53: Cool is Everything with Roman Zenin

This episode is sponsored by the Better Future Awards! To find out more, head to https://betterfutureawards.com/together/page.asp?assetid=162568
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In this episode, the (REDACTED) team is joined by the talented automotive designer, Roman Zenin.

Hailing from St Petersburg and now living and working in London, Roman shares his journey from a car-obsessed child to working with highly renowned brands such as Jaguar, Land Rover and Arrival. 

Listen as Roman discusses the differences in aesthetics between classic and modern car designs, the impact of electric vehicles, the transition from working at traditional OEMs to innovative start-ups, plus the creative process behind creating iconic vehicles. 

Hosted by Lucy Bishop and Louis Mills with guest Roman Zenin.
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Roman Zenin - Sr. Exterior Designer at Tata Motors | LinkedIn

Follow Roman on Instagram | @zeninrom

Tata Motors Design Centre

Lada - Wikipedia

Citroën C4 Cactus - Wikipedia

Why Jaguar is taking such a big risk with its rebrand and pink concept car

JAGUAR UNVEILS TYPE 00. UNMISTAKABLE. UNEXPECTED. DRAMATIC. | Jaguar 2024 Media Newsroom

Jaguar | Type 00 | Command Attention 

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To follow the show, get in contact with us via email & more head to:

https://linktr.ee/redactedpod

Transcript

0:03

Please hold whilst we connect you to redacted. This is Lucy Bishop. This is Louis Mills. This is Romanian. And you're listening to Redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted. Today we're joined by Roman Zenin, a talented automotive designer, hailing from St. Petersburg, now working in London. Roman's love for auto design was developed from an early age, and he's worked with some well-known brands like Jaguar, land Rover, and Arrival. In this episode, we're gonna go through some of Roman's unique experiences and get a rare glimpse into the world and process of automotive design at some large companies. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Roman Zenin. First of all, let's talk about you. Could you please introduce yourself? It would be quick. I'm Roman, I'm human, and I'm designer of moving things. Yeah, fantastic. What kind of moving things, specifically? All sort of things. At the moment, I'm designing cars. I used to work on public transport, commercial vehicles, and even flying vehicles. I kind of love them all and trying to find the projects and companies that as many things as possible. Fantastic. It's a pretty interesting sector. How did you come across that? Initially I was just a boy wheel off cars and moving objects. Anything on wheels is just amazing. I think I happened to be a designer and then just gravitated me into vehicles because I just made sure you liked them and had a boy. Yeah. Yeah. But you didn't wanna drive them really fast. You wanted to specifically make them and design them, which I suppose is a bit different. Yeah, that's the thing. I'm not a al head. I'm not into classic cars. Moving objects somehow interested me more in terms of their scale, and they're just everywhere. They're like architecturally form our cities and it just makes you see them wherever you go. The scale of it is amazing. Yeah, I suppose it's so interesting as well, because there's an exterior and an interior, so much engineering that goes on. It's obviously a very big field to get into. It's a very complicated objects, maybe it's most complicated, uh, object that you could design. It's really interesting that you say that you're not interested as much in classic cars.'cause when I think about classic cars, I think it's really wild how often they would change the entire shape of the car. And I might be a little bit biased because my dad has a Thunderbird. In the 10 year span, I think they had three or four different shapes. Which is just so wild to completely retool the design. DNA of the Thunderbird is so different to each other, where when you think about Porsches that've had that DNA for such a long time, that you can really pick out that's a Porsche. I feel like they traded more on changing design as opposed to the kind of roadmap of modern day cars. I think rely a lot on changing technology rather than design aesthetic. I think Porsche is more like an exception really. Mm. The rest of the world is trying to come up with new things because they have to sell you new things every five years or so. You don't have to twist someone's arm too much to get a Porsche. Yeah, and because the technology and cars doesn't really change and didn't really change much for the last how many years before the electric cars, you have to change something to make them different. Yeah, for sure. I just feel like that lifecycle of the shape was so much shorter back then than it is now. It though. I think the lifecycle of advertise is about 10 years. Right. I might be specifically thinking of Thunderbirds then.'cause in that 10 year span, I think there was three or four completely different shapes. Were they completely different or just iterations? Totally different sizes. Oh really? Maybe they were in a really random spot where they're trying to find their market or something. As I said, I'm pretty biased 'cause that's what I know more than other cars. They're just very different to today's roadmap of a car. Hey, it's Will here at Redacted. We believe that everyone has a role to play in making the world a little better, even in the smallest ways. Sometimes shining a light on the good stuff is all it takes to spark change or rally others to a bigger cause. This is why we've teamed up with a Better Future awards, a global network of design awards that celebrate products, studios, and ideas making a real difference, whether it's environmental impact, social equity, or economic outcomes. These awards highlight the work that pushes us forward. The nominations are open now, so if you or someone in your orbit has been creating something meaningful, consider throwing a hat in the ring. To find out more about the Better Future Awards, head to Better Future awards.com/redacted. That's better future awards.com/redacted. You can also find the link at the top of the show notes. Redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted. You've discovered the field of automotive. You got really interested in cars, but how did you discover specifically industrial design? When I was 16, I was buying those gaming magazines. They included the CDs with game demos so you can try things for free. One of those magazines, they included a 3D program demo with a tutorial, how to model and animate the war. So Cool. I did that. It was pretty cool and I downloaded the cracked version of 3d Max five started to play with it and it was so cool. I never played video games again. Yeah, wow. At that point there was, um, a massive growing community of CGI people discovering new things. Sharing tutorials, making tutorials, giving each other feedback, and basically just talking to each other a lot. And that's how internet was a new thing at that point. Most people, and including myself, we were just modeling cars or transport objects that existed. So you just take a picture and model something, render it, and have fun. I just noticed in that community when people were sharing their stuff, some people were sharing their own designs and I was like, oh, this is cool. How do you do this? And basically you could just send a message to everyone and just ask, how did you learn that? I just realized most of them were industrial designers. It was a time to go to the uni and I just found one in St. Peter's work. That's so cool. I wonder how many people got into industrial design just from reading that comic book and picking up that disc and chucking it in the computer. What you reckon? That was early two thousands or something like that. 2006 or something like this. It's good that online communities to nurture that and teach you more as you went along way before uni even.'cause not many people would've been doing 3D modeling and that in high school back then. Community is a big thing. We used to have this website called Car Design ru, which was very, very early on car design, community of car designers who studying that or who, who already went abroad to work on some cool companies. In that time, everybody was posting their sketches and trying to learn from each other. It was a big thing because I think most car designs from our area there, from that website must have had a really big impact in the car design scene. Yeah, it's huge. I don't think of any other country having that online community. Ous of cars sort of thing. Yeah. Even though we didn't have a car industry at that time. Well, we still don't though. That's okay. We don't really have one now either. Yeah, that's true. What was the name of that website? Sorry? Co-design dot ru. It doesn't exist anymore happening. It's that officially tech. Ah, that's a shame. All those communities, all those forums, they dealt with social media. Social media replaced everything. Yep. Yep. And that time of your proper forums, you had to use your home landline to go there, annoyed everybody at the home. You can't have a call, actually, because you're trying to read that tutorial, how to model the car. You've got a call with Destiny. Yeah, yeah. It's all just on Reddit now. I remember being addicted to guitar forums and guitar design forums as well. It's sort of like got me interested in design long gone Pull one out for all the dead websites out there. Now it's even better. Right now we have YouTube. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 4K videos of anything and getting to another level, it's just amazing. And you can ask GPT to teach you things. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, in that time there was those tiny pictures that I downloaded for hours. And what does that thing in that menu, I can't see it in my interface. The click. Yeah. And it was taken on somebody's Nokia. Maybe it just made you more creative. Yeah. Yeah. So it was really annoying because every time you just read the step, you have to push that button, you have to do this. It just doesn't exist in that interface that you have. After that community, I basically went to the uni and saying it just work, which was one of the biggest schools teaching industrial design. It took me probably two years to get there because it was a part of the art school. You have to do this academic drawings and stuff like that on a serious level, and I never did that before and like people normally get prepared before I didn't. So yeah, it took me a couple of years to get there. I was working as a plumber. In meantime. Were the drawings industrial design style drawings or did you have to do different types of artistic classes to get to more industrial design? More like fine arts. Wow. Draw people and things. Very general stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you get there, what was really cool and helpful in that evening is that they basically teach generalists rather than specific designers. The overall education was very general. You just learn main stuff about design thinking, solving problems, colors and materials, and building prototypes. Most of the people in my course, like they went, do some other different things where they get paid better digital product design and stuff like that. Yeah. Yep, yep. The teachers that were there, they were amazing, but they were both trained Soviet Union, so they never worked as designers in a capitalist country. Yeah, that's interesting. That is so interesting. So they haven't had to necessarily build up a business. They don't know what the business is. Market research doesn't exist'cause the government would just have one version of something.' cause you have a factory Another factory building kitchen taps. So another factory is building lamps. This satisfies all the internal needs of the country. So you don't have any competition whatsoever. You don't have budgets. The country had a committee of designers that were confirming what designers were doing in different companies. They never had a competition. They never had to deal with business and stuff. So they don't really know how design and business works in moral times. But what they can actually give you is this general education, which is really, really helpful to be honest. I think we all understood that when, when we started there.'cause we don't have industry, we don't have professionals around us. We don't have understanding of what companies need. So to get that, you need to go somewhere else. You need to move abroad and and learn from there. And was that always the plan? Not always, but yeah, at some point I just realized we need to do it.'cause otherwise you can't get the best idea for how to do things properly. We started four years, I got a bachelor degree and after that I could move on to masters. This is where I decided to switch to car design and basically just to go to a specific place to study that. Did you have to study the LADA in uni? I think we had a project with them, yeah. Oh really? Yep. Yeah. At that point, LADA was a part of Reno group. They're kind of like a bit of a tough, boxy, small, or they still doing things. Yeah, they still do things. When you were first looking for your first job in automotive, what were you expecting it to be like and what was actually different when you started? First job, it was Lendl, right? I moved to England and I think in that time 2018, it was a lot of hype around electric cars and autonomous vehicles. It was that amazing positive time where people were dreaming about, this is around the corner technologies that we got, the autonomous driving, we got it done. Tesla testing stuff, Google is testing stuff. It was such a cool time to be there. EVs were redefining cars as well. Most OEMs, they very risk averse. They're like evolving their products. If you have a grail, you put the next version of that grail next item and stuff like that. Yeah, the EVs getting rid of the grill was so controversial. Yeah. It's just a small thing, but it is a lot of package things that give you more freedom as a designer to actually do things differently. Mm-hmm. But what most important is giving you some right to experiment so the customers don't get scared. This is new technology, so it can look a bit different. The Tesla S still has a grill, doesn't it? For that reason, they didn't wanna alienate people too much with the new technology. Tesla was very conservative in that time. Mm. Tesla was the first company who realized you don't have to build things differently for the sake of it. So when they built the Model S, they built a conservative British sedan with classic proportions, with Grail. They didn't want to make a weird things that all the companies are doing with easy. Before Tesla EVs were really weird. They were like, okay, this is new technology. This is something new. Let's just build something really crazy, make a potato on wheels and put some balloon stripes across the cars so it emphasizes the cleanness or whatever. I remember someone telling me that the Google autonomous vehicle that they were working on at the time looks suspiciously like a koala. That thing was hilarious. It was cool. I think it was like Waymo or something. Yeah, that was the first Waymo. Yeah. So you're totally right. They looked ridiculous. They were mostly small hatches. The first baby steps of it ease was really strange. Nobody could really figure out what to do with that, and I think they were pushing it as a environment friendly thing. So they were trying to sell it to people who care about environment and the cleanness and whatever. But what they didn't realize is not enough people in the world to actually sell it to who really care about environment because people who do care about the environment, they don't buy a new shiny electric vehicle every five years. They instead just take a bus or take a bike. Or if you didn't need a car, you just use your 20 years Toyota forever. Tesla was the first company who tried to sell the emotion, take the electric vehicle and make it sexy. Make it cool. I feel like what they did was they made a car that just happened to be electric, that it was a whole bunch of other things as well. It was so fast. Didn't they start with a lotus that they made electric? Yeah. Yeah. So they kind of had that sexiness from the go. Yeah, I think it was this, uh, general obsession of Elon. He was obsessed with British cars. The first Tesla was Los. Yeah, because he famously crashed his McLaren too, without insurance, didn't he? Yes. The Model S was inspired by Aston Martin and Jaguar. He even hired, uh, Aston Designer in the beginning to start working on it because he wanted a classy, sexy shape, classic proportion, one bon conscious stance, everything that cars a liked for, to make it sleek and cool. He didn't want to make some weird potato on the wheels, which most companies really who were doing and failed at some point. You can see most companies, they try to experiment with EVs looking different. Look at Mercedes, they failed with their EQ lineup. That was different for the sake of different and people just didn't get it. And I think the new generation of Mercedes, they going back to this classic proportions again.'cause people just like it. Yeah, absolutely. Do you feel like you have your own design language when you are designing cars or elements of the car? I think I do. Generally just reduce things or try to reduce things to its essence and use more geometric forms on wheels, but still trying to play core automotive rules. If you get the stance and the proportions right, you can experiment with everything else basically. If you know the rules, you can work on breaking them. Take a cyber truck. Cyber truck is so weird, but they still get the main core things right. It still has great proportions and stands. They made the core. Right. And then the rest is weird and flat, but it still does what it should. It's really low poly. It is, but it's low poly version of, uh, Lamborghini Patch or something. Yeah. Yeah. A really tall Lamborghini. Do you have any details that you like to play with? Once those proportions are right? When I do my personal project, it's easy. You can do whatever you want. When you work in a company, this is where it gets difficult because you got the package, you got the platform, you got a lot of things that are given to you that you can't really change. Yeah, and what does that look like? They will most likely have most of an idea of how it's gonna look based on market trends, and they ask you to carry that out. Depends on the company. If you work on a traditional OEM or something, they have a product planning team who do market research and trends and all that stuff. So they realize what sort of product we need and then they give it to the vehicle architecture team who would decide what platform to use and where the seed and stuff like that, what sort of features they want to implement there. Design team get that brief and some basic proportion of the thing. And depending on the company, you can challenge that or you can. First thing that design team is doing is to build a full size proportional model. When you get that brief from vehicle architecture. So you build something like a generic volume millage on the full size and see what happens, see how it looks, if that looks horrible, or you can definitely challenge that and show the management like, okay, we can do it better if you move things around. That first job that you mentioned, pretty good gig to get straight off the bat in the uk. What was your original brief that you had when starting out? You do a lot of things in parallel. When you start out. You basically are given as many ideas as you can for any given project. It's not like they put you on one project and you sit there forever. That happens at some point, but I think as a young designer, your main task is to generate as many ideas as possible for all ongoing projects. Land Rover had three sub-brands at that point. I was basically just sketching around all of them. That's cool. That sounds like a pretty cool gig. Yeah, so a lot of concept generation on those three. I mean, when you start out, car design jog is very easy. You just sketch around what you want. It's a very competitive field. You have a lot of designers who compete. Yeah, it's incredibly hard to get in high barrier redy. Then it chills for a minute and then it gets hard again. You have to compete to get there, and then when you get there, you have to compete together. The project, you sketch around and then you generate a lot of things and hope that something will be selected at some point, and then you will build a model out of it, and maybe that model will be under the road at some point. But yeah, this is very competitive and what happens if you don't get selected? You don't have responsibility. This is actually making your life so much easier. Some people can sit in those companies for their whole entire career doing absolutely nothing, just generating ideas. If you don't get selected, you don't get any responsibility, so it's very easy. You just sketch around and go home, sketch around and go home. For some people it's a dream. I think it depends on what designers want. I know a lot of people who really enjoy that. They're just having fun, you know, sketching, playing and modeling stuff, and then go home actually. Sounds great. To be honest, you'd probably be more at risk of being made redundant or something like that if you'd never got selected, but it sounds pretty good. Yeah, it's hard to progress your career, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. What does that sketching look like? Is it hand sketches or do people do a lot of mostly digital sketching in there? Now they're more open to different things. Traditionally, you do do all after. Do all you do Photoshop, renderings, take that and do free views of the card from different angles in Photoshop, so it's understandable and realistic. Old school way is to give it to 3D modelers who would build this alias? So they have to read your mind. Basically, if it's not modeled digitally, it would be modeled in clay most of the time. In that stage, it would be core scale models. The modelers would also interpretate your sketch. Try to read it right, read your mind, and basically just model something in and then you would work together with to make it pretty much what you want. But they'll sometimes do that clay modeling before it even goes into cad, working from the sketch to progress it further. Don't make C and C out the clay first to get a rough shape before they start screaming it. Depends on the company. Some companies don't do play at all anymore. It's very expensive. It's a super expensive process. It's expensive to have clay facility in your studio. In general. Clay is expensive. Tape is expensive. Model is crazy expensive. The person to do the clay's expensive. Yeah.'cause it's a very niche profession. They get paid really well and it's not that many people in the world who can do that. I knew a clay modeler from Ford in Australia and that was all he did. What those guys are doing is just magic. It's really cool. I dunno how they do it, these little scrapers. Traditionally the process would be designer sketch and then it gets selected. Every designer would be doing quarter scale model, claim model. This modelers, this would narrow down to maybe two proposals that would go full size and then they would build it in full size and maybe after that it will go for one. Now most studios, they skip the quarter scale modeling. Instead of doing quarter scale model, designers model it themselves. Do you ever use VR to view the cards instead of physical modeling? Depends on the place. Again, some companies just don't have powerful enough computers to do it. I think most companies use vr, but you have one computer to verify models. I personally prefer to have my own VR goggles on my desk if I can. I use Unreal Engine to do that. So basically I just modeled my own thing in Blender or in S, and then I just dropped it to Unreal and I can check it 10 times a day, which is amazing. That's awesome. It's still not as cool as Clay. It's still not physical. It doesn't give you that feel of the real thing. But to me it's more helpful than quarter scale because quarter scale is the wrong scale. You have to really learn how to do things on that scale.'cause you have to exaggerate a lot of things. Do you have to look at the car at different times of the day as well, because where the sun is in the sky affects the shadowing of the car, which looks so important for the overall perception of the object. So like in the morning is gonna look different to the afternoon. Long shadows or short shadows. Yeah. Or just the light coming from the top or from the sight. Not so much the weather, but looking at outside. This is important for sure, but it doesn't matter what the weather is really. Especially in the uk. You have your views when you get your cross out to the design garden, so called to view it outside. This is very important, but they never plan. Okay, this is gonna be sunny or morning or evening. It doesn't matter. It just have to be outside. Can you tell me a bit more about the process of the clay modeling? Because you see sometimes it's purely a C and C clay model, and then you see some of these clay models that are actually fully painted. They've even got glass in the windows. I think we've also seen some of the hubcaps. With hubcaps as well. Yeah, you can do several things with it. Some of them are really high level. When would you use either of those? Most of the times you would put the ect. That's the film you use. The film that imitates the car paint. It's normally silver. Before the review, clay modelers would put that film on the car. So the silver is the body color and the glossy black film would be imitating the windows and some graphics. If you have lamps and stuff like that. It would be black or red. For internal reviews. The wheel caps could be just existing wheels of existing cars that you have. They can be print out. If you design a new wheel, you can just print out a full size round thing and put it on the car. You can 3D print that, but that would be for major decision making reviews, not entering things that you do every week. Then at some point you can paint the model. Let's say if you show the clay models to the board to make a decision, which one you go for. This can go to the paint shop, so they would paint it properly. So it's glossy. It looks like a real thing basically, unless you put the real windows, because it's normally just goes black. Do the designers choose the color range or does that go through marketing? We got CMF department, they work closely with marketing and design director to choose the colors, but on the design process, it's normally just silver, just to make things easier. Could you tell us a bit more about some of the British brands that you've worked with? I started Landrover, which has range over Defender and Discovery three sub-brand. It's cool to get to work on all of them. At some point they are pretty different, but still within one design direction. I think in that point it was still like one design director for everything. We also get to try to differentiate them, propose some ideas, what's the difference between all of them so they don't overlap them? What's the difference between defender and discovery and discovery from range over the more modern cars you have? It's really harder to differentiate them. I feel like the demographic Forland R is so broad as well. You've got Q soccer Model X school pickup, and then you've got the really burly guys that wanna drive them as well. Yeah, they're expensive though. Yeah, absolutely. It's a fancy car. It's a nice. You don't have students driving them? Oh, there some very well off students around where I grew up. We have a thing called Malvin Mums and they always rocked up to school in a Land Rover in Melbourne, there's a suburb called Turak. Oh. Oh yeah. It's a bit of a fancy rich suburb. So we call it a Tour Act tractor here in Melbourne. Oh, that's good. I haven't heard that one. Take a five minute walk in Tour Act. That's all you. That's all you're gonna see. Around where I am. They're just everywhere.'cause of their company coast. Mm-hmm. Mm. Everybody's just using them. Enjoys everywhere. My neighbors have one. I think at some point in your career, like a manager level, you can get one, you still pay for it, but it's It's pretty cheap. Yeah, that'd be awesome. They are everywhere. They massive. They absolutely doesn't fit to this little British villages that we live in built a thousand years ago. That reminds me of Jeremy Clarkson was driving a Hummer around Britain. It's this massive car and these ancient roads does not fit. Same thing obviously. European market is those little tiny hatchbacks everywhere, but here we are. Range Rover, massive defenders are massive. I mean, the Queen looked great in London. I think it'd be weird if she didn't look good in a Land Rover personally. Yeah. What were some of the biggest design constraints or freedoms regarding working on such iconic branded vehicles? If I'm not wrong, you worked on the new Jaguar rebrand as well. What was that like? Going in a completely new direction? I did my little contribution to this, which was amazing. Such a viral release as well. Brands like Landover, they're very evolutionary. They're pretty much like Porsches. They know what they do, right, and they keep doing it. Yeah. And then as a designer it's always easy to get things on brand because you know what the brand is, what it stands for. Well, hard is to make it look fresh at the same time without it being too old or too boring.'cause let's say you got the new range over, then the next range over will be introduced in maybe five years, or, you know, sometimes seven years. Now they're trying to get things quicker because of China. They used to make new cars every seven years, which is crazy. And then you have to imagine at some point that the car that you're driving now have to feed that environment in seven years and have to be a little bit more advanced. Not too traditional, but still on brand. The incremental roadmap of cars. It's really interesting as well how they'll have certain features that they can swap out without completely redesigning the car, like they change their headlines and things like that. And think about how long the CD player stayed in cars. Yeah, I still got one. Don't get rid of it, man. Keep it. Yeah. What did that rebrand look like while you were working there? Jaguar was a different studio. It was within one company. It's called J Lodge Jaguar Land Rover. So they had Land Rover Studio and the Jaguar studio. It was different studios. They were under the same building, but we couldn't go to Jaguar, for example. You could sometimes just sneak out to see what they do, but it was still a separate thing. They were doing nothing. We were doing our thing. At some point, Jaguar was really in trouble. They didn't sell, they were declining. They were about to launch two new electric xj and the big SUV as well. It was already done. It was designed, it was ready to launch literally next month. I think it was a new CEO who just started in the company and he just realized it doesn't make sense. The product is not good enough, the technology is not there, and by the time it gets to the market, that won't sell doesn't really make sense because the previous CEO was chasing the Germans, Jaguar was a competitor to three big German brands. They couldn't compete with Germans at that point, with the quality, with the technology, it wasn't quite there. The new CEO's vision was to go back to what British brands can do better, to do some emotionally cool things, crazy shit that Jaguar used to be. It can be quite expensive, but it has way better emotional connection with customer. It has less compromises and it's very, very much design driven and emotional. To achieve that, you have to compromise a lot of other things. It's not the most practical car in the world. It doesn't have the best range or other things, but it would just look amazing. Because at JLR Design has such a strong voice. It's more or less design driven company design, what sells? They just decided to just go nuts and relaunch the brand, do something completely new and different to bring their connection with what our juggler was doing previous 20 years, which was good, but it was time to move on because they wanted to go up, market less volume, sell less cars, but get massive margins by the more expensive products they needed to launch something special. So it was an internal competition between studios in there. So every studio had to propose their vision for the future of the brand. The timeline was crazy. It was like three or four months, I don't remember, but something really quick. We had to show three cars each, a vision of the family, of the cars, not just one, but how would that family look like and presented to the. The competition was between Glen Studio and Jaguar Studio, and there was another advanced studio here in Coventry that was working on both. Every studio worked secretly from each other, so we didn't see what everybody was doing. At some point there was huge presentation where that design garden outside Sunny day nine cars, everybody's showing their vision and the board came over. They were voting which direction they prefer and which direction they see as the future of the brand. Was it every designer pitching their own design, or was it the teams showing a few things? Studio. Studio. Yeah. Yeah. The studios. Yeah. It has a big vision of the studio. One direction, three cars. Land Rover won the proposal. How a ular feel about that. Yeah, it was a lot of drama in there for sure. Yeah. Wow. They restructured the whole company. Now Jaguar is part of all the other brands, retro, uh, defender, discovery, and Jaguar. They have one design director for everything, and it's part of the family now. And how do you think that was all received? Once that came out, it was a big thing online. Seeing the smooth ink cars with the different logo, that was all minimal. All I remember is the lowercase GI think it is, that people were outraged by and a pink car. The reception was terrible When people saw it first time, they were like, what? I think it really won people over though all the commentary I saw was like, this is really smart. From Jaguar, they're old clientele are dying. They're not buying the cars anymore. They've gotta appeal to a younger, more hip audience. I felt like the commentary I saw, people were really positive about it. Some people hated. Some people love it. Isn't that the sweet spot for cars though, where they want the polarizing views? Because no one's gonna buy a car that's just super mediocre. If someone hates it, someone loves it, and you'll only sell a car to people who love it. That's the case. Why? You need to make volumes if you wanna sell cars to as many people as you can. That's the case. And also that's the case where in the process you don't have leaders who can take a responsibility and make some bold moves during decisions. I would say when nobody wants to take a risk and a responsibility, they would all be very careful and basically make data-driven decisions. And when you make data-driven decision, it's always quite compromised. Every department is pushing their thing. They have to be very, very compromised. One thing about Jaguar, for example, was historically they always had very, very extreme proportions. I feel like that's personally something I really like in a car is extreme proportions. Yes. That was the idea. You need extreme proportion and you can't actually appreciate in the picture when you see it online, it's million, well, boring, blah, blah, blah. Actually, when you see the whole thing out there, it is just insane. It's so low. That's another thing why you need claim modeling in full size models in vr, because on the screen it just doesn't look like that. When I first saw it on the screen, it was just like, nah. Okay. And then, yeah, full size model, like wow. Do you think part of that is contrast where you can see other cars and where they sit in relation to it. To really understand that proportion, you just have to see it. It's a very emotional thing. You have to appreciate it on the real scale.'cause the real scale is important. It's a big object. And see it on the screen, see it on the picture. It doesn't give you an idea how it looks. And when you see it in reality, it can be in the middle of the forest. You don't have to compare it with other things. It's just, it gives you that Wow or not. Proportions are everything. And to achieve those proportions, you really need to change the process where someone on the top management will say, fuck it. We just do it this way. Every company has human factors. Team who would tell you this is where the passenger's head is and this is how much headroom we need for 90 percentile male. And who would comfortably seat in the backseat? It's a very tall person, isn't it? What they have to do is to say, if you can't fit in the back, just buy another car. That's fair. I feel like a good example of this is when Lamborghini decided that backing out of car parks wasn't important and you'd have to just sit on the edge of the car in order to get that extreme proportion. Some cars just can't do everything, you know, make sacrifices. Yeah. That's why they were not successful with chasing Germans, because Germans trying to do very compromised products. Good in every way. They look good, they functional, they're comfortable, they work properly, blah, blah, blah, all that. But juggler, they just like emotions. After all that, do you think it's been a success? The rebrand? We'll see, the sales will show a success. Nobody knows. Nobody knows yet. It's a bit challenging now because the EVs are not selling that well. Everybody's pushing those EV strategy and stuff, and it's a bit risky just to sell just EVs. Everyone wants to dodge ramps. Yeah. This will be quite challenging as well for Jaguar to be full electric brand. So we'll see. But it's hard to say. It's very bold move and it's amazing that there are some companies and leaders who actually can take a risk and do something as well as this. Yeah, I think it's pretty amazing. Back the back, aside from Jaguar and Land Rover, you also worked with Arrival. Could you tell us a bit more about the differences between startup culture and the big OEMs for automotive? Arrival was a madness. Arrival was one of those emerging companies where people were talking about autonomous driving and EVs and changing industries and stuff like that. Everybody was dreaming at that time. This is the time to be a designer. This is the time to work on cars. It's not just styling, it's redefining the whole industry, redefining how you move around. It's not just cars, it's not just styling. You can think about different aspects of the vehicles and work with different teams and redefine packages. It's user experience, a lot of things, and we can work together in smaller teams. It was amazing what a lot of companies were doing. Even were establishing internal startups to do things like this. Even JLI had a small internal startup to do some autonomous boxes. The rival was quite big. When I joined it. It was already a few thousand people or so. It was really crazy big. I think it was a bit too late to join. How far in were they when you started, they built something already or they were still in the process? Well, they never built the final product. Everything was a prototype, and now they're dead. So they probably never will. They were trying to build vehicles like big tech companies would do. It was entirely new process. They were trying to sort of build prototype fast, not chasing perfection, but build something, test it, gather feedback, then build something new. Prototyping was a big. Because they tried to imitate the Silicon Valley culture, it was totally different from any OEM you can work for. As a designer, you are much closer to decision making. You can drop the message to the CEO, you can talk to the anywhere in the room. You can just change things. You can influence things. You can have way more responsibility and influence within the company, not just in your little area, not just styling or how things look, but how they work and what they actually are, what the product is. So everyone's wearing a lot more hats. Were the timelines a bit crazier, or was it quite similar? They were pretty crazy. Any day the CEO would just come to the office inside, we have to build this thing next week. They're changing things so quickly that you just have to accept it and just build something. Sounds so stressful. It is, yeah. Do you prefer the startup culture or you like it with the OEMs? As far as the The culture, I definitely do. Well, startups culture. Yeah. Yeah, a bit more exciting. It's risky, it's exciting. And I have to say, you learn way, way more because as you step up to different roles and you have access to different teams directly without gatekeepers and players of management, you actually learn way, way more way, way faster. Most of the things that designers deal with is your managers and your managers. They deal with other teams, and then you just stay in silo. Sometimes you just don't understand what you're sketching. You don't get that information straight away. You have those layers just above you. In a startup, you're just in the middle. You're just there. You, you talk to everybody, and that makes it way more effective, way more product. As a designer or EM studio, you have designers and you have engineers, but in between you have studio engineers basically bridge between engineers and designers. They try to translate both languages and stay in the middle, so you don't have access to air engineers or anyone who would work on certain things. That's really interesting. I haven't heard about that before. The studio engineer, so it's just a go between. What are they mostly involved with? The studio engineers. They have to take what our designers want and try to make it work with engineers because it's such a complicated product. You have too many things to care about from aerodynamics to packages of batteries and safety and lots of things that designers normally don't really know. Or if we know it, we know some basics, but we don't know specifics and what, what's latest and what's the regulations are and stuff like that. So those guys speak both languages. They speak engineering languages and design languages. They translate it to those two and act like a bridge. Oh, interesting. I suppose you'd have that in quite a lot of large companies, but maybe in smaller companies, designers and engineers just have to try to talk together and make it work. They just battle it out. Battle it out, yeah. Clash. Yeah. And that's cool. When you work directly, you just get to understand more the reasoning why things the way they are and why engineers are fighting for something. And you can present on your vision directly without somebody trying to present what you think is right to them. Way, way fewer layers, that's good. But at that point, arrival was quite big. I would consider arrival is a huge r and d project. I would never think that it would be successful commercially. There would be newer, young making vehicles. I would rather think there would be a huge r and d project. So they would bring a lot of crazy people, give them money and space to actually experiment and do some crazy shit. And that's what was happening even when it's all died. The result of that wasn't the product for a company, it was educating people. So those people, they had their experience, they experiment, they built something, they learned something. And when the company went under, those teams created their own little startups. They moved to other companies, but they still keep working with other people from other parts of arrival and it's crazy. That's so cool. We were talking to Ryan recently. He was talking about the same thing, that there was so many talented people just experimenting and trying crazy stuff, and now they've all had to move on. But it's good that everyone's had that experience and I think that's still gonna be some good outcomes, even though the project itself didn't come to a head in the end. Yeah.'cause people keep saying, oh, it was a scam. They just wasted a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. But I don't think so. You have to do r and d, you have to research, you have to try things, you have to try crazy stuff. All those people who they brought to the uk, they all got the visas. They all got here. They paid taxes and stuff. They all created their own little companies afterwards or got to the companies here. So I think it's all very healthy for the country and for the economy to do that. Some of the ideas that they on, people move on and trying to implement those ideas later in different companies. Yeah, that's true. Rival won't be completely forgotten, that's for sure. It's also about Silicon Valley mentality. If you fail, that's good because 99% of startups, they fail anyway. You can expect it to be successful. For sure. This is the thing in Europe, if you fail, you're like, okay, you're a loser. That's a different mentality. Really. Yeah. I'm exaggerating, but that's the case. Interesting. Not as much as that Silicon Valley, like fail forwards and keep failing until something happens sort of thing. Yeah, because if you don't fail, how do you get there? How do you get new methods and new products? In many industries, there are a lot of people doing research for their whole life. They got funded for finding a new medicine to fight the cancer, and there's never a guarantee that you'll find it. Yeah, there's a lot of researchers who will go their entire career and never make a breakthrough. Exactly. But you can't expect people to make that breakthrough. If you do it, it's a bonus us. But if you don't, it's still good because there is a chance. So to me, arrival was a huge RD project. Yeah, amazing. What was special about Arrival is they wanted to build a new method of production vehicles. The company wasn't about building the products, it was about the way of building products. You mean they wanted to innovate the assembly line? Yes. Wild. I think they wanted to build New Henry Ford, but backwards they wanted to build micro factories so you can build things locally. So it is that vertical integration on a really extreme level where micro factories are designing and building small components that are going to one main area to be put together. Not that. I think it's the opposite actually. The components would be built somewhere else. The components would come to the factory, but the idea is to make those local factories so you can build products tailored to your local needs. If you build buses, buses, at the moment, they basically hand bill. You have your chassis, you have engine, the capping, all that stuff, and then you just build the party on top of it with the internal layout that feeds to your city. Let's say if it's crowded city, you have one layout. If it's uh, a small village, you have another layout. All the cities, they have their own design tailor to them, the same as delivery vehicles and vans. One thing couldn't be popular in the US and one thing couldn't be seated to a small English village. They're very different and they're not built in high volumes because at the moment they build van in huge numbers to make them competitive and to make them cheap. You have to build them in huge numbers. But the fans are very universal. They have to be anything. They can be delivery, they have a passenger. They can be luxury passenger vehicles. They can be cheap delivery vehicles. They can be anything. So they're very, very compromised. And then you have to send them over from huge factories across the globe and you have to invest a lot of money to start that production. And if you want to build something specific to the function like a delivery event, delivery events are not that popular and you don't have to build millions of them crazy. When I think about that, I think about Mercedes sprinters, and they're everywhere. The printers are the crazy products because they have to be everything at the same time. When designing them, it's insanely difficult. We were researching and trying to build something to compete with them with a similar product, and then that's where we realized it's just incredibly difficult to satisfy everything at the same time. Well, they just have so many lengths to begin with. The wheel bases and the extra bits on the cabin and the extra heights. There's so many different variations. You have to think about all of it, and it's always quite compromised. You have the basic platform, the basic technology and the components and stuff like that, but then you can go locally and build vehicles specifically for that area. In low numbers. For example, you open that microfactory, you don't spend billions on it. It's relatively cheap, so you assemble that thing, or you don't even have to build that factory. You can use warehouses or something already existed. So you put that micro factory inside, you build a number of buses that you need, and you can just close that factory. You don't have to use it or you can repurpose it to different vehicles. That's wild. This sounds kind of like those, what do they call them? Secret kitchens. Oh, ghost Kitchens. Ghost Kitchens. That's what I'm looking for. So essentially they have these kitchens where they'll have a bunch of different food brands under one roof that are all only being delivered by Uber Eats, but they're all the same people, making them under different brands. What arrival was trying to do is to be agile, agile factories. They can repurpose and build small numbers of vehicles and build different types of vehicles in the same time, in the same assembly line, which is highly automated with almost more people involved. Arrival. We were working on robots and things that carry parts around. Everything was thought through. That's why it became so big at some point because there's so many projects in the project of the robot. The project of the assembly thing or project of the vehicle itself, it obviously component components were all designed in house as well. The idea to reinvent that production line was the main point of arrivals exist at some point. And the vehicles themselves, the products, they were enablers. They were not the main goal of the company. They were just an example of what it can build on those factories. Because those factories, they have their own limitations and to make the process cheaper and more agile and simpler just to get rid of paint shops and stamping because it's so massive and expensive. They hired some crazy people inventing their old composite materials. So they build their own material factory and researching the material properties and can you recycle it afterwards and how you built in the colors, all those materials, they have limitations. It's easy to design something. You design the van and have different parts like this part is metal, this part is the injection molded plastic, and that part is composite and you just spray it over. Everything is fine and easy. When you don't paint anything, it actually gives you so much limitations of how you design things and how it looks. For example, perceived quality. At some point they realize they can't just in the way that build things in those factories, they can't build it in the way that. The consumer expects. Yeah, like we all got used to reading small gaps and everything's flush and glossy and perfectly finished. Panel alignment, they are called teams and those OEMs taking care of this, it's called perceived quality. And there they realized, okay, we just can't do it. The tolerances can't be controlled enough. Yeah, the tolerances are crazy the way it's assembled as well. It's not perfect the way that the robots put the request together. You can't match the the quality of big factories and then you can't paint them. And then basically it was massively mutations of how you actually design and how it looks. At some point, it even drove the design language we had to come up with the way things look when nothing is flush, for example. Well, that's wild. That's a hard problem. Do you know if there's any other car companies pushing the boundaries as much as arrival or Tesla or BYD? Are there any others that you know of that are out there doing new things? Well, the old dad now. I feel like one that never gets talked about that I think takes risks or at least one model. In particular, the Citron Cactus, that is a wild car. They did the market research. They found out that most people who did their cars are denting them in the doors and they put that big patterned, spiky thing on the doors. Oh, I've seen this car. Yeah, it's so ugly. But I love that they did the market research. They solved the problem, and then they launched it and they paid the money. They put their money where their mouth is and took a chance. Okay. I had no idea that was the purpose of the thing on the doors. Yeah, so that people stop dipping their doors. I actually have a giant dint in my door in that spot, 'cause the wind just took it away one day and smashed it into someone else's handle. So I appreciate this. If I had giant cactus spikes on my car, maybe it would've been okay. There was Blackboard engineering. I'm sure they come up with this explanation of those things later on that they did the research. I don't think they did. You think they just put those spikes on the doors for no reason as a design choice? I think it was just cool. That is wild. I would never think that they could make that decision without having some sort of academic backup. The main thing about co-design that you have to know is it's driven by only one word. Cool. So cool. Is everything cool is how everything works? How everything is getting decided. Cool. Is everything cool? Is everything. That's the clip. It's your currency. Yeah. Cool. Is a currency. That might be the name of the episode. I think so. Going back to that Tesla conversation in the beginning, they, they just made it cool in different way. Not styling, but something else. Acceleration is cool. It's the best. Acceleration is so much better than going fast. Nobody was thinking about it before. Everybody was thinking about the electrica or hybrids as a, something really boring because it's so reasonable and reasonable is always boring. I actually think Tesla has become too reasonable. The why is so slow compared to the others. Is that the newest one? It's smart. Before the cyber truck, maybe they've gone in the right direction. Maybe they're going in the less reasonable direction. Well, the cyber truck for sure, but now they have to do reasonable things just to sell things. But they're still cool enough. If you think about it in the beginning, you show the model S. The Model X is the five seats of family sedan. They can get zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds, which is faster than a fucking Bugatti for 4 million. It's really cool. It's so cool. Yeah. And the higher speed, the acceleration is not as fast. I think if they do the drag race with Bugatti, that would be faster, but it's not way faster. Right. That wasn't possible before they showed that coolness of the electric vehicles. Nobody was thinking about it. It was the cool product. Oh, it's a boring vegan something for people who care about the environment. How about this muscularity? Where's the sex? Where's the cool? I like the X was the ultimate call. It had the billionaire doors. Oh, that was terrible. You weren't a fan of that one. Brutal. They weren't too far. It wasn't really successful either. I think they've gone too far on the interior. I actually don't love their whole iPad dash thing. Oh, you're a button guy. You don't like innovative ux? I don't like that personally. You don't like UX updates? Okay. I like tactile things I can touch. That's right there. That's also depends on the process and how fast you can move with things. We explore that arrival, 'cause arrival. We have huge digital product design teams and HMI teams also, of course, very talented people. They were exploring about buttons and no buttons screen and no screen. And this screen is making things really agile. If you wanna keep up with that process of how big tech companies work, they ship something to customers as fast as possible, and then to make it perfect later. The thing a lot of people forget about the Tesla is it was initially designed to be full self-driving, so you're not actually searching for the buttons that you're pressing because the car's meant to be driving, and you are able to actually focus on hitting those buttons without the tactile cues. That's true. I think it's also the explanation they came after just to sell it originally, no buttons was because it's cheaper. Buttons are expensive. You need to assemble them. You need to put them together. You need to wire every button. That's expensive. If you put everything on my computer on one screen. It's also failure points, more moving parts, more opportunity for failure. Buttons, they do only one function. If you shit something cal finish and you want to finish it with updates, so let's say the ergonomics. If you take something like Volkswagen Gold from 20 years ago, it's a perfection. Everything is in the right place. Everything where you expect it to be is very ergonomically perfect. But it's boring if you keep doing the same thing. People get bored. There's nothing more boring than golf. If you wanna do something else and try things out, to try a new button and to place the button in a different place and figure out the feedback and make a new version of it, which is better, you need 10 years traditionally, because you need to implement all out feedback from customer to the next product. When you have everything on the screen, you can change things constantly. You put that interface, you put all those buttons and text and everything in there. You ship it to the customers. Customers who complain, oh, this is too far. I can't reach it out. It's not really nice. And the phone is too small, I can't see it in the dark. They just change it with an update. And at some point they even experimented with smalltalk gearshift. So now they have a stop. You just put it on D and then you drive forward. But at some point they experimented with what if car just guesses where you're going?'cause car knows that you have a wall in front of you, so you have to go back first Obviously. They just did it at the experiment that does it. People hated it. They just remove it, and then at some point they're like, okay, instead of using the shifter, you got a slider on the screen just next to you. So they put that slider on, tested it. People hated it. They removed it easy. You can just move things around and change it constantly, depending on your ease, especially for a railroad, if you build the cars for different purposes in different countries, in different cities, for absolutely different customers and functions. I was gonna say that left hand drive versus right hand drive as well. If you don't have buttons, you don't have to flip them over that too. That's true. That's true. I'm coming around on the screens a little bit. You guys are talking me into it. It's fair when you're driving. It's really annoying not having buttons. But I think if I was in that position, I can see why they made the decisions that's been said. I'm not saying buttons are bad, I'm just trying to explain the logic why they're trying to do off screen things. It looks futuristic, it looks new, and it's way, way cheaper and easier to build. Thanks Roman for joining us on the show today. It's been awesome hearing about your journey through arrival, and we've enjoyed hearing all about some of those big brands like Land Rover, some big OEMs. Also for our listeners, don't forget to check out the show notes for links to anything we've mentioned, where to follow the show, see Roman's work, plus the link to our sponsor Better Future. Thanks again for listening, and until next time, this has been red. The number you have dialed has not been recognized. Please check and try again. The number you have dialed has been.