Envisioning the Future and Going Back: A Human-Centered Strategy to Develop the Styling of a Sports Car

Developing a vehicle means uncertainty because the competitiveness of global market implies investing high sums in advance without knowing if the final solution will be successful after its launch. Therefore, automotive styling must be well executed to reduce management risks and adopting a Human-Centered approach at the early stages of the process is one of the best strategies to avoid negative outcomes. In particular, the research used the Vision in Product Design, a strategic model to envision the concept in the future to anticipate future trends or upcoming wishes. However, since ViP generates a prediction because its context factors belong to the future, the research would risk of not completely matching costumer expectations because of future uncertainty. Therefore, the research pushed the intent of the vision backward, in a mediated context, where the character of the vision was merged with the real expectations of people gathered in the current context.