Dear Ferrari,
Thank you for the “Interior & Interface” of your new Ferrari Luce.
Right. Bit of a hot-take here. And an absurd over-simplification, I know, given the much and rightly heralded involvement of Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson and the LoveFrom team.
Yes and, I’d love to think that you, and they (Jony and Marc) and your 100+ engineers, started with the very simple premise that a Ferrari is basically a toy.
A toy for the very rich. A toy for the mechanically minded and the luxury auto obsessed. A toy for the status-driven who want the thing that they cannot have – join the queue, put your money where your mouth is chaps, and maybe. But a toy nonetheless.
I’d love to think that you delved into the now far-off sub-conscience of the now middle-aged and now wealthy, to understand what toys meant to them in their childhood. What it meant to play, to discover, to make things do things through their own volition. And what toys could mean to them now.
I’d love to think that you heard these middle-aged (I think probably mostly men?) reminiscing about their Fischer Price Activity Centres.
And their Tomy Aaaaaagh! Handheld games. Their Screwball Scrambles.
The joy, the delight, the unspoken satisfaction of the clunks, the clicks, the physical movements.
I know, I know, the prevailing narrative is all about moving back away from ubiquitous and frustrating touchscreens, the reintroduction of genuinely haptic interfaces. Oh the irony given everything Sir Jony did for touchscreens. And you’re all about redefining the EV category rules (I think you are doing that by the way). But from what I understand, LoveFrom’s approach was “very human-centred”.
Well amen.
And what is more human-centred than tapping into the deep foundations that are laid down in the lightness of our childhoods?
In those precious and crucial early years.
We might all be in total denial. Or perhaps just lacking the self-awareness about the extent of the impact of our childhood on our adult selves, of course. (I doubt that incidentally, as will your Therapist, I suspect).
But with our brain connections developing faster in the first 5 years than at any other time in our lives, the evidence of the impact does appear to be there. Even if your human-centred design approach took an entirely different line, I’m grateful for the formative childhood feelings and associations that the “Interior & Interface” of your new Ferrari Luce arose (awoke, inspired, stirred?) in me. Well, the pictures at least. Thanks again Ned