New Workflows in the Transportation Design Process: A New Way to Design

JUAN ANTONIO ISLAS MUNOZ: Hello, and thank you for joining this industry talk at Autodesk University. We're going to talk about new workflows that are emerging in the field of transportation design that are basically changing the game of how transportation design studios are going to be set up in the future.

My name is Juan Antonio Islas Muñoz, and I am an assistant professor of industrial design at the University of Montreal. But before that, I spent the better part of nine years at the University of Cincinnati in which I became the head of the transportation design program there, an industrial design program which is top of the line anywhere in the world.

And there was an interesting situation in which we had to revamp that program and create it from scratch anew, which included the integration of the Future Mobility Center that I co-founded together with Gjoko Muratovski. So I'm going to be sharing a few learnings from that process. That started around 2016, and well, it still continues just in a different situation now.

So we're going to have four learning objectives. The first one is that we are going to address where in the transportation design process there is opportunity to utilize virtual reality workflows to make that process more effective, more interesting, and better. In addition to this, we're going to identify where to use virtual reality and where to use physical reality in the process because there is value to both, and it's important to know, well, what's what.

And then, the third learning objective is about layouts of these new spaces because it involves facilities, and you're going to see what we did in the Future Mobility Center at the University of Cincinnati. And lastly, I'm going to talk to you about some of the consequences of changing the workflows for transportation design with virtual reality but also with some megatrends that are coming that are changing the rules of the game for industry as well.

But before we talk about those megatrends and the future that's changing things, it's important to understand the world of transportation design today and why it works the way it works. That world is a consequence of the paradigm that started in the 20th century mainly after World War II. The US wins the war and having a car, gas money, and an open road becomes the synonym of the American dream.

And so cities began being developed to follow that dream. And not only in the United States, suddenly, all the world is building cities for a car that you buy and you own. And thus, it escalates to being 60% of the urban space in cities around the world. So this is the paradigm.

It's a car that a person owns. It's a very expensive thing that you buy, only second to the house as the most expensive item that we own. And thus, investing all that money needs to make us feel good once we buy it, right? So the design of vehicles and creative design teams around the world are usually based in creating emotion, persuasion, and desire so that when we see that moving sculpture, it can become a driveway trophy.

It can be personal to say, hey, I did this. I managed to have this. I'm happy with my purchase, or even signal status and become something for the neighbors to see in addition to that, right? It varies from person to person, but the point is that persuasion and desire in design are the main drivers.

Something that has also helped this is that pretty much for the last century, the vehicle architecture for internal combustion engines have been very stable, right? It's an engine. It's a cabin. It's a trunk, and you can maybe reconfigure it and modify it to create vehicle categories like sedans, pickup trucks, et cetera.

But what this does, this stability in architecture has created a workflow that is invaluable to great car design. Now, this workflow is largely untouched since the '50s with Harley Earl that we see here to today. It's sketching. It's creating clay models. And then, today with some other technologies, with CAD and CNC milling, rapid prototyping, VR reviews at the end, you get a better process, but mostly, it's the same. You can see in the pictures here.

This process mostly works by having-- it's initiated by having a meeting of the marketing department with the design department with engineering, and they come up with a design brief, how many people the vehicle needs to transport, what kind of powertrain it's going to have, what's the target market, the price, et cetera, which evolves into a technical package like the one you see here.

But then designers have to take that technical package, and then they have to take the needs and wants that marketing has told them about that target market, and they need to translate that into color, form, proportion, surfacing. They need to transform that into the car we see today, but it's still dressing this technical package that comes here, which comes from the same paradigm that we discussed.

And the process for making that transformation starts with 2D sketches that are quick and dirty at the beginning and then become more and more refined until they become these beautiful renderings but still 2D, then jumping into CAD to figure out how that exists in the 3D world, then going into physical modeling, first of small scale. It's not the same to see it behind the screen.

You have to refine it and then goes back into the 3D modeling program. And then, you have a full-size photo. Again, cars are big. Foreshortening exists so the proportions need to be massaged once again. And once that vehicle is ready in clay, then it's scanned and then modeled up to class size surfacing.

And up to very recently or still today, virtual reality was constrained to the end of the process to see that car with its final materials, with its final everything model. It's just a review before saying, sure, it goes into prototyping whether it is for a concept car or into a production program, et cetera.

And this process works mostly with this type of team, right? It's a car-centric team, car-centric process with great designers, digital sculptures, physical clay sculptures, color, material, and finish designers, component designers, the engineers, et cetera. And that has worked for the paradigm that we're carrying over from the 20th century.

However, the future is changing the rules of the game, right? We're in the middle of a revolution with many megatrends connecting at the same time. That means that probably designing cars only is not the only responsibility that these teams will have. For example, we have now connectivity, potentially cars that can drive themselves, which has huge implications. Maybe then the interior of the car is not a cockpit that you use to control the car only, but it becomes favorable space to do another task.

There is a shared economy in which you may pay for a ride instead of, well, just using it like a car day to day, and it's not the same to take a ride to work and commute than to take your significant other for a fancy dinner on the weekend, right? You're going to need experience-specific vehicles.

Cities are becoming larger, and they are becoming more complicated and more intelligent. And with a shared economy and autonomy, there may be less cars on the roads in the future. So urban spaces may change in addition to this. Micromobility solutions are putting cities in a pickle and with legislation of how do you share the Street space with cars and real solutions, et cetera.

Add the aging world and when a 70-year-old person can extend their lifestyle that is active more years. Like today, the older generations can stop being active when they lose the ability to drive, but in the future with driverless cars, that's not changing. So you have a lot more people involved. And then the newer generations have completely different values than we have. So the game is different. We may need new types of vehicle that solve other types of needs than today's simple car formula.

So for these groups of designers in design service around the world, we need to flip the script because designing vehicles is only part of the whole. And up until today, university programs have been preparing designers for the traditional transportation design responsibility, which is people that have amazing skills. They can do magic with visualization and are specialists in creating emotion through color, proportion, volume kind of like what I mentioned there.

It's a very individual and company approach because you are trying to get your ideas selected for production. You're competing against your fellow designers, right? And still, most people that go to design school, car design school, they want to become exterior designers. They want to be part of that exterior design team because, again, that's the sculpture of the driver trophy that we were talking about.

But today and what we did in the University of Cincinnati in my time there was to shift this version. Just one disclaimer, this type of designer is not going away. There is just more people added to the team, and that's what it's being done over there in Cincinnati. But we need designers that can use strategic foresight to envision the future of mobility experience.

They need to design vehicles that are the result or as a consequence of the urban context that will be different in a few years and the user needs they have. And that gives you what vehicle you need rather than starting with let's design the next generation of the next model car X or Y.

And rather than trying to create something compelling stylistically, you need to create transportation solutions through finding pain points in the user experience. You need to find evidence for research rather than the usual approach, which tends to be more towards the inspiration that drives the whole thing.

So these designers will become strategic actors rather than somebody that executes a design. They will be interdisciplinary collaborators rather than specialists like we mentioned before. They will be informed in industry 4.0 methodologies and I think will shape industry rather than just feed it.

So that's how we flipped the script at the University of Cincinnati. And the good question is how we got there. And believe it or not, actually, virtual reality is something that made us get to this conclusion even if this is way bigger than virtual reality. But the thing is the processes that we discovered and we planned and we created were so much more efficient that it just gave us head space to think what to do with the extra time we were having in the studio.

An example, in industry, to come with a program that goes from the design brief to a prototype, it's usually a several month to probably more than a year work done by dozens of people in the design studio in that little circle that I showed. But at the university, we have a semester. We have 15 weeks, and we usually work individually with students, or we used to do that.

And we could do two types of projects. The one was we give the students a design brief. Design the next sports car of the next decade or something like that. And with something as easy, as simple as that, or as clear as that-- not easy, as clear as that-- we are able to end the semester with a physical model that students could show, a physical scale model. Not a lot of iteration, but it was possible to do that.

But if we began a project with a question, then it was a bit different, something like design an autonomous mobility solution for older adults and that is fully autonomous, right? In that case, there's a lot of research to do to find opportunity areas and to create the design, which means no physical model. We finished with a CAD model and then we do it to the work to show design concepts.

And granted, physical models are amazing. They're beautiful, but they do take enormous time and enormous resources, and that's true for students, and that's true for universities. I'm sorry, for universities and for industry. So you may want to decide and be very careful about when you put the resources in a physical model, right? The trick is less physical iterations but better ones.

So this is the first car that we developed in virtual reality. This is a project by Raleigh Haire who now works at Ford. You can see it's a McLaren concept in which you are going to be floating in this blue side, which is like a capsule, and you are going to see the road under you on the track and everything.

And that's something that you couldn't really design correctly unless you designed this vehicle from the inside out. So what you're seeing here is Tilt Brush. It's like Paint used to be for Windows, but even then, it allowed Raleigh to sit in a car seat, get in position, and then start designing the car around him from the inside out.

The cool thing is that it also enhanced his 2D development process. It did not substitute it. It just made it better and faster. And the cool thing was that the geometries he created in Tilt Brush could be imported to a more serious or more accurate, let's say, applications to create clean models. And in the end, well, we could also do a lot of iterative reviews using VRED. That used to be probably more common in industry, but now we could do it even at the school.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Out and it goes like that, or it would go like this.

- Yeah, I see what you're saying. But even if something came over--

- Or you could pull this geometry so that it-- I wish I had a tape line right now. So it's like instead of it being swooped in like that, if it had a slight more kink here, you could maybe get it so that the highlight actually was intersecting that so that it made like a core.

[END PLAYBACK]

JUAN ANTONIO ISLAS MUNOZ: So this level of critique makes you wonder, do you need to go all the way through the process of the physical model to find this highlight that doesn't work and then have to modify it physically? That's a lot more than seeing the vehicle in front of you in virtual reality. And you can see it in full size as well. So you can see where I'm going with this.

Today, we still need physical models. I think we'll never stop needing them. But again, it's a matter of making better ones and maybe making fewer iterations and modifications in the real world. One example of why we need physical models, for example, this Tim Anness from Stellantis. He's looking at the student projects. He's the only one with the headset. And you can have headsets for everybody, but now with COVID, you can't really share it. So you'll still need full-sized scale models, and particularly the interiors, but again less iterations, better ones.

What we saw with these methodologies is that we started working with was that from the five weeks that we had to finish the physical model, and that is sanding, gluing, assembly-- so this is all out from CAD-- that's a third of the semester, and we found that we had it available to do other stuff. So what if instead of a physical model, you do a video or animation, or what if you do more research in the beginning, or what if you now go into human machine interface, and that made us open our minds to different types of design that would appear in studios.

I'm going to play this video that was one of the examples. This is a project that I did myself as part of my research in Cincinnati. And you can see it's more about the interaction and communication from autonomous vehicles with pedestrians, with other drivers, et cetera. I'm not going to go deep into what this concept really does fully, but you can see those lights that communicate what the vehicle is doing. And I'll just play it for you for a little bit.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So for the sake of time, I will move forward a little bit, but this is probably from year 2018, and if you went to CS that year or even 2020, which was the last one I attended, you could see some of the attempts from industry to reach this level of communication, which they're not quite there yet. And we all did this by having more time because virtual reality made our time better. But not only that.

So you saw the immersive sketching from that project that we did. But the cool thing is that we could also now bring the geometry to game engine like Unity or Unreal, and we could actually see the behavior of the vehicle we created there. And immediately, we could say, you know what? The expressions of the eyes, the eye contact, that's clear, but the eyes are too small to see them from a distance.

So imagine all the investment that a company would need to do if they were to develop this car and figure that out when they have a full-size working prototype. Not quite a good thing. So simulation and experiences for VR is also an interesting thing that we discovered that we could do.

And once we discovered VR had the game-changing potential, we went all in and created a new center for mobility called the Future Mobility Center at the University of Cincinnati precisely to create that type of designer as I mentioned in which the vehicles are the consequence of the urban context and the needs of the people rather than a vehicle-centric studio.

So this is an example of the layout that I was mentioning, and it has four main parts. The first one is this space here on the left, which is a multidisciplinary collaborative. So you can have holistic thinking there. Of course, you can have your designers, traditional designers, color, material, finish, your engineers there, but why not also include social scientists? Why not include foresight strategies so that you're not blindsided with your mission of designing your little part, but you can consider the entire thing? And that was really useful for us.

Then we have an advanced visualization lab in which we have a series of tradition design tablets for designers to do work in 2D. And it's not in a cubicle on their own, right? It's there so they can all see their work. And then the fun part begins on the right where we have four virtual reality booths so that we can do virtual reality work in high fidelity there or explorations in low fidelity at the beginning in tandem with this interior box that you could disassemble to do smaller vehicles or put together to do larger vehicles. These walls that you can see here can be rolled up in case you're doing, I don't know, a [INAUDIBLE] passenger interior. You could do the entire thing, right? So this is how this space would work.

These are the cabins. We had the measurement of an interior of a large sedan here in case we wanted to work on that. This that you see yellow thing is tactile flooring because you're blinded. You're inside this virtual reality world. You're walking back, and you suddenly feel that under your feet, you know you've reached the edge. And you have a VR-ready computer and a screen so people can see what you're seeing inside of the VR headset. And then again, the dividers, they can go up.

And then here you can put your low fidelity prototypes that you create in the physical prototyping lab where you can quickly mock up things that you, let's say, you're seeing the real finished car interior or the explorations of it. And then you can reach out, and you can actually feel surfacing where there is a surface.

The idea is that this is not for fancy accurate modeling. It's quick and dirty because the fancy stuff is happening inside the headset. And this example is kind of like the lowest level of space blocking that we have. It was spring of 2020. Next step as you went along with the virtual reality work, you would be doing something like the example here on the right that Grace is using with a plywood or maybe some milling on foam, 3D printing, et cetera. But this is when the pandemic hit so sadly, we couldn't use it for more, but you can see-- I'll show you an example of how that looks when we get.

So Future Mobility Center, a place to do virtual reality early in the concept process, also to present farther along in VRED or game engines that also includes the rapid physical prototyping lab. And we also were so successful with this, and we got a lot of donations from industry. We were able to get this material [INAUDIBLE] capture by X-ray Pantone, which scans materials and creates super realistic stuff to render, for example.

And now is where I show you a couple of projects that are the output of the Future Mobility Center, and this illustrates the process really well. It's a project done by Hunter Elmore and Matt Whitby, now professional designers, but then, they were taking Transportation Design I. So this is their first project, and it is a passenger drone.

Hunter did the physical side, and Matt Whitby did the how you fly it flight experience, and this is the example of the benefits of that low fidelity model. The engineering [INAUDIBLE] group gave us a design brief that said, OK, create a passenger drone where you could fly like a superhero. But that position, the posture is very uncomfortable.

So Hunter started hacking this down like aluminum extrusions and gym equipment to create this final posture, which was more like a super futuristic bike. It still felt like flying like a superhero, but was it something that you could use without being tired for 30 minutes. So that became really good. Then he took a picture of himself in that position and went to the traditional design mode but adding virtual reality in the creative process with gravity sketch.

So the cool thing here is that it wasn't just supplanting the gravity sketch, the 2D sketching. It was creating one iteration, then going back using that as an underlay where you can take screenshots from many sides, adding to it, coming back, creating another version of this, and just creating this virtual cycle, that virtual cycle that accelerated his process quite a bit. And he did the same in the exterior. The shades of all the different iterations, they're saying it was over 100 if you combined exterior and interior work.

Matt, on the other hand, was doing from another, I think, emerging discipline for vehicle design studios in the future, which was the experience of usage. So he had to do three things, create a scene for his virtual assets to exist, create the vehicle interior that you were going to see while wearing the headset, and then number three, create the physical bot that you would use to operate this in virtual world.

So you can see an example here on the right of the first prototype while he was adjusting the postures and everything. He added some sensors so you can communicate with the virtual reality headset, and you can actually fly this drone. And this one, I love this slide because it was basically him using the game engine, in this case Unity, to find what was the most intuitive way to fly this drone. So he created a virtual track, and he created different ways of grabbing controls and everything and had students and some faculty fly this through the space to find which one was easier and more intuitive to do.

And then it was the seat design, and this was his final presentation in which you can see Professor Min Tang here from architecture flying the drone. And of course, he couldn't resist an added shooting game there. And what you see here, you see the vehicle from the outside because that's what's happening on the screen here. But Ming could fly and see the controls riding from it. And that's a new way of showing and experiencing a final design that didn't exist before.

So this project gave both students an internship at Ford. I'm going to show you a little bit of what Matt Whitby did. So he created a virtual room where you could see all the interns' work. This is Hunter Elmore's. He's the classmate who did the drone as well.

So you could walk around it. You could open doors. You could do these different things. But the coolest thing is that you could also drive it around the track. So this is a fantastic way of doing things. This is also all done long distance during the COVID semester, which is why I can show it to you because that was public.

And this is you're now in the car. You're going to see some clumsiness when you're trying to grab the controls because you can't feel stuff, but this is the value of having the low fidelity physical product in front of you where you can grab that directly and use it and then using those sensors just operate it and take a car for a spin. So that's way more powerful than only the physical model and pulser. So we're not saying physical model and pulse disappear. We're saying this is added to the presentation to what you can do. And hopefully, you don't crash like Matt's doing here.

All right, so going back to summarize the process, low fidelity quick and dirty virtual modeling, then you muck it up in the real world, then you would come back and refine, go back and refine with easy to do fiscal stuff. And suddenly, this side of the muddle becomes more complicated, and that's fine because you don't have to build it and it makes sense.

And then at the end, you can see the final presentation of this project that was about mobile living. And you can be probably even walking in the virtual world, but you're seeing this thing right in front of you. And eventually, sure, you move to a real project for industry, you would need a physical prototype, but then instead of doing one clay interior bot and suddenly realizing you need to change and you need to put in modification, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in models, you can probably use your resources in a few less.

To end the presentation, I promised you to talk about what the consequences were for design studios not only in facilities which we've seen but also in their personnel, and there will be new people joining the team. Again, these people, we still need them for sure. We still need the creation of gorgeous surfaces and gorgeous colors, and the traditional car stuff is not going away. But new things are coming for new vehicles, new business models, new things, for example.

Well, we talked about holistic thinking, right? It's no longer a car design studio. The studios will need to evolve to provide mobility solution design, which means holistic thinking. So that group that's very nuclear to create that decades-old design process that started in the 1950s with Harley Earl and General Motors will need to go bigger and include strategic foresight, social science, and psychology, urban planning because cities are changing, systems thinking and emerging technology, et cetera. Some new faces we're going to see are going to be more researchers, more foresight strategies, people that create a configuration of vehicles, people that do virtual prototyping like the one I just showed you, for example, immersive prototyping.

So one of the figures that I mentioned is the foresight strategists, and this new person needs to pretty much future proof the company. So they need to find the emerging opportunity areas so that they're not disrupted in the market so that they guarantee the company is ahead on their ideas, and they don't become a Nokia, for example. So these people need to be part of the team.

Also, more researchers because we need to stop designing exclusively from inspiration. Well, not exclusively, it's not done exclusively from that, but it's a lot from inspiration for the sake of creating compelling solutions to do things rather than actually finding pain points and solving them and providing usable and delightful user experiences. And that comes from research.

We're going to need people whose job is more and than creating the surfacing on the car, creating the new vehicles from the future. So they're going to need to understand human factors really deeply, how we operate vehicles, if a joystick is better than a steering wheel. They also need to understand how to use usability studies, simulate activities, understand psychology. And this is two-fold. This is for physical design and human machine interface.

Traditional transportation designers, we mentioned that they still exist. We still need this to look this hot and to look this compelling and to make us want to use it. So these people have their job secure. The team will just go bigger. We also need people that can identify new business models that the company can use.

Right now, they pretty much operate in the same, I make a car and sell it to you, and then you have to fix it so you buy parts from me. But what about, I don't know, selling vehicles to cities for the sharing economy. That's a huge revenue opportunity that is not currently being addressed.

So these people need to be part but also, most importantly, somebody that advocates for the things that matter environmentally and socially. So in that multidisciplinary collaboration space of the future design studios, we need to have all these voices there at the same time exchanging ideas so that we have holistic thinking and not just specialist thinking.

We're going to need to have the immersive prototyper that we discussed, and we're going to need the physical prototyper, the one that is fast, quick, and dirty, kind of like scenic designers that can build the scenery for a theater play in a few hours then dismantle it to create all this literary work, and also, the traditional more detailed and crafty and high fidelity model that exists today in studios.

So from a top level, what is exactly that what changes? So this is the linear process we have today from the generation of the brief, creating the package, creating the aesthetic things in 2D, selecting them, going to CAD modeling, physical scale modeling, full size modeling and the other iterations around that, digitizing that in VR, and sending it to production.

What we're saying is it will look more like this. And whatever you see purple, there are VR interventions, and whatever you see blue, they are new activities that didn't exist before. So here in the first circle-- oops, excuse me-- in that first circle, we're talking about the design of the architecture of the vehicle, the package and the front end, these two. So we need design and the holistic thinkers to be there so that it's not just something that's cranked out by the marketing needs and the engineering. But we have those social sciences. We have those strategic foresighters, et cetera.

Then that goes into the design team, but it's not only just 2D sketching at the beginning. We have VR immersive sketching and probably low fidelity prototyping, and that becomes later work. Then the theme is selected. It goes into CAD. You do CAD, and you check it using VR so that you need the less high-fidelity physical scale or less having to do full-size iterations but maybe better because now you can funnel the resources to the ones that you need, digitize a model, and then you present in addition to the poster, model, you do high-fidelity VR experience reviews.

On the other side, while these people, while these designers are creating the next vehicle concept, the new figure of the immersive prototyper needs to start storyboarding the user experience of the VR strategy, creating low-fidelity prototype like those where you're flying the drone that I showed you to find what's the best UX. The next is then creating the scene and the assets, programming into a VR scene so that by this day, you can also take your vehicle for a spin. And then it goes to the prototyping and production. So this is what I envision that will be coming.

So just to conclude, remember, opportunities for VR to work in the process-- in the early creative process of 2D and immersive sketching in tandem, during CAD development to review the process models and not have to wait for the physical stuff, and then experience design creating how to operate vehicles, how to work with them, and also final immersive simulations. That's where VR can be a game changer for studios.

Number two, when do we work-- excuse me-- with physical reality and when we work with VR reality? Basically, whenever it's too expensive to create a physical prototype, VR is better until we found the actual physical model we want to do with less modifications. That creates a faster and deeper ideation process, quick and cost-effective validations, and yet, a lot less money in creating high-fidelity big, big, big models. Layout-- free spaces in a space that allows collaboration and allows for holistic thinking. Traditional to visualization labs, virtual reality booths, and physical prototyping that allow for hybrid work with physical and virtual reality.

And lastly, get your teams if you are in a design studio and you need to know who to hire, create and bring the people that can create this holistic thinking and that can enable that virtual reality prototyping in game engines. That's, I think, one of the biggest things that doesn't exist and no one has said.

And companies have tried to bring game designers, and it's not the same thing. I don't really think this type of designer that solves problems and tries them in game engines isn't quite out there yet from the university's information. So if you do find these people or you work with universities, a good idea is to fund the creation of businesses.

And industry has received these changes really well. We've had more sponsored projects than ever. We brought close to $250,000 in industry sponsorship, and in the Fall 2019, we had four companies that wanted to work with us and contribute economically to the program, and we had to turn them down and just choose one, which was amazing.

And then the pandemic came, and that stopped. But this is successful. It's here to stay. And I hope this can work for you to reflect into if you have a university or if you work in a design studio to see what's coming and be prepared for the future. Thank you for your time and for listening.