Jeff Hammoud: Chief Design Officer of Rivian on constraints, color, and what separates designers from stylists

23:28But if you can iterate a lot more at that point, that's where it becomes really powerful. I'm also curious about how it might affect your relationship with the engineering team. You mentioned you sit pretty close together and they might have their own uses for it, but it also might blur the boundaries a little bit where maybe somebody on the design team, especially for the software design, can actually code a prototype, like a functional prototype, or an engineer might use some of these tools to do some visual exploration have you been seeing any of that kind of blurring about 100 like we're we're working very closely with our software teams on this is like how can we do these things to create um better workflows because there still are a lot of things and you guys probably aware of this but like in the software world where you're taking ui ux it's getting coded and just like how do you do the onion skinning between okay well we released a figma file how does that figma file actually match with the code and the more we can make that streamlined it means the last time the designers are checking to make sure every pixel lines up and less time that you know engineers have to keep recoding things and i mean that's just one example of a workflow where it can really help us we we do it a lot with prototyping as well being able to tell like user stories now where we used to sketch them out by hand or like you know grab some images to tell user story like using ai to to tell a user story is just amazing it's just amazing because it's and that's all it's that's what i think it's all about uh you know we were talking about this last night if you look within design and i think in any creative field and probably other ones really for the longest time and i'm gonna use vehicle design as an example of that the way that designers would get their designs picked or chosen is who is a better illustrator and it was really about who did the best illustration and yes the design is obviously important but you could have a better design but somebody told the story better and that's what gets chosen and i think that goes with everything in in the world like if you're a good storyteller or you can communicate your idea or your concept, your proposal, whatever that is, better than the next person, then you're ultimately going to succeed.

25:22So I'm excited to see how it starts to level the playing field in terms of design, where now it's about the idea and it's less about who told the story better. Yes, storytelling is still very important. You need to know how to do that. But then it's not about, well, this person can have better artistic ability than this person. Now it's just, which is the better idea? which is what I'm really excited about as we progress with AI. Do those user stories take the form of like a storyboard or what does the artifact? Some of them are storyboards. Now we're doing like embedded videos in them. You know, we're looking at different ways because now you can, and we'll obviously put things on top of it where maybe you have like a vehicle and then you have something on the screen or, you know, someone on my team was just playing around with something where we're showing like, okay, a dog in the vehicle and we're showing a use case.

26:05And it was in our R2 vehicle, like the screen was there because we put a UI over top of it and it was showing what it would look like from the outside of the vehicle with a dog in it as an example. So it really just helps tell the story or even when we're trying to do a UX flow and really trying to explain how you could do that. We still use a lot of obviously Figma files. We'll do protopies as well so you can actually play around with the UI before you're going to do that. But it's just helping us tell the story much quicker which once again means more time for the designers to actually be thinking about how to solve the problem and generate ideas versus doing something that AI tools just help you tell a story better.

26:44So on this topic of AI, it's not just a tool that could influence or augment the creative workflow, but it can also influence the user experience. If we think about a Rivian vehicle as a platform that's got a lot of different services and capabilities, cameras all around everything is very software driven and lots of actuators and motors and so forth ai could be a really great way where there's natural user interface natural way of interacting with the vehicle how are you guys thinking about what that's going to look like in the future future iterations of you so next week we're actually doing an ai and autonomy day which you know excited can't tell too much about it but you guys will hear about it then but it's a big part of our process and how we're thinking about this.

27:33With our fully integrated software and network architecture, it gives us full control over anything within the vehicles, whether that's the cameras, to body controllers, to lights, I mean, UI, you name it. So the possibilities of what, you know, AI can do in the vehicle, I'm really excited to see some of those use cases. And, you know, you could imagine just dreaming up some things. I mean, we were just talking about this last night where something is used, one use case is an example. If you've got a car in front of you and and maybe that car you know what kind of car it was or you wanted to check a license plate to just talk to the vehicle and say what car is in front of me and using using ai could tell you what car is in front of you it could tell you what the license plate is because it's using the camera and obviously the llms to be able to calculate that for you or if you're trying to go somewhere for navigation and you're trying to explain um you know i'm tired and you just say i'm tired you don't need to say find me a hotel xyz where it can use customer data as well to provide maybe options for hotels that is something that you would probably go to versus something you may not because the vehicle will know you and and it also can integrate things like charging stops so you're so it's aware i mean that's one of the things that we get a lot of questions on you know carplay versus android auto um versus versus our system and the big unlock for us and why we're so bullish on our software is because we can add in all these other layers of data from the vehicle that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

29:02One thing that caught my attention as we were driving around yesterday is that built into the software, it's recording incidents of someone trying to tamper with your gear as part of the brand, like the gear guard, the little Yeti looking guy, and also So accidents and so forth, is that also part of a vision for how AI could change the user experience? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we keep adding to our gear guard in terms of functionality. I mean, the vehicle in general, we're adding a lot of additional features that really start to build these systems. It's just a matter of time. Honestly, we have no shortage of ideas.

29:39It's just like really we'll work with our software team and sort of prioritize. like what do we think are the most things that are from a customer overall delight and you know requests or things like that so we're always trying to do these trade-offs in terms of what's the best next feature but you know as we start to put in ai it's going to unlock a lot of use cases and experiences that we haven't even thought of before because a lot of the things you normally have to do either need to press a few buttons or type some things in that require a multitude of things to do which while you're driving is probably not the easiest thing to do um i've personally never been a big fan of voice assistants um not just because most of them have never worked but that a lot of times it's just easier like if you look at it on a phone is a great example i don't think people use not a lot of people want to talk to their phone because it's not that hard devices in your hand to actually type it out and and that's an example of of an area where i don't think it's used as much as it could be used even if you said that the you know the voice assistant is great but if you're in the car and you've got two hands on the wheel and you've got just a lot of distractions you know in front of you the last thing you want to do is start you know fiddling around to find something or try to do something some multitask like the ai is going to bridge that in a way that you know even for those like me that are maybe anti-voice assistants don't want to talk to the car it starts to realize well actually this is a lot easier to do and that's what it is if you have to convince somebody on a technology that it's a better technology you should use it you've already failed honestly so the uh sounds really put up with our ai uh producer to the test here siren a helicopter jackhammer you got everything waiting for the parakeets to fly by next um we're on the we're on the ui uh subject we talked a little bit yesterday about figuring out this balance between what might be a physical control in the car and what might be in the ui on the screen and some brands like tesla really push towards the screen to the point where at least I find it really annoying to have to dig through a menu to just change the airflow some cars like I happen to have a Ford Mustang Mahi and it it actually has an artifact button now which used to do something but doesn't anymore and so it's basically useless so you can kind of you can make an error on both sides so maybe talk about how you design for that challenge are they when you're trying to design for an interior especially we get a lot of feedback you hear it a lot where customers are like hey I just want a physical control This would be so much easier.

32:05So instead of just saying, all right, let's do a bunch of physical controls or let's go the Tesla approach and don't do any, it's like we're really trying to balance how can we give the customers actually dig deeper to understand why do you want a physical control? For what function? What are you trying to do? And when you start to ask that and you dig deeper from customer feedback, there's not that many things that people really want to be able to adjust. The most common feedback we've ever got is anything HVAC related. Honestly, that's been the most thing. Like I want to be able to control fan speed or temperature.

32:34Like that's one of the ones we hear a lot. Now we have our temperature right on the screen and you're able to tap some buttons. There's still a lot of cars that have either haptic buttons in their cars or I know those have not really have been great customer feedback on them, but they've existed before. But something as simple as like the drive selector. We were talking about this quite a bit early when we were designing R1. Like what do we do? Do we create this little terrain selector? We have all these great drive modes. Like how do you address them? And a lot of cars celebrate it, right? They either have like a big dial a la Range Rover Jeep, or you have some old school like shifter mechanism, or we were talking about the Lamborghini Urus that's got this crazy fighter jet looking shifter there.

33:14But at the end of the day, all those things are doing is they're not mechanically attached. They're sending an electronic signal to the vehicle to change. And that's a design choice that they've decided to make. And we talked about it quite a bit, but then we realized to put this control in here, what are you gaining from it it's going to take up storage it's going to clutter the design of the vehicle and gives you lose opportunities and the biggest way is as you mentioned is once you label control like that's it that control has to do that for the rest of the life of the vehicle unless you just make it dummy or you for a new update you change it and with our vehicles and really wanting to be a software defined vehicle is well by doing that that hinders you So we're very sharp on what are the controls we want always to be physical.

33:58So things like turn signal wipers, we're like, it's just so easy to do that. Why change it? And the PRND, we also decided to keep that as a physical control because it's about what's the fastest and easiest thing to do. And yes, through the UI, some things you have to dig into. I think as we were just talking earlier, I think AI is going to bridge the gap on some of that. But for R2, really excited about the haptic halo wheels we've designed, which, you know, that gives us an opportunity now with different haptic profiles and changing within our UI, as we can really change with the experience of those wheels are doing, depending on what the use case is.

34:33You know, I was talking a little bit about it, but as you're going through a menu, you can not only visually see that it's rotating as you go through it, but it's also giving you a haptic feeling to let you know you've gone to the next menu item. And when you're top of the menu, it'll resist and tell you, all right, you're at the top of the menu. Or if you're changing volume, it can give you these like small distinct clicks. If you're somebody who wants fan speed or temperature, you could program one of them to be that that you use all the time. And we haven't even thought of all the use cases for it.

35:03But that's why we wanted to make a control that's really unique but allows us to address some of that feedback for customers. Because no matter what you do, in my mind, from terms of user experience in the car, there's always going to be somebody who wants something different. So the balance that we try to do, which is probably the most difficult thing, is like how do we make the vehicle UI as simple as possible, but still provide customization that's easy to use for those power users who really want to do X, Y, Z. And that's something where it's always a very, very delicate balance. I wouldn't say we've always got it right, but it's something we're always looking at because the power users are always the loudest ones.

35:40People that just want to get in and drive, they won't say anything. They'll just be like, this is complicated. So trying to cater to those two different audiences is really the challenge. So every person from Rivian I've talked to the past couple days, it always comes up, what are you excited about R2? Catch us up on R2 when it's coming and what's exciting to you about it. So really excited for R2. It's coming out first half of next year. and why I think myself and a lot of the companies are really excited about it is it's a vehicle that will help the Rivian brand scale. It's taken all the essence of what a Rivian is and distilled it down to a smaller package that's more affordable so a lot more people can get to enjoy the vehicles.

36:24And as a designer or a product development person or anybody within the company, it's like the more you can see the products that we've been working on and creating around the roads is what gets people excited. for me specifically why I'm excited about it you know R1 was our first product you know and this is as RJ said you know this is R2 is our second album and for our second album it's our Abikini and like what like how are we going to make sure that we take all the things that are great about R1 and not only you know distill them down and yes we got to reduce costs but in a lot of ways make it even better so we learn so much from R1 to R2 just through us being a more mature organization to a lot of customer feedback because now we have a lot of people put out of the vehicles.

37:08And there's a lot of things from an engineering, a design perspective that I'm really excited to do and help push it into the future and especially on the user experience side as well. So I'm excited about the R2 because I've had my eye on the R1T for a while, but our garage space, Paul, so I think something a little more compact is probably more reasonable both on the budget, but also garage space. So one of the kind of unique things that we explore here, the little pavilion that we're at is the scent design that you all are exploring. And when you think of automotive companies, really the only scent that comes to mind is kind of the new car smell that everybody seems to like.

37:47I don't personally love it, but I guess it is nice to have at least a car that doesn't smell like dogs and whatever the kids have been spilling in the back for the last few years. But why bother tackling that challenge when it's not something people normally associate with an automotive brand? Yeah, we haven't, you would say people don't associate with it, but I think a lot of people actually do very subconsciously. Like, you know, obviously, Sense is one of those things that's the most tied to memory. And me, and maybe I'm a little bit of an edge case, but I think there's others like that that have this like memory of like certain cars.

38:20There are certain cars that I just know you could blindfold me and put me into it. And I'd maybe not tell you the exact model, but I'd be able to tell you the brand or the year, roughly, just based on what it smells like. Because not because I'm an expert on scents or smells or anything like that. It's more because I have these memories of it. And whether that was when I was a kid getting into a vehicle that my father owned or a vehicle that I owned and absolutely loved. and tying that to the vehicle is something, you know, we really want to then always look at what are the ways we can continue to not only elevate our brand, but to create memories and longevity, that idea of timelessness.

38:56And scent is an area we haven't yet explored. And he said, like, the new car smell. I mean, new car smell, yes, some people love it. It's really, most of it is honestly materials off-gassing, like that's what you're smelling in a new car. The smell of leather, you know, that's part of the tanning process. It's actually blethered as a smell like that. And when you just get it, like raw cows don't smell like that. So it's really the tanning process. So we're looking at new ways of like, how can we insert smell into the inherent material? It's not to say that we, you know, we're totally against doing some atomizer in there.

39:26But that's, I mean, I think that could be something if we wanted to do, but we could do relatively easily. More excited about things like, you know, we look at materials for color, textile, the type of texture it has on it. The haptic, what does it feel like? And the next element is you got look, touch, smell. Probably not going to try to do taste. I think it'd be weird if you're licking your material. But that's the next one we're excited to sort of dig into and say, how can we change that experience? So where is your interest in cars come from? Is that something from your childhood that you talked about, you know, memories that you have with smell?

40:04But what's your connection to cars? Yeah, I mean, at a very young age, I loved cars. My dad was into cars and like the fun thing for me was, you know, helping my dad clean his cars on a Sunday or going to the auto show in Toronto. And I was just obsessed with cars. I knew I wanted to be a car designer since I was six years old. The way it happened was when my dad was into Mercedes, I still remember the car he had. It was a smoke silver, a tan interior, 5.6 ESL. I still love that car. I'm like half tempted to own one someday, but they keep going up in price. and it was one of those cars that I would find myself just you know getting in the car as a kid and just sitting in it and just like moving just sitting it touching the steering wheel like playing around with the controls and my dad would get these magazines that Mercedes would send him and I remember looking like inside of one of the magazines and there was this book because I was artistic I didn't know what I was gonna do I'm six years old right so I don't know and I got this book It was from Mercedes and there was some drawings and there was an article on Bruno Sacco.

41:04I still remember during, you know, during, during the late, late eighties and early nineties timeframe. Some of my, my favorite designs from Mercedes was during that time and, and looking at that, that magazine seeing, well, wait, this is actually a profession. And like, I had a conversation with my parents about it. I said, well, this is, this is what I want to do. So since then, you know, I mean, I, I'd like to look at inspiration of many different things. weren't looking at the cars but when i say i'm obsessed with cars i'm obsessed with them when i'm not working on cars at at work i'm working at them at home i'm going to track days i'm wrenching on my cars i'm watching youtube videos it just it's it's cars in my happy place so it's awesome six years old that's pretty early to discover design as a career it's probably maybe one of the earliest that we've found in our yeah our interviews that's awesome so rivian's mission I'm just paraphrasing here, but it's about keeping the world adventurous.

41:56And there's obviously also very mission driven, sustainability focused aspect of it. So how do those two things guide your team? When you look at R1, everyone, mom, everyone, most people associate adventure lifestyle that could be, you know, surfing, kayaking, overlanding. With R2 as well, we're really trying to say expanding the definition of adventure. and adventure doesn't mean just going out and doing these heroic things a heroic thing could be taking a new job and moving across the country you know heroic thing or adventurous thing to do is and which we tested with r1 um going to ikea with some kids and trying to load those boxes into a vehicle and just watch everything an adventure exactly just watching that just be like yeah you're like how do we help solve solve these things so really expanding the definition of adventure um adventure also means something very different for each person but then r2 being a global product, you know, the way that, you know, you could say California or Miami look at adventure are very different than, I don't know, Michigan.

42:57Well, what about when you go into Europe? I mean, that is going to have to expand as well. So we still want to have that sharp point. We're not trying to be everything for everyone, but how can we expand that? In terms of sustainability, on the design side, we're always looking at ways that we can continue to improve on a sustainability side, whether that's obvious ones through material choices and whether that's low carbon footprint, or is it recycled content or upcycled things? And we're using some of those materials in R2. We like to say that sustainability is a journey. So every vehicle we make, we have a target for ourselves.

43:31It's like, how can we make this vehicle more and more sustainable from a material choice of manufacturing method? But also even just the way you design things. I'll use this as one example. On R1, the headliner's got like one big, big piece to it. So that middle portion gets cut out and that's like scrap material at this point. and you know we've tried to find other things where we turn those into bags but like we learn from that as well so for r2 the way we broke up the trim and the headliner uh is so much simpler and to walk it's actually not simpler in terms of shape but simpler in terms of the material usage that actually prevents us from doing more scrap because as you're cutting pieces out of a car you're finding that you're you're doing waste so those are the things where it's like not only does it reduce cost because it's less material using it's more sustainable and those are the things that we're pointing out where the customer is not going to notice that you've done that but it's a more sustainable for the vehicle but be cost less in the end so jeff what have you been watching reading um listening to that brings new perspective or fresh eyes to your work it really uh i've been spending obviously a lot of times the buzzword right now is like looking at ai tools like really trying to understand that side of it in terms of how it can improve our workflow.

44:45But in terms of inspiration, really try to look out for inspiration, especially when we're looking at colors as an example. It's just doing trips with my family and experiencing the vehicle that we have and learning new things. Or I was using one of the oranges we have here. It was about a couple months ago. Went to Yellowstone and was inspired by some of the colors in the Gagers where they've got these beautiful mixed oranges with these amazing like teal blues like just amazing color spaces and looking through inspiration from nature i know that's obviously or or an outdoor brand is something normally you would do but we we really try to as myself included is not look for inspiration or or look at the automotive industry we look at it just to be aware of what's going on but if you look too heavily on it you're just going to emulate what someone else has done so really looking at different uh areas and that could be consumer electronics or it could be some of the outdoor goods that our customers use.

45:39Where can people learn more about the work you and your team do and also about Rivian in general? If you want to learn more about Rivian and the Rivian design team, there's a lot of pieces that we've done that you can find some of those on different media outlets, on YouTube, of course, as well. If you want to learn more about Rivian specifically, go to our website, clearly, our Instagram, Rivian Official. And then spaces. We have a bunch of different spaces in different parts of the country where you can go in, on experience the vehicles, see the color of materials, or schedule a demo drive. Well, Jeff, this has been super fun to hang out with you and the team here in Miami.

46:12So thanks for being on Design Better. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys coming over.

46:20Jeff Hammoud:This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.