AUTOMOTIVE SYSTEMS

MERCEDES-BENZ · AUDI · KISKA PROJECT: Strategic Design Partnerships (University) ORGANISATION: Mercedes-Benz · Audi · KISKA (via Folkwang University of the Arts) CATEGORY: Design Education | Industry Collaboration | Foundation YEAR: 2010 – 2014 I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE IN THAT ROOM Second semester at Folkwang. Prof Rempen's "Semester mit dem Stern" — a structured collaboration between Folkwang and Mercedes-Benz. Seventy students, most of them seniors in their final semesters. I was in my second. Nobody told me to be there. I showed up because I wanted in. These were not classroom exercises. They were real industry collaborations — with NDAs, hotel stays, ICE tickets, and direct access to Mercedes headquarters, facilities, and management in Stuttgart. Folkwang's design programs partnered with companies who wanted fresh thinking from design students, and the students who delivered got invited back. MERCEDES-BENZ: THREE COLLABORATIONS Semester mit dem Stern (2nd semester) A full-semester program. Primarily senior students — and me, in my second semester. Weekend access to an S-Class. Multiple visits to Stuttgart. Meetings with Mercedes managers. Museum visits. Full immersion. I did not wait to be ready. I went. Denkfabrik — Böblingen facility (4th semester) 2 full-day design thinking workshop at Mercedes-Benz's Böblingen facility. Eight students total — I was in my 4th semester, the others in their 10th of their diploma. Plus the Dekan, Dozent, and Mercedes staff. One- to two-minute brainstorming rounds on rotating topics, early morning to late evening. NDA. Hotel. The full program. The topic was autonomous driving and human-car interaction. This was 2014 — the conversation around autonomous vehicles was still early, and the questions were not about sensor arrays or processing power. They were about what happens to human attention when control becomes ambiguous. When does trust build? When does it collapse? Those are experience design questions, not engineering questions. That distinction shaped how I thought about the work. Autonomous driving — interaction design (6th semester) A full-semester research and interaction design project on autonomous vehicles. Using Hassenzahl's experience-first framework — start from the human experience, then design the product — I observed how real people related to existing assistance systems: adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, parking assist. When did trust build? When did it collapse? What triggered the hand hovering back toward the wheel? From those observations, I developed conceptual models describing autonomous driving as a series of human transitions rather than a technical state. Not design solutions — frameworks for thinking about experience before shaping form. These were project deliverables presented as part of the semester program. My healthcare background shaped this directly. I had watched technically excellent treatments fail because nobody understood how patients actually behaved. The same pattern appeared in automotive: technically brilliant assistance systems that people did not trust, did not understand, or used in ways engineers never intended. Different domain. Same gap between what the system assumes and what the human actually does. AUDI: DESIGN LANGUAGE & STRATEGY A semester project focused on design strategy. The brief: analyze and explain Audi's design language — why specific design decisions create the brand identity they do. Extend the analysis to Volkswagen's design language for contrast. Then develop a strategy project applying those principles. This was where I learned to read design decisions as strategic choices — not aesthetic preferences, but deliberate signals about who a product is for and what it promises. KISKA: PRODUCT CREATION FROM BRAND & USER INSIGHT A full-week intensive with KISKA — the Austrian design and innovation consultancy. The focus: how companies create new products from brand identity and the customers they want to attract. Research the future user, understand the design language, develop the product through insight about who it is for. The process was about focus, experience with the product, and obsessive attention to detail — looking at every element, understanding why it exists, then executing through CMF (color, material, finish) and iteration. An ideation and execution exercise compressed into one week. The most concentrated education in product strategy I received at Folkwang. WHY THIS PAGE EXISTS None of these were employment. They were university-industry collaborations through Folkwang's design programs. I want to be clear about that. But they shaped how I think about design as strategy — not decoration. They taught me to start from human behavior, not technical capability. They gave me direct exposure to how Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and KISKA approach product development. And the pattern that started here — I did not wait for the opportunity to come to me, I went and found it — repeated at VDID, at Grau, and in every role since. The principle I took from all of it: understand human experience before building systems. Whether the system is a vehicle, a service, or an organization.