we get to do that more effectively.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

Yes but as an individual you know we can make choices and all our choices have sort of repercussions and implications whereas I think in a company there's a sort of there's the outside forces in which are broadly things like finances and regulation and then there's the sort of in and out which is that most people who work there I think do want to have a good time but most people more than anything want to have a job and maybe this comes back to culture where I think is there a sense that if I try something too radical or if I push the boundaries or if my CEO is going, look, we've got these financial constraints so just freaking knuckled down, go faster and get these products on the market you're seen to be excuse my language but pissing about on the edges with these experiments you're probably going to end up in a position where or you might in the wrong culture end up worrying about whether you're still going to have a job. So that's the solution I think there's something hugely powerful in what you say about trying to remember what we're doing it for trying to remember and bring the joy and I don't just mean that as the individuals who work in the organisation I also mean that as the organisation at large I think that having a sense of what's our purpose our purpose can't just be we need to churn out more cars to make more money to give money back to the shareholders I'm on really dodgy ground here because I think that's part of the issue so many car companies are listed and that is their fundamental frickin' purpose. But as a I think what we're trying to say is as organizations that provide a fundamentally massively important human means connecting people getting from one place to the other opening up the world giving a sense of being able to move freely well that's where the joy comes that's the actual really important bit yes we need to make money yes we need to return money for the shareholders but we also are trying to do something where we are making machines and making vehicles that people identify with and will move them from place to place in a you know more enriching, joyful, safer, you know environmentally sustainable all that good shit you know way. And I think sometimes we have just become really lost on that and I totally understand why in the context of where we are in the world but but look at the way that products such as for instance the Twingo seem to be being received and it's it's it's a double factor. It's it's actually affordable and attainable many people particularly in Europe and the sort of established car buying companies sorry car buying countries can sort of see a means to attain one of those. It's a 2000 euro product right also it has character and a sense of identity dare I say it which is you know distinctly French which is distinctly charming which I hope is distinctly something that maybe brings a bit of joy and colour back into the world and that is something that many people can identify as wanting to project out there about who they are and what they want to bring to the world. So it's a kind of combination of of those two things and I think we've seen people this week including you know the head of Renault actually talk about how I thought quite intelligently how the EU needed to look at its regulatory process particularly in terms of EVs not because we don't want to kind of be environmentally sustainable and move to EVs, but because the unintended consequence of trying to do that really quickly has been that we've left a bunch of consumers behind because in order for these companies to still make money they've not been able to do it in a way where they produce vehicles that people or a high percentage of people can actually attain Yeah or if I can clean my soapbox moment.

SPEAKER_03 53:01

Or even want right feel drawn to and I think to to to to wrap it all up if if part of what the job of the automotive industry is is crudely to manufacture desire right um a world in which everything looks the same a world in which kind of products essentially flatten people's sense of character because you know they're they're they're identity driven products versus kind of the character driven products that people can can better see themselves in um yeah it feels like that that is the path out yeah yeah there we go we got to an answer now go make Joe now make it go ha go go make it happen Joe I'm having tremendous fun making it happen in my little corner of the world that went to some unexpected places especially given it was the uh the the the second take the second take um I hope you all enjoyed it everybody listening um thank you for uh for giving us the oh the curry along the encouragement to get exactly the microphone and and not to be obsequious and and to just you know seek I I'm I'm deliberately I'm not seeking praise if you're in the industry if you're not in the industry if you're just observing if you're just interested if you're just into cars and this kind of whole space culture I'm really curious to know what people think.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

I'd love to hear more. Maybe you think we're talking complete shit fine but I'm just really curious to kind of engage with people because honestly I mean as I think you can tell not all the thoughts are fully formed but it is I think a very rich and very interesting space and I think it's one that the industry has a bit of difficulty with now and right now but as Drew's sort of just concluded it has to kind of grapple with I think I think it's one of the one of the roads out and I do see some green shoots from certain companies that they're starting to get that and as we've talked about with perhaps brands like Hyundai and Renault I think they're already on that path so let us know what you think this has been looking at the podcast um extemporane by me Drew Smith and me Joe Simpson thank you so much for listening.

SPEAKER_03 56:39

Well uh we'll see you next time