Styling wil take a great part in the study “Impact of a changing Automotive Industry on Exterior Lighting: evolution or revolution?”
We interviewed many styling experts, and below a part of the interview of the famous Lowie Vermeersch from GranStudio.
Lowie is CEO and Creative Director of GranStudio. He is part of the 3rd generation of a prominent Belgian artistic family. His fascination with the physical world led him to industrial design, to a strong awareness of the play between aesthetics and mechanics, and to the philosophy of people-centred design.
After studying at the University of Delft in Holland, he left for Italy, where he started his career as an automotive designer at Pininfarina. After being responsible for several successful designs, he was appointed Design Director and led the automotive design department of Pininfarina for several years.
In 2010, he was one of Automobile Magazine’s “World’s 25 Most Influential Car Designers”. He was responsible for the design team of award-winning cars, such as the Pininfarina Nido; the Maserati Birdcage 75th; the Pininfarina Sintesi, the Ferrari 458, the Alfa Romeo 2uettottanta, the Chery TX, the Cowin i-CX and the SCG003.
Lowie identifies 4 trends as lighting success factors for the next decade:
1st trend: The Design of light becomes more and more de-coupled from its primary function to become a new ‘design material’.
Originally the shape of lighting was pure ‘form follows function’. But during the last 100 years as designers we got increasing freedom to diversify the shape of light, thanks to new and smaller technologies. Now the DRL function is getting more and more important to define the exterior styling and brand identity of the car, because the DRL function has more design freedom compared to HB/LB functions, and it’s always switched on