Porsche SEEN

Mr. Mauer, what are our chances of bumping into you at the hardware store? 

Michael Mauer: [laughs] I do go to the hardware store sometimes. I’m not very talented manually, but I still need a few tools, a hook or some nails every now and then. 

There’s this American author, Matthew B. Crawford, who wrote a book about the joy of working with your hands . . . 

I can relate to that. Because once I’ve managed to drill a few holes in a wall and maybe even hang up a picture using a special anchor, that fills me with immense satisfaction. Especially as that kind of work doesn’t come easily to me.

Does that mean designers no longer work with their hands these days? Isn’t automotive design a hands-on profession? 

I still belong to a generation in which we worked a lot with our hands, drawing with a normal pen on normal paper. The medium may be different today, the pen electronic, but the process is still manual. The actual manual work is on the model, working on the surfaces with modeling clay. I am convinced that the quality of the surface shows whether your work was done only electronically, using mathematical data, or whether you really got your hands dirty and touched the surfaces. It has always given me great satisfaction to feel that the form, the design, was evolving as I had imagined. It’s like a sculpture that grows. Sometimes you have the impression that something isn’t quite right yet, then you work on the surfaces, look again and finally think: now everything is perfect. This feeling gets lost in the modern way of doing things. At Porsche, we try to keep this feeling alive because, as I said, I believe that in the end it expresses itself in the quality. 

Is it this feeling that gives a designer joy and satisfaction? 

Yes, the joy consists in realizing, after perhaps a long time that was also filled with doubts, that the form, the proportion finally appeals to me. That the design can generate an emotion. That it’s finally right.

Do you also experience the phenomenon of flow during the design process?

When you’re working on a project, you’re always under pressure to complete it on time and within budget. You can’t just say, the way an independent artist would, “If it’s not finished tomorrow, then it’ll be finished the day after tomorrow.” On top of that, you put pressure on yourself too. You want the outcome to be appealing. For your boss, of course. For the brand. But also for yourself as a designer. And when you’re dealing with a topic twenty-four hours a day, consciously and unconsciously, when it’s the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about before you go to sleep, then these phases can be very intense. And I’m not responsible for just one project, but for several at the same time. But even then, although you may have the feeling that things aren’t going anywhere, you keep working on it anyway, and at some point you realize that the pieces of the puzzle finally fit together. And then, if you get the problem solved and the project moves forward, you feel that flow kick in.

You once said that design is created and works in holistic contexts. How far beyond the product do you think?

As a designer, you have to satisfy an awful lot of different demands. There’s the sales department, for example, which decides for which market and which customers a product should be developed. In that respect, you try to understand what other people want and what they need. But this very question is an important one for me as a designer anyway. What kind of people want a product like this and what do they use it for? What appeals to a customer like that? That’s one of the biggest challenges I’m facing right now, by the way. It used to be that you would finish a design, the car was made, and then it hit the road. And as a designer, you would see that car out there for a year or two and start working on the successor. These days, because of the shorter life cycles, you sometimes start working on the next model before the first one is even on the road. Admittedly, I find that difficult. Of course, I have an idea of how I want a model to evolve. But that includes being stuck in traffic with it, having it pass you on the highway, or perhaps seeing it in the parking lot outside the hardware store. The question is how it comes across in different situations and how people respond to it. I always find it exciting to see whether a little boy on the street turns around to look at a car or not.

And this 360° view, how far does it go?

We spend about one year working intensely on a model. At times, we move some of the lines back and forth by mere millimeters. Because we believe it will have a positive influence on the overall design. Of course, you also ask yourself how it will be photographed and presented when it is done – perhaps how it will look standing at the dealership. Let me give you an extreme example. Say you want to appear extremely progressive, innovative and modern with your brand or your product. And then the dealer shows it inside a wooden box in a living room atmosphere. So every little detail is important, right down to the press photo and the visuals. We think about that from the beginning, which I think is extremely important.

We’re calling this issue “I for Myself”. Now, every Porsche has its own identity – and yet you can always recognize a Porsche when you see one. Do you intentionally differentiate according to product and brand criteria?

A brand stands for certain values. And the product is the ambassador of these brand values, expressed in the design. That’s why it’s important to have elements that illustrate this brand identity. A truck, for example, has to express reliability and robustness. And with a powerful brand like Porsche, I have to make sure that people immediately know what it is, that it’s a Porsche, even without the emblem. A broader product range, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to give each product its own identity, its own character.

Can the concepts tell us anything about the future of Porsche?

Porsche designers are often accused of having the most boring job at Porsche. One 911 after the other, nothing ever changes. Copy, paste, that kind of thing. But these concepts show that (...)

→ Read the whole interview with Michael Mauer in rampstyle #22 "I for myself".