PEOPLE INTERIOR VIEW DAVE WALKER, 51 Day job: Chief engineer, vehicle concept & package Spare time: I go walking and camping with my two teenage boys. I also like video games, my favourite is Team Fortress 2 People often think engineers are just about the numbers and the physics of how to engineer the car, but to do that well you have to understand what the car is about and how that’s expressed. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up with something very logical and unemotional and Jaguar is nothing if not emotional. I think the way we did the boot on the F-PACE is a good example. A really passionate engineer might want to shrink-wrap the boot [to gain extra luggage space] but you’d end up with something that frankly would be a mess. What we do is try to make the boot more straightforward and usable, so it actually looks like you can put large items in easily. You might lose the odd half litre of volume here and there but the end result is far better. We did a lot of work on the driving position. For instance, on the front seat we tipped the nose of the the seat up and the back of the seat down about two degrees from what we would normally do. It doesn’t sound like much but it transforms the car. We put expert dynamics drivers in cars with two alternatives and they came back raving about the change. There is still a range of seat adjustment but inherently the seat is sat that little bit more ‘knees up’ and that’s a typical sports car driving position. It makes you think that way. We even digitally measured one of my engineers’ dogs – Roly, a Golden Retriever – to assess how easily dogs could get in and out. We measured Roly standing up on all four paws and sitting down, because I don’t know if you know, but dogs are taller when sitting down. PEOPLE OFTEN THINK ENGINEERS ARE JUST ABOUT THE NUMBERS BUT TO DO THAT WELL YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE CAR IS ABOUT DAVE WALKER, CHIEF ENGINEER, VEHICLE CONCEPT & PACKAGE 22 j THE DESIGN ISSUE
INFOTAINMENT GURU Alister Whelan talks interiors with Dave Walker in the Design Centre ALISTER WHELAN, 40 Day job: Head of interior design Spare time: I’ve got a little magnesium-bodied Fuji X-T1. It’s a compact camera but has many lenses and has rekindled my passion for photography. I have a young daughter so I take lots of pictures of her The space that we create inside the car is just as important to designers as it is for the packaging experts. It’s about finding the right balance between the metricdriven analysis and perceived quality, space and usability. One of the nicest things for me on the F-PACE was how we retained that sporty driving feel. We’ve never done a car this practical before and we knew consumers find the command driving position appealing on SUVs, but we still wanted it to feel like a Jaguar, so we put these buttresses on the side of the centre console and pulled down the Riva hoop line at the bottom of the windscreen and the door shoulder line so it makes you feel like you are sat inside the car rather than on it. PETER VIRK, 37 Day job: Director of Connected Technologies & Apps Spare time: My job is actually my hobby. I have a connected home and try experiments out there. Cycling is a way to clear the mind and gives me time to think. I have twin boys so my family takes up a lot of my time The department I run didn’t exist three years ago. The consumer world is changing so we needed to bring consumer technology to the car. Now we have 28 people on apps alone and 400-500 in total for infotainment. My team adds the user experience, what we call our InControl Apps, which run from your phone and project onto the car’s screen. The central infotainment screen has gone from seven inches up to 10.2 so it’s got to be designed to fit – that’s the hardware – and then we interact with the design team to make our graphics flow nicely with the interior theme. It’s not just a navigation screen anymore, it has audio, you can watch TV, it tells you the weather and reads out news articles while you’re on the move (all without being distracting). We want to create a hybrid system, because sometimes when you drive you’ll lose connectivity and we need an experience that can be used on- and offline. For instance, in some markets the system can already ask if you want a certain music track to play from your phone or from Spotify, rather than simply not working at all and going silent. Same for nav, we can cache all your data while you have connectivity. THE DESIGN ISSUE j 23
Jaguar Magazine celebrates creativity in all its forms, with exclusive features that inspire sensory excitement, from beautiful design to cutting-edge technology.
In this issue, we explore the art of creativity from the Brazilian masters who devised the graceful art of Capoeira, to the Irish artists mixing new culture with old. You will also discover the creative line that links Victorian wallpaper to the iPhone. While the multi-talented actor and performer, Riz Ahmed, explains why it is the right time to reveal his true self to the world.
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