| Interview With Walter De'Silva, Head Designer Of The Audi Brand Group
Walter de'Silva (55) is regarded as one of the best automotive designers in the world. Since March 2002, this Italian has been the head designer of the Audi brand group and, as such, not only responsible for the Ingolstadt-based premium manufacturer, but also for Seat and Lamborghini. He started his career in 1972 at the Fiat design centre in Turin. After a brief period of working for Trussardi, de'Silva moved to Alfa Romeo in 1986, before going on to take over the management of the design centre of Fiat and Alfa Romeo in 1994, followed by that of Seat just five years later.
Mr de'Silva, what is design for you?
Walter de'Silva: Design is, in abstract terms, a sum of individual signals, which combine to produce a powerful overall signal. Good design is by no means the result of purely rational thoughts. And that's what makes our mission so difficult. After all, design is always the reflection of attitudes towards life, views and convictions.
What do you think about design through the ages?
Walter de'Silva: There have been a lot of changes. Design has always been a discipline that has connected form and technology. Nothing has changed in that respect. But today the design is quite clearly the main focus of attention - it is the most important source of motivation behind a customer's desire to buy. In other words, design still has to take account of the issue of functionality, but must also convey the brand. A whole range of different requirements from all the divisions converge centrally in the design. Conversely, as a company, Audi has itself been defined over the past few decades by its design culture.
That sounds a bit like a proliferous plant.
Walter de'Silva: Yes, it is a wide-ranging culture. Whenever we talk about something relating to cars, the topic of design now always enters instantly into the picture, even when talking about the details - that wasn't so in the past. When I started out some 30 years ago, the product orientation was the only aspect in the design - today, this is a field that covers and reflects the group through 360 degrees. Today, good automotive design always emanates - in contrast to the 1970s and 1980s - from a dialectic relationship between creativity and history. It is about development in which we must not - to continue the plant analogy - forget the roots of the brand.
What role does design play for Audi?
Walter de'Silva: Before being assigned the responsibility for the design of the Audi brand group in 2002, Audi already had a highly distinctive design - namely, precision in form and technology. To appeal not only to the mind, but also to the heart and, as such, to people's emotions, a new, modified design vocabulary was needed - if not only to stand apart more clearly in an age of increasingly fierce competition.
A further task for me was to establish a strong family resemblance within the growing model range, whilst emphasizing the individual characters of our cars. Although this appears to contradict itself, nature has already provided a brilliant solution to this problem. We took the analogy with real human families seriously and, in doing so, defined the genetic building blocks of the brand, the DNA, as it were. The outcome is an aesthetic canon that defines the design framework for architecture, style and details from future Audi models.
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