This weekend, in the Beijing 798 Park, where Chinese design is inspired, Sangyuplee, vice president of styling design at Hyundai Motor Genesis, held a conversation with the media about Hyundai Motor's new design direction.
The birth of the chief designer
Gentle, composed and fluent in English, this was probably the first impression of the first meeting of the designers and editors of the modern car.
Lee Sang-yeol, a south-born middle-aged designer who graduated from the California Academy of Fine Arts and has worked for 16 brands in 8 countries for 25 years, calls himself another avid fan of Steve Jobs. "Stay hungry, stay foolish" is also a motto he hangs on his lips.
In the past 25 years of overseas work experience, Li Xiangye has gained not only a fluent spoken language that is difficult to distinguish between Britain and the United States, but also from 16 different styles of car companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen and Porsche and Lamborghini.
Of these experiences, the first that inspired him was the experience of joining GM in 1999. There, Lee Sang-yeol and his colleagues worked together to design several concept cars, including the well-known Bumblebee Camaro concept car, which for a long time deeply influenced Lee Sang-yee's design aesthetic concept and planted the seeds of sensibility in his heart.
However, in GM's design life, Li Xiangye ran into a wall in his later contact with the Volkswagen design team, and when he received the design task of designing a new golf, Li Xiangye found that the design of the German car based on simple and practical style made him very strange and even unable to start.
After discovering that there was a vacuum in his design, Lee sang-yee decided to join the Volkswagen Group to experience this new style and concept. At this point, his overall design concept as an automotive designer has been completed. Since then, he has joined Bentley cars from the UK, further complementing and refining his design language.
After going through the design culture of major car brands around the world, Lee Sang-yeol finally chose to return to the embrace of his most familiar motherland two years ago and worked for Hyundai Motor Group, the largest automobile group in South Korea. Although the chief designer's resume has been endorsed by countless brilliant works, he has never worked for a Korean car company and still faces the test of design in a new cultural context.
Awaken the sensual DNA of modern cars
When it comes to the design of cars, one of Mr. Lee Sang-yeol's extremely new and unique ideas is particularly interesting. In his view, there is a "core" model in every brand, and the design style of this model determines the overall outline of all models of the entire brand. Taking Porsche as an example, under the influence of its classic 911 model DNA, both the panamera and the Cayenne have a unified style, which is also known as "be the 911".
So, for modern cars, which model is its "core"? This became the first question that Li Xiangye, who joined Hyundai Motors, had to think about. Unlike luxury brands and ultra-luxury brands, brands such as Hyundai have a wider coverage and a more diverse variety, and it is not easy to determine a core. Under the careful consideration of Lee Sang-yeol and his team, in the end, Sonata stood out and took on the heavy responsibility of setting the tone for the brand.
Why Sonata? In Li Xiangye's view, the Sonata model can best represent the brand spirit of Hyundai Motor, it is the most successful model of Hyundai Motor in the market, and it also represents the essence of Modern Car design. It combines the design characteristics of cars and sports cars, and at the same time is full of the avant-garde sense of the times, which is very promising. For a variety of reasons, the Sonata has become the DNA model at the heart of Hyundai.
After determining the core model, Li Xiangye and his team began the comprehensive evolution and transformation of the DNA of modern cars. In Li Xiangye's view, the key step in innovative design is to let each model regain its own characteristics, so that the entire family becomes a "chess" with a unified style, rather than a "Russian matryoshka doll" with a unified image.
In the choice of new styles, Li Xiangye uses two words to describe his design concept, that is, sensuous (sensibility) and sportiness (sports), specifically, the future of modern cars will adopt more sensual and dynamic design lines, further close to the emotional demands of modern people, moving towards the direction of high-end design. "In the past, we wanted our vehicles to be recognized at a glance from tens of meters away, but now we want consumers to notice more details of us at the second glance and fall in love with modern cars more deeply."
Make more changes for Chinese consumers
While injecting new DNA into the design of modern cars, as the design leader of modern cars, Li Xiangye is also keenly aware of the product differences of Hyundai cars in various markets around the world. How to provide products that are more suitable for different markets and different consumers is also the focus of Li Xiangye's work.
For the Chinese market, Li Xiangye's attitude is particularly cautious and concerned, and he is clearly aware that this neighboring market, which also belongs to the Asian country, is crucial to the development of Hyundai Motor, and the demand for products is not the same as that of the local market.
The Chinese dream, self-confidence and the pursuit of appearance, these three points have become the cornerstone of Li Xiangye's summary of The needs of Chinese users, in his view, China's new generation of modern car consumers in the world's most developed network environment, with strong self-confidence and high standards, therefore, emotional design will be the key to impress Chinese consumers.
Therefore, at the Beijing Auto Show in the first half of the year, Chinese users saw the products of the concept of sensuous (sensibility) and sportsiness (sports) on the modern booth - hyundai's new medium-sized car lafesta, the new generation of lafesta obviously spent more attention on perceptual design, the whole car appeared more vivid, but also further fit the aesthetics of Chinese consumers.
In order to further meet the needs of Chinese consumers, the modern design team led by Li Xiangye not only hopes to make changes in products, but also expands the layout at the source. In cooperation with the Central Academy of Fine Arts, we will jointly cultivate the next generation of Chinese designers and bring local designs back to the local area, with a view to creating more top-notch works.