Historic Panel Discussion on Design Held at the Barber Vintage Festival
Birmingham, AL – The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum held its first design panel during the 17th Annual Barber Vintage Festival in early October. The discussion took place with legendary designers in front of a packed audience who were gathered inside the all-new Barber Advanced Design Center (BADC).
The BADC was created to inspire new generations of creative thinkers. It functions as a high-tech workspace for Industrial Design exploration that includes a multimedia hub for visiting designers to learn and collaborate with other designers from around the world.
On the panel were Pierre Terblanche and Miguel Galluzzi of Ducati and Aprilia/MotoGuzzi fame, Polaris head of Industrial Design, Greg Brew, and Senior Vice President of Experience Design at Dell Technologies, Ed Boyd. The BADC director, Brian Case, co-moderated the panel along with Ultan Guilfoyle, who’s known for curating the world-famous Art of the Motorcycle exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1998.
“One of the great advantages of the Barber Museum is we can literally go to any point in time in the history of motorcycles and see what the state-of-the-art was at that time,” enthused Guilfoyle on the use of museums for design research. “That’s what we’re talking about here, design as a narrative. Or a story with a beginning and a middle, but we don’t know yet where the end is going to be. Where we go tomorrow is what we’re going to find out.”
When asked about capturing the imaginations of new buyers, Ed Boyd said, “When I worked at Nike, the design teams were constantly resetting our targets down to the youth. If we just do another same version of the sneaker or what have you, then the age demographic would grow up. We knew if we developed designs that connected with our youth, then the older folks who wanted to feel young would buy those products as well.”
“I think there are new designers working on these vehicles, they come from different backgrounds,” explains Terblanche. “The Rivian’s got a hidden flashlight, it parks and auto-levels itself, my stove comes out the side, I’ve got storage. Another one I like is called the Canoo, they’ve done all this stuff that people haven’t done before with IC trucks. So why couldn’t designers have done that with IC trucks? They could have, but they didn’t.”
When asked about designing for more specialized uses, Galluzzi said, “We can’t forget that markets are very different. If you go from the U.S. all the way to India, what we are talking about would be completely different. That’s a part of our job, to understand what the actual need between different cities in the world is going to be.”
“If you’re constantly doing production programs, it’s like you’re always playing a game and you’re never practicing,” Brew exclaimed on the evolution of design workflows and building concept vehicles. “So for us, concepts are a chance for everybody to practice. It is necessary for us to stay ahead.”
Connect with @BarberMuseum on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to hear about future programs in the Barber Advanced Design Center.
The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum is a 501(c)(3) Not for Profit Foundation located at the 880-acre Barber Motorsports Park, in Birmingham, Alabama, dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, exhibition, and history of motorcycles, vintage vehicles, and motorsports. The museum is home to the world’s largest motorcycle collection and is widely known for its collection of vintage Lotus racecars and other rare vehicles. Each year it hosts vintage motorcycle and vintage racecar events, including the Barber Vintage Festival and Barber Historics. For more information, visit www.barbermuseum.org.
