Graphic Man
So I’m sitting here, going through email and I open one from George Acorn over at www.swedespeed.com about a guy with an old 245 wagon with a little over 300,000 miles on it and he wants to know if we want it for our car collection. No, not really. That’s kind of middle age mileage for our cars, so, yes lots of miles but come back when you get close to Irv Gordon’s numbers (2.7 million).
BUT that got me thinking about how 245′s were our work horse Volvos in those days, a big box on wheels. Amazing that today, they still command good money for used ones. I suggested Craigslist, sure to be snatched up rather quickly. Anyway, the only down side to that car was the air conditioning system. Our friends in Sweden never understood why we needed A/C, or more accurately one that would suck out quarts of humid water, send chills down our spines with frigid Arctic air for hours on end, while blasting across Texas in mid-summer. Story goes we put Swedish HVAC engineers into a 245 wagon and sent them across Death Valley one ‘warm’ summer week. Told them we’d meet back at the ranch for cool ones when they had enough. That convinced someone that Sweden wasn’t the best place, in those days, to engineer A/C for our cars. They went to Harrison – suppler to General Motors – to work on our upcoming 700 series. Oh, that car was wonderful.
Ok, where is this going? We’re getting to Graphic Man’s story. How did we get from here:
Volvo 240 – around 1980
To here:
Environmental Concept Car – 1992
To here:
XC60 – 2010
So, how did this change come about? We have to go back to the Environmental Concept Car (ECC, 1992) for this one. Doug Frasher, José Diaz de la Vega, Geza Loczi and others from Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center (VMCC) in California headed up a project, well, best if we let Doug explain:
“Gary Fitzgerald was the guy who designed (DJ: Interior Designer) the layout in the ECC and it was based on the work done he and others had done for our G0 (G-Zero project -1991). This was the internal project that we did here which became the basis for the ECC (car). It was a very extensive project aimed at developing a proposal for how Volvo should meet the proposed California ZEV (zero emission vehicles) mandate. In hindsight now almost all of our conclusions have proven to be prophetic.”
Prior to G0, VMCC was already working on design expressions for HVAC interface controls. Gary added a unique understanding of Human Machine Interfacing to this germinating pictogram. About the same time VMCC hired Brad Lohrding, Stanford educated industrial designer who specialized in interaction design. Brad helped to identify the sound logical basis for this concept. The idea was to create “ease of use of self evident controls and displays” according to Doug.
From Doug, “At the time (1990-1) iconic design was coming into vogue in the sense that designers were feeling that the best way to communicate a function was to be very literal with the hardware (buttons) form and graphics. If air is pumped by a fan, directed through a duct, toward a person, then the buttons should literally look like a fan, a duct and a man. This idea was then refined graphically down to simple symbols. It is also fair to say that the electronics suppliers facilitated this as they allowed for buttons which could easily be made in any shape, size, with any graphic appliqué and with light emitted from within or piped from a hidden source.”
“After ECC (car) the mission became to achieve the appropriate influence in our real products. The adoption into real product, the graphic man was well liked by the ergonomic responsible engineering guys in Sweden (Staffan Herz) and to refine it for production they enlisted Brad. Brad spent a lot of time with them to secure the basic concept. The execution of the concept into the center console user interface was a long and tumultuous development,” according to Doug. In the end, from idea to concepts to design mock-ups to ECC, to production, lots of really smart people were involved. Doug said it wasn’t easy, apparently many meetings, discussions occurred before everyone signed off on graphic man.
“So with that, the S80 (1998) was to become the first product to employ the graphic man,” concluded Doug.
BTW here’s what ECC interior looked like:
And today’s XC60:
Check out these really good XC60 videos too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b8ABCjZmRw
