The attached narrated power point presentation attempts a case study exploration of how automobile industry has benefited through the implementation of design thinking and innovation. The material will be useful for KTU second year B Tech students who prepare for the subject EST 200, Design and Engineering.

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Design Thinking and
Innovation in
Automobile Industry
MEC

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Contents
• Design Thinking.
• Elements of Design Thinking.
• Automotive Designing.
• Styling.
• Form.
• Design Thinking and Innovation.

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“Design Thinking is a discipline that
uses the designer’s sensibility and
methods to match people’s needs with
what is technologically feasible and
what a viable business strategy can
convert into customer value and
market opportunity.”
- Brown

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Design Thinking
• A methodology that imbues the full
spectrum of innovation activities with a
human-centered design ethos.
• A discipline that uses the designer’s
sensibility and methods to match people’s
needs with what is technologically feasible
and what a viable business strategy can
convert into customer value and market
opportunity.

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Design Thinking
• Combines the three spaces of innovation -
technical feasibility, human desirability and
economic viability to a holistic team-based
approach.
• Adapting design principals and cognitive
styles to business management.
• Design Thinking in organizations varies
along specific elements - the mindset,
team diversity, process, tools and
environment.

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Mindset
• Described by personality traits (e.g.
empathy, integrative thinking and
collaboration) inhibited by design thinkers.
• Also called by designers as “the way of
thinking”, “thinking as a designer” or
“design attitude”.
• Design Thinkers to balance intuitive and
analytical thinking with abductive logic
than being traditional.
• To focus on the customer needs.

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Empathy Map
• A collaborative visualization used to
articulate what we know about a
particular type of user.
• Externalizes knowledge about users to
create a shared understanding of user
needs and to aid in decision making.
• Provide a glance into who a user is as a
whole.
• Best used from the very beginning of the
design process.

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Empathy Map
• Provide a deep understanding of end
users.
• Are not chronological or sequential.
• Reveals any holes in existing user data.
• Reflect the mindset of a design thinker.
• Can capture one particular user or can
reflect an aggregation of multiple users.
• Aggregated empathy maps represent a
user segment.

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Team Diversity
• Multidisciplinary team approach.
• May business experts, engineers and
visual designers.
• Collaboration within the team increased by
different perspectives and backgrounds.
• Team members to hear and appreciate
different opinions and viewpoints.

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Process
• Steps to be carried out by a designer to
create good design.
• Four steps - analysis of the problem,
designing the solution, the implementation,
and the evaluation of the solution.
• Analysis, design, implementation and
evaluation carried out and sequenced
differently in different contexts.

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Phases in Design Thinking Process
Non-Sequential.
Iterative.

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Tools
• Toolkit, tools or ideation techniques, which
can be used in each specific process step.
• Around 39 tools found used by Design
Thinking teams.
• Majority of tools used in “empathize” or
“define” stage.

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Environment
• Environment to be flexible, portable and
inspiring.
• May purposely avoid own offices for a
Design Thinking project to enhance their
creative capability by an unknown and
inspiring environment.
• Use of movable flipcharts and tables to
create spaces needed to work efficiently
together.
• Materials for reference and to build
prototypes to be provided to the teams.

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Automotive Design
• Partly deals with the visual appearance of
vehicle exteriors.
• Perception of the vehicle depends heavily
on the design.
• Automotive designers to use their
experience to make sure the appearance
of the vehicle fulfills requirements, such as
those of the users, those related to market
and sales, technologies changes, etc.

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Automotive Design
• Design Engineers to develop the visual
appearance (exterior design) or aesthetic
aspect of the vehicle.
• Design Engineers to consider engineering
and business constraints, such as
technical package, hard points, platform
requirements, category, portfolio
considerations, etc.
• Visible design to be one of the most
powerful contributors to the branding and
marketing of a vehicle.

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Role of Design Engineers
• To cater to the increased expectations of
vehicle quality, reliability, safety and utility
and survive in the hyper-competitive
business environment.
• Automotive industry determined to ensure
a steady stream of product and technology
options that is developed on the basis of
the company’s sense of where the market
is headed.

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Role of Design Engineers
• Task of the design team split into three
main aspects:
- exterior design.
- interior design.
- color and trim design.
• Design focuses not only on the isolated
outer shape of automobile parts, but also
on the combination of form and function,
starting from the vehicle package.

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“Automotive design is the consideration of
aesthetics during the product development
of an automobile. This consideration
extends to all areas of the product readily
visible to the customer: metal, glass,
wheels, lamps, mirrors, grilles, badges and
other adornments on the exterior, and all
items of visible soft trim; seats, door trims,
instrument panel and controls; steering
wheel, switches, radio, console, etc. on the
automobile interior.”
- Clements and Porter (2006).

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Aesthetics
• Implies visual appearance, perceived
attractiveness.
• Explores new ways of seeing and of
perceiving the world.
• Study of sensory or sensory-emotional
values, sometimes called judgments of
sentiment or taste.
• Deals with the nature of beauty, art, and
taste, and the creation and appreciation of
beauty.

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Styling and Aesthetics
• Designer to use skills in applying aesthetic
treatment to the development of form to
enhance the “appeal” factor of a product or
vehicle.
• Stylist as a specialist in the process of
developing engineering design.
• Stylists to use intuitive processes, “private”
form (i.e., designer’s individual
interpretation) and graphic languages (i.e.,
designer’s visual linguistic interpretation).

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Styling
• Design managers to control the styling
process through a number of management
intervention points which provide a precise
objective framework for the process.
• Contradictions between designer and
design manager in relation to decisions on
form may become an issue once design
interpretations are subjective.

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Form
• Visual appearance of automotive design.
• Hard to standardize “form” or to generalize
what constitutes form in any all-inclusive
manner.
• Characteristics of form are subjective.
• Interpretations to depend on the use of
form language, defining meaning
(semantic aspects), facts (pragmatic
aspects) and structure (syntactic aspects).

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Form
• Interpretations to depend individual
perspectives and the area of specialisation
of the designer.
• Designer’s perceptions depend on his/her
background training, such as whether it is
within art or science.
• Form development is skills driven and
implicit.

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Form Elements and Features
• Automotive designers to communicate
using visual language to illustrate the
characteristics of form.
• Visual elements are point, line, shape/
plane and volume.
• Features of form include accelerate line,
hollow, concave, convex, etc.
• Components are elements such as
headlamp, radiator grill, bumper, fender,
etc.

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Form Designing
• Manual Designing and Hand Sketching.
• Computer Aided Design – 2D and 3D.
• 2D CAD for exterior design of
automobiles.
• Automated Morphing Systems (AMS) - a
powerful software tool for facilitating and
generating visually compelling and fluid
form transformations.

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Deformation Based Morphing

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Automated Morphing Systems
Shape Averaging
Car to Tear Drop
Shape averaging produces a series of novel shapes that fit
between two typical shapes representing different meanings.

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Design Thinking and Innovation
• Design Thinking in practice to generate
innovations.
• Team able to come up with new ideas.
• Innovation - idea, practice, or object that is
perceived as new by an individual or other
unit of adoption.
• Perceived newness of the idea for the
individual determines his or her reaction to
it.

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Design Thinking and Innovation
• Innovation = invention + exploitation.
• Invention process covers all efforts aimed at
creating new ideas and getting them to work.
• Exploitation process includes all stages of
commercial development, application, and
dissemination, including the focusing of ideas or
inventions towards specific objectives,
evaluating objectives, downstreaming research
and/or development results, and the eventual
broad-based utilization, dissemination, and
diffusion of technology-based outcomes.”

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Design Thinking and Innovation
• Innovation encompasses major stages
namely creativity (invention) and
innovation implementation (exploitation).
• Creativity - development of new ideas.
• Creativity essential to produce invention.
• Innovation implementation - introduction
and practical application of new and
improved products, services, and ways of
doing things at work.

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Design Thinking and Innovation
• Team’s innovativeness - extent to which
the team is able to generate innovations
though the application of Design Thinking.
• Innovative if the team generates new and
creative ideas and are able to implement
the outcome.

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Design Thinking and
Innovativeness

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Factors Influencing Design
Thinking and Innovativeness

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Influencing
Factors

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Organizational Environment
• Organizational encouragement,
supervisory encouragement, work group
support, freedom, resources, challenging
work positively associated with creativity.
• Workload pressure and organizational
impediments obstruct team’s and
individual’s creativity.

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Organizational Environment
• Organizational encouragement - an
organizational culture that encourages
creativity by fair judgments of ideas and
recognition for creative thoughts.
• Supervisory encouragement - supervisor
supports the team and acts as a role
model at work.
• Work group support - group to
communicate well and be committed to the
work they do.

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Organizational Environment
• Resources - providing the team with
sufficient resources such as materials,
time, money and information.
• Challenging work - team member to have
the feeling to work hard on challenging
tasks.
• Freedom – team member to have a sense
of control over one’s work.

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Organizational Environment
• Organization impediments - apparent if the
organization hinders creative thoughts by
internal politics, bureaucracy, rigidity and
overemphasis on the status quo.
• Workload pressure - includes distractions
from work and unrealistic expectations.
• Time limits - Ideas need time to settle
down, have to be re-considered and
further developed.

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Team Climate
• Innovative and open team climate
significantly increases creativity and
innovation.
• Focus on shared objectives and vision,
group participation and safety, task
orientation and support for innovation.
• Vision – team commitment to the project’s
objectives.

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Team Climate
• Participative safety - interaction between
individuals in a non-threatening climate.
• Task orientation - shared concern
regarding high quality outcomes.
• Support for innovation - enacted support.
• Relationship between team climate and
innovation stronger for research teams
than for development teams.

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Team Climate
• Research teams have a greater scope for
novel ideas and team climate increases its
importance.

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Team Collaboration
• Multi-disciplinarity is important.
• Teams to profit from the combination of the
sum of the individual capabilities through
interaction, communication, debates and
idea exchanges.
• Brainstorming to “go for a quantity” of
ideas.
• Production blocking, social loafing,
evaluation anxiety and conformity and
downward norm setting as potential
problems in face-to-face brainstorming
sessions.

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Leadership
• Management styles of leaders influence
the creative outcome of teams.
• Design Thinking teams influenced by the
leadership styles of their principals.
• Transformational leader to positively
influence team’s outcomes.
• Transactional leader to diminish innovative
capabilities of teams.

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Transformational Leadership
• Enhances project progress and
innovativeness.
• Active support to the team.
• Project leader expects the team to be
creative.
• Project leader sets realistic project goals.
• Transformational leaders are visionary,
inspiring and committed to the project
team.

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Transactional Leadership
• Leaders do not trust the team.
• Leaders may overly monitor the teams by
setting up two teams for the case that one
fails.
• Project leader skeptical towards the
project outcome.
• Project leader do not appreciate the
outcomes.

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Laissez-faire
• An absence of a leader or carelessness of
the leader.
• A loose coordination of activities instead of
a specific project leader.
• No expectations of the project leader
towards the result of the project.

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Motivation
• Intrinsic Motivation – “do something from
within”, a positive influence.
• Extrinsic Motivation - overemphasis on the
deliverables, the individual adhered to
specifications and limitations, a negative
influence.

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Once upon a time…..

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Design Transformation
• Rethinking, and thinking outside the box.
• Shift from classic car design to a user-
centered, holistic and unique vehicle
experience design.
• Users to experience a car than drive it.
• Growing preference to use cars ‘as-a-
service’ solely when required.
• Different cars for different purposes?

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Design Transformation
• Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot invented steam-
powered vehicle in 1769.
• Carl Benz applied for the patent for first
gasoline- powered vehicle in 1886
• 117 years to introduce gasoline engine in
a vehicle!
• The first step towards modern era of
automobiles that we see today!
• Start of a move towards the design and
aesthetics of the cars!

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Design Transformation
• Cars of 1900-30 mostly “open” by design,
but built for comfort, little more safety,
speed, and reliability.
• Cars with long hood, big wheels, high
ground clearance.
• Car racing with improved cars.
• Racing force engineers to think about
other contributing factors such as
aerodynamics, light and strong materials,
and safety.

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The First Car by Carl Benz

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Earlier Cars

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Tatra T77

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Enzo Ferrari

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Aston Martin Rapide S

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Ford Sierra

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Sports Utility Vehicle

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Current Scenario
• Driven by the customers as the ‘social
currency’* is changing the face of the
automobile industry.
• Social networks and the internet has led
on to an increased customer-to- customer
interaction.
• Customers know what they want and they
know how and where to get it.

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Comments
“Design thinking is as much about mind
shift as it is about innovation. And even
though implementation might take a
couple of years to find its ground, the
solutions brought about by design
thinking shall prove to strengthen
relevance, application and most
importantly sustainability in the coming
days.”

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References
• Your prescribed text books and online
resources.
• Ellen Simon, “The Application of Design
Thinking in Automotive Industry - An
Exploratory Study”, Master Thesis,
University of Twente, 2015.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV88n
YG6zsE
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6OBf
7ngMI4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nTh3
AP6knM

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Thank You