Chris Bangle - Insights from seventeen years as Chief of Design at the BMW Group

Chris Bangle is one of the most successful and controversial car designers of his generation. In this wide ranging interview Bangle gives insight into each stage of his career, from design school through to his time at FIAT and as Chief designer at BMW. Bangle advocates for a radical rethinking of car design and manufacture to suit the evolving needs of the urban majority. His ideas on ’personal emotional mobility’ appeal directly to personal lifestyle aspirations to achieve behavior change in car use for sustainability improvements. He also implemented some novel management strategies during his time at BMW - in this interview sketching out on the palm of his hand the vortical structure that he saw as necessary for innovative design. Everything from the corporate structure to the mix of individual personalities was shaped by this process - which Bangle links back to his experience of mentorship at the Art Centre College of Design California, which produced a range of other automobile designe