Establishment design office
In my years at the design office of ISUZU so far, we have had many turning points and many milestones have been reached in the way of becoming a solid esign office. The very first was the establishment of the design office. Our design team had an important task at hand when the team was first established. We had to build a design language from scratch in the company whom had decided to usedesign as a strategic tool and to create a design DNA to have all the vehicles within the same design language.
Design DNA
In order to create a design DNA we demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the company and we analyzed the designs of the competitors, their products and the general automotive trends in detail. Which each designed vehicle the design DNA improved and grew. By 2014, all of the current product range had been designed by the design office. The most important problem we encountered at that stage was to be sure that the value of design was absorbed and the design philosophy that we wanted to create was understood by the whole company.
As the design identity of the company grew stronger, the added value of design was felt even more and in SWOT analyses, design began to be one of the strongest sides of the company. Even when few models were onle re-touched, there had been a drastic increase in sales figures with the power of the product family that they belonged to.
Sharing our knowledge
We have been sharing our experience in various accademic sessions, conversations with small-scale companies and design students. Our article which includes our experiences about this subject was published in 2011 as “Experiences on Establishement of Product Developement Process and Industrial Design Team in Anadolu Isuzy Automotive Industry and Trade Inc.”
We focused on brand and design relations starting 2013, after the design processes and products had settled down some. When we analyzed our products on the axis of design-brand relationship, we identified things that are ready for further developement. We created the design philosophy of our future products at the end of these analyzes. At this point, we moderated an in-house brand-design identity workshop in order to introduce the whole company to the branding goal of the design office.
More workshops and published articles
In 2014 we organized a Design and Brand Relationship Analysis workshop at the METU National Design Reasearch Conference. We aim to establish our designs in accordance with brand itegrity. Finally, in 2016, we published an article titled; “Investigation of new generation marketing researches and findings in the axis of design discipline” at the METU National Design conference.
Starting in 2016, we began to focus on smart city applications and digital transformation. IOT, connected vehicles and electric vehicles were the priority in our research. We have pioneerd in the developement of a strategy for intelligent mobility solutions in our company. These stategies have been presented to the work groups in Turkey, which includes the 81 provincial municipalities and various ministers. Again, the electromobility solutions we prepared in this camp were presented to the ministers, deputies, mayors and groups of fleet owners. We published our experiences related to the subject in the National Design Researches Conference in ODTÜ in 2016 under the title of; “Design for everyone” in Anadolu Isuzu through the example of public transportation.
In the year 2013, the design of the vehicle which was subject to the news titled; “The pioneer of Turkey is found” was our design. It was the only project to be supported by incentives of Tubitak for the first domestic automotive product.
Working with universaties and mentoring students
In addition to these studies, we also pay attention to university coorperations. We believe that such collaborations are mutually beneficial. Firstly we are inspired by the excitement of the students, and secondly students benefit from the experience that we have. In this regard, we had our first experience with ITU in 2012. We opened up new horizons to each other by working together with the students on ’the busses of the future’ topic. At the end of this project we received 8 patents on behalf of the students and we employed one of the students in our office. Since then, we have been repeating similar projects regularly. In 2014, 2015 and 2017, we worked with METU Industrial Product Design Department on various bus and pick-up differentiation projects. We also mentored 5 sudents from various universaties.
To conclude…
All these studies have been carried out with the knowledge amd experience of our specialized team. Our journey, which stared 10 years ago, has transformed itself into an effective design office, where our mentorships sought in various in-house projects. I am proud to be part of an offic that is consulted for its quality of work for design; from website preperation to interior design, from corporate presentation formats to conducting design workshops.