At the graduate level, you want really want to get that broader issue of the business implications and how does it relate to the brand image, to the target customer, to their decisions, and to the long-term goals of the company as far as strategy goes. So that takes a different set of thoughts and skills. And to really optimize that, this understanding of what people need, how they communicate that or don’t communicate that in some cases, and how you draw that out of them and come to these sorts of new conclusions, that really is where the focus of the graduate program is.
The difference between style and design, in relating to transportation, is style was very much this conventional idea of just dressing the surfaces. You know, don’t worry about the bones of the situation whether it was the bones of the business case or the physical bones of the car. You know, we’ll just style the pieces on it and make it all work, add a little trim and things like that. We’ve moved on from that a long time ago. There are people who still see the efforts of transportation work and think of it as styling, but you have to feel sorry for them because it’s much more a three-dimensional, four-dimensional issue and design is the right approach to take. But even in design, these ideas of the business case, the brand meaning, you really need to understand what the customer’s talking about and what they need and what they’re not talking about in some cases. To get very in-depth, not necessarily intuitive, requires a lot of intuitive behavior to peel the onion away in the right layers to get right down to the problem. That’s where design is going, that’s where successful design is now, and there are people executing it and we have to continue that development.
You know the other thing is, on a global basis, you look at transportation solutions on the outside and they are much more diverse and much more developed in other parts of the world because they have other transportation problems. In the United States it has been a more segregated type of transportation situation. I mean it was probably more diverse right after the war. And now you have these other solutions coming from other parts of the world, you’ve got financial models that start to move those towards this marketplace, and you have the growth of cities in a much more dense situation than you’ve ever had before. So you combine those elements together and you have a great time for opportunity.
The Paul & Helen Farago Chair of Transportation | Larry Erickson
