Designer's lines live on in bikes

Designer Peter Naumann has a theory as to how many new cars seem to look the same, writes PAUL OWEN.

He might have won numerous design awards, and his Royal College of Art (London) classmates are now the heads of design at Aston Martin, Audi, and Volkswagen, but Professor Peter Naumann is content with his freelance self-employed life.

It's a choice that gets reinforced whenever he catches up with salaried colleagues who are now high-profile employees of motor corporations.

"They all say to me: 'Peter, you're so lucky that you didn't join the car industry'."

Instead, the Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Munich began his own design studio with his partner, Bea, and both established Naumann-Design at the forefront of the transport and lifestyle fields. Naumann might inhabit the fringes of automotive design as a freelance consultant, but that doesn't prevent him from working on the top-secret Lamborghini project he is engaged with while visiting New Zealand.

He first made his name with helicopters, with the early sketches he did during his time as an intern at Eurocopter, and the ANAX design that completed his master's thesis at London and put him on the cover of design magazines throughout Europe. Naumann fully expected to become a helicopter specialist after his training, but an offer of work at BMW directed his talent towards the world of two-wheeled vehicles.

"They came to see me in 1992 and said: 'We have a really tricky project for you'. It was the C1 [a scooter with a roof], which was based on a concept originally drawn up by the car designers and none of the BMW bike designers wanted to touch it.

"Then I saw what the single engineer working on the safety- vehicle project had created.

"It looked like a two-wheeled tank with gigantic rings of steel around it. It was hard to convince him how this frame had to change."

However, Naumann succeeded, and with the help of a fantastic team of modellers, "we made something that was good to look at". The C1 was the most-published object of the 1993 Cologne Motorcycle Show, and although it took BMW several more years to put it into production, it established Naumann's reputation as a motorcycle designer and led to further commissions from Honda, Yamaha, Kymco, KTM, Touratech, and MZ.

The tag of bike designer is one Naumann is happy to wear, despite his work on cellphones for Siemens, laptops for Sony, switchgear for Wohler, and crash helmets for Schuberth. "A motorcycle is the most difficult product to design, because everything motor, wheels, etc, has to work together."

He is also proud to be one of just 20 professional motorcycle designers in the world, a select group that includes highly creative individuals such as Massimo Tamburini, Pierre Terblanche and Miguel Galluzzi.

"Miguel attended [the transport design course at] the Royal College with me, and would only draw motorcycles because he hated cars."

Naumann says it is quite a challenge to make money as a bike designer, because of the smaller scale of the motorcycle industry when compared with automotive work.

"Fortunately, my name is in the playground, and I'm lucky that there is always another motorcycle or scooter to design."

He now hopes to reverse a design trend he feels in some way responsible for.

"With the MZ1 concept bike, we needed an extreme identity and wanted the bike to have character straight away. It was inspired by stealth bombers, etc, and won just about every bike design award. Now bike design is getting too grotesque and out of hand. Even the Japanese have joined in. Look at the latest bikes from Honda and Yamaha. They all have that eagle look."

Naumann expects his new six- cylinder bike, due to be unveiled in May-June, to herald a return to a more basic approach.

"I want people to look at that bike and say: at last, someone has done a real motorcycle again. There's not a lot of bodywork, and the heart of the design is the engine. It's the opposite of the latest six-cylinder concept bike from BMW in that there isn't a lot of styling on it. They've covered their bike in a plastic landscape, but I'm finished with styling. I did too much of that in the past."

Naumann is also critical of car design, where every car "has a big mouth like an Audi these days". He blames the increasing lack of distinction in auto design on the determination of car companies to select about five young designers annually from each of only three schools - the Royal College, the Art Centre College of Design at Pasadena, and the School of Design at Pforzheim University in Germany.

"With the leading young auto designers all emerging from the same training and background, it's no wonder the cars are starting to look the same."

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