I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon hanging around the Pagani factory a couple of years ago.  Actually, to call Pagani’s facility an automobile factory is quite misleading, as the term conjures up visions of dirty wrenches, flying sparks, and piles of sheetmetal.  If anything, the Pagani factory resembles an Intel chip fab — clean, quiet, and orderly.  And the cars produced inside are exquisite.

Located a short drive outside of Bologna, Pagani sits but a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Ferrari and Lamborghini — part of the high performance internal combustion industry cluster that’s existed in Emilia-Romagna since the 1920’s.  The factory is very compact and sits, almost invisible, in a quiet suburban neighborhood.  It is divided into three main areas, each sitting side-by-side: a carbon fiber fabrication area with several autoclaves, an assembly area (big enough to fit three cars on jack stands) and an entrance lobby/museum.  The design offices sit above the museum, and the entire facility oozes quality and attention to detail, as do the fabulous cars that roll out the front door.  For example, most Pagani owners choose to have their car painted, but one car being assembled during my tour had been left in its natural carbon fiber finish.  Why?  Because the carbon fiber layup at Pagani is done with care and workmanship worthy of fine jewelry; every adjoining weave pattern met up with its neighbor with the unwavering precision of a Savile Row pinstripe.  Simply gorgeous, technically superb, utterly and completely to the hilt:

How to the hilt?  Well, when you order a Pagani Zonda, you also receive, at no additional cost, a pair of achingly beautiful leather shoes crafted in Bologna out of the same custom leather used to cover the interior of your car.

Amazingly, Horacio Pagani has been able to buck the odds (I reckon the last successful automotive startups were Honda and Ferrari, and those started in the unusual economic circumstances of the aftermath of WWII) to create a real, going automotive concern not unlike the famed atelier of Ettore Bugatti.  Conventional wisdom tells us that it’s impossible to start a new car company.  Perhaps.  But Horacio Pagani built his venture in a smart, calculated way not unlike that of Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites: first, he paid his dues (learned the trade at Lamborghini) to pick up tacit knowledge, then started a composites fabrication business to get some cash flow and create option value.  Only once those steps were successful did he begin making cars with the passion of someone doing what he truly loves. 

Pagani is a great example of designing a venture and building it via an iterative process.

The 2005 Ducati 999R
to my new friends at Ducati North America, all I can say is, "You guys rock!"  Forza Ducati!

10×10

Frequency

Color

Pattern

Gesture

Ranking

Form

History

10×10 is a good example of how innovations in interface design can take us beyond accepted communication norms such as the newspaper headline.  And it demonstrates the potential of RSS feeds very well.

I can think of several examples where a 10×10-type interface would open up new possibilities for insight and understanding:

• An email inbox
• A 360 degree performance review report
• The seat assignment screen on United’s self-serve check in kiosks
• An accounts receivable aging report

Can you think of others?  Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

A second (see prior discussion here) way to explore the future of the sports car is via the concept of simplicity of use. 

Simplicity of use involves creating an offering experience accessible by non-expert users. As the Stanford historian Joe Corn notes, one hundred years ago the car was an ornery beast, and its “users” had to bring their own “IT department” along in the form of a riding mechanic or chauffeur.  In the intervening years, automobile designers have added layers of technology between the driver and the base mechanicals so that the overall use experience became less complex; mechanical and electrical complexity went up, but experiential complexity dropped.  For example, these days it’s possible to maneuver a bling-bling three-ton Cadillac Escalade with no more than your right foot, index finger and thumb – all due to the miracles of integrated circuits, advanced hydraulics, and servo motors.  The trick in designing sports cars is to achieve simplicity of use without adding weight – the source of the wide experiential gulf between a 2005 Porsche 911 and its 40-year-old great-grandfather, the 356C.

Perhaps the best example of simplicity of use in the sports car realm was the first-generation Mazda Miata.  The MG TC may have been fun to drive because of agricultural directness, but keeping it on the road required a high level of mechanical skill, or at least a good relationship with a mechanic named Nigel.  In terms of reliability, the 356 was much better, but only so far as contemporary state of the art would allow: park one in your garage, and your living room will soon reek of Shell’s finest!  The Miata raised the standard of simplicity for the sports car ownership experience by adding a layer of sophisticated Japanese engineering between motor and driver to make everything as reliable and bulletproof, yet lightweight, as possible.  Want a motor that only really gets broken in around the 100,000-mile mark?  Check.  No more oil leaks?  Check.  A top that keeps the rain out?  Check.  All with delicious handling?  Check.  If that isn’t simplicity of use, I don’t know what is.  The magic of the Miata is that the sophistication was engineered in without creating a lardy car. 

Simplicity of use and simplicity of specification must inform the point of view for the sports car of the future. That car is many ways already here: the Lotus Elise, which employs an elegant aluminum chassis, simple plastic body panels, a reliable Toyota four-cylinder motor, and lots of lightness to create the delicious feel of a MG TC or 356, only better.

Simplicity provides a good frame for yet another answer to the question “Will sports cars die?”  As I stated earlier, a better question is “What form will the sports car take?”, and simplicity, expressed two ways, also provides answers.

The first answer comes from the idea of simplicity of specification.  The MG TC, which introduced the sports car idea virus to the United States, was an incredibly simple machine, almost to the point of being crude and agricultural.  Four cylinders, ladder frame, cycle fenders, and little to no weather protection, it was an elemental design.  But its very simplicity created its value: next to the average American lead sled, the MG TC was light and nimble and immersed its pilot in an intensely visceral driving experience: wind, noise, oil everywhere, steering kickback, blatting exhaust. 

Joining the MG TC in the ranks of all-time great sports cars is the Porsche 356, also a machine of simple specification, a far cry from lardy descendants such as the Porsche Cayenne.  A sophisticated design for its epoch, the 356 was derived from one of the simplest of cars, the VW Beetle.  The 356 provided a drive with more protection from the elements than did the MG TC, but still made him a full participant in the process of getting down the road.  Even today, to drive a 356 is to experience a car as almost a living, breathing animal. To illustrate how compelling the 356 driving experience is, I have several friends who own both a modern Porsche 911 and a 40- to 50-year-old 356.  These are cars separated by 1000+ pounds of curb weight, as well as by two extra cylinders and 200 horsepower.  But to a person, they prefer the 356.  Simply put, its Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective signature hits the enthusiast driver’s sweet spot. 

Both the MG TC and 356 were simple machines, even for their time. Where they excelled was in the sense of lightness that comes with a simple (but elegantly executed) mechanical specification, resulting in a direct, stimulating driving experience.  From a pure feel point of view, there’s no substitute for “adding lightness” to a car.  Heavy designs can be made to handle well – and elephants can be taught to dance – but if you want to float like a butterfly, why not start with a butterfly?
Significantly, neither car was about heaps of horsepower.  Both, in fact, were rather slow relative to contemporary family sedans.  There’s a lesson here for designers of future sports cars: as I’ve noted earlier on this blog, the automotive world is in a wild upward spiral of horsepower; it’s a place where a $32,000 Subaru can give a $70,000 Porsche a run for its money.  Within a few years, any marque, be it Ford or Ferrari, will be able to deliver a reliable, 600 horsepower street car, and at that point, the only way to create a truly differentiated driving experience will be via feel.  And the best way to create good feel is by designing around a simple, even spartan, point of view. 

As such, the Porsche 356 is the template for future sports cars. 

I’ll discuss the second expression of simplicity later this week.

The Ducati PaulSmart 1000

CNN is running a nice piece on Alec Issigonis, father of the (original) Mini.  What’s notable about this brief bio is its author, James Dyson, father of the eponymous vacuum that never loses suction.

Issigonis was a genius on many levels.  As Dyson notes, the father of the Mini was nothing if not elegant in both his design solutions and his structured approach to problem solving:

Sir Alec Issigonis… came up with his
ingenious idea while sipping on a gin in a hotel in Cannes — a very
civilized approach to engineering.

If this article is indeed written by Dyson and not some pathetic PR flak, it poses an interesting question: why not have real, working designers write the history of design?  Why leave it up to non-pracitioners who don’t know really understand the design process?  I’d like to see more designers follow Dyson’s lead.  Gin or no gin.