Hugo Eccles on industrial design and reimagining personal transport

How did you make the transition from industrial design to motorcycle design?

I’ve been a petrolhead since I was a kid, long before I was a professional industrial designer, so the two have coexisted for decades. I did some vehicle design work in Europe with Ford and Peugeot, but it was my move to California in 2014 that really set things in motion. Approximately half of all American EV companies are based in California and, as I started meeting these companies and hearing their challenges, I saw the opportunity to combine my two passions into a fresh approach to transport design.

EVs, and related technologies, are catalysing disruption and creating a need for innovation across the industry. It’s an opportunity to rethink not just motorcycle design but personal transport as a whole. What happens in this next decade will decide who leads and who’s left behind. Many incumbent brands are attempting to create new results by using old embedded processes and it’s not quite working. What the industry really needs is a new way of looking at things. I think this is where companies like ours that bring non-traditional skill sets and broader perspectives can help drive innovation. Industrial design, in particular, is a hugely powerful tool that can bring something to the table that traditional automotive styling cannot.

Ten years on, we’re now doing much more than just motorcycle design. We recently rebranded to UNTLD MOTO to reflect our broader remit across all powered personal transport from landcraft, to watercraft, to snowcraft and even aircraft. We’re working on partnerships across a range of those categories.

As a professionally-trained industrial designer how have you adapted your skills and knowledge to motorcycle design?

I don’t come from a conventional automotive styling background and, because of that, UNTLD can offer a different point of view. In this moment of industry upheaval, that’s proving advantageous. It’s less about industrial design adapting to transport design and more about using industrial design’s advantages to help transport companies into the future.

Professionally, I use many of the same skills that I used in my decades at design agencies like IDEO, Landor and Omnicom. I’ve always translated intangible strategy into tangible physical products, but now I’m focused on the challenges and opportunities of personal transport. Business talks a lot about verticals, but I believe that much of the power of design - especially industrial design - comes from its horizontal approach. Industrial design is broad by nature, and that breadth of skills and knowledge is applicable across categories and can help solve problems that vertical thinking struggles to tackle. Design is less a skillset, per se, and more of mindset. It’s a way of seeing the world, understanding challenges as opportunities, thinking laterally and asking the right questions. That mindset lets industrial designers see beyond what’s expected to find new and novel solutions across industries and sectors.

As I mentioned, transport design wasn’t completely new to me when I founded UNTLD. I’d previously worked on projects for Volkswagen, Honda and Peugeot-Citröen, and spent the entirety of 2003 embedded at Ford in Köln, Germany working on concepts for J. Mays (designer of the Audi TT, Ford Mustang, VW New Beetle and RCA Intelligent Mobility Programme visiting professor, among other things). We proposed a number of innovations that are just now coming to market, so we were more ahead of our time than we imagined. That early experience of seeing what industrial design could achieve in the transport world definitely planted a seed.

Your XP electric motorcycle breaks away from preconceived notions and limitations of what a motorcycle is supposed to look like. Are electric motorcycles the way forward?

Electric motorcycles are certainly one way forward, but not the only way. I think it’s more constructive to treat this as an “and” conversation rather than an “or” conversation. I do think that we can say, with confidence, that petrol is not the way forward. I see petrol as an experiment that’s run its course. But what replaces it is still up for debate. It could be electric, or hydrogen, or something new that’s yet to emerge. Most likely, it’ll be a blend of technologies and energy sources applied to individual use cases. There will be more choices and, I hope, more positive implications for transport companies, their customers and our society.

With our XP project with Zero Motorcycles, we began with a couple of simple but provocative questions. We asked ourselves: What would a 2020s motorcycle look like if motorcycles had always been electric? What would the result of 130 years of development look like? The goal was to interrogate the design legacy of combustion engines, challenge expectations of what a motorcycle should be and start afresh from first principles. In the process, we created a new design language for electric motorcycles and an aesthetic that is uniquely ownable by Zero. The XP does look somewhat futuristic, but that wasn’t the goal. Whatever the future holds, it’ll require new perspectives to drive the industry forward, and that’s where UNTLD MOTO comes in.

What do you think is the future of the motorcycle industry, given the advancements in electric vehicles?

Well, the first priority is to keep the motorcycle industry alive and healthy. I believe that we do that by attracting new audiences and nurturing the next generation of riders. Electric bicycles and motorcycles have been a real boon in this area, but most incumbent brands, deeply invested in traditional combustion motorcycle culture, do risk falling foul of the classic “innovator’s dilemma,” like when Nokia was confronted by the iPhone. We’re seeing what happens when an atom industry meets a bit generation. If established brands are going to catch up with emerging electric brands – and I hope they do, because more players means more innovation – they’ll need outside perspectives that challenge their internal status quo and help them embrace new technologies and attract new audiences.

Tell us about the process of designing and prototyping motorcycles.

We work with all sorts of companies, from startups to early stage companies, to established marquee brands, so ours is not a “one size fits all” process. Many design agencies tend to have a proprietary process that they use regardless of the client’s actual needs, but it's not an approach we take at UNTLD. We find that we have more success if we tailor our process to our client rather than vice-versa.

I’m a petrolhead at heart - and have been for even longer than I’ve been a designer - so on the one hand I really revel in and enjoy the history and culture of cars and motorcycles. On the other hand, I’m not a traditionally-trained automotive stylist so I have the ability to ask the “wrong” questions that often lead to new ideas and innovation. We’re at a really exciting inflexion point in the industry where there’s beginning to be an awareness that long-held conventions about motorcycles need to be questioned. Why does an electric motorcycle need a petrol tank? What opportunities do new manufacturing processes suggest? What do new technologies enable? Can we take our riding preferences with us from bike to bike so we’re only transporting bits and not atoms? It’s an exciting time.

Often with clients, we will either help them develop a platform, or work with an existing one. We prefer to be involved from the outset so that design considerations can be integrated into the engineering from the get-go. If we’re working with an existing platform, we’ll strip it down to the bare minimum to understand its “essence.” It’s difficult to make a platform into something it doesn’t want to be and, in our experience, trying to force it to do so results in less successful design.

In either case, if I were to oversimplify the difference between UNTLD and more conventional automotive studios, I would say that our approach is, at its core, people-centric. We tend to design from the “inside outwards,” starting with human needs first and then fitting the necessary forms around those needs, whereas automotive tends to design from the “outside inwards,” starting with an exterior form and then attempting to fit a human inside.

You strive to design motorcycles that avoid the standard sexism, ableism and exclusion so prevalent in the industry. How is UNTLD MOTO doing this?

Motorcycling culture is associated with a number of values that are problematic to say the least and, unfortunately, some parts of the industry continue to perpetuate them. In the 1960s Honda ran a famous advertising campaign featuring men and women riding Honda motorcycles with the tagline “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” as a response to the male-focused, macho marketing of motorcycle brands at the time. Unfortunately, half a century later, many brands are still using these misogynistic tropes while, unsurprisingly, struggling to attract female riders and other newcomers. It’s an attitude that also prevails in the physical design of motorcycles with male-centric ergonomics that exclude other kinds of riders.

Our people-centric approach inherently lends itself to more inclusive outcomes. Alongside our corporate work, UNTLD also undertakes a select number of private commissions every year, and we’re currently working with a triple-amputee client on a motorcycle designed around his unique tastes and needs. The motorcycle itself won’t go into production (the nature of disabilities is that they tend to be individual-specific), but there are some exciting learnings and innovations that will definitely inform our wider work.

You judge many design awards. What impresses you?

I’ve been very lucky to both participate in, and judge, a number of prestigious awards over the years and I’m currently an ambassador for the Good Design Awards. I’m constantly impressed by the energy and imagination of the design entries, and that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

There are a lot more electric vehicles being submitted, and I’m really excited about that. At the same time, there’s still a tendency to design those vehicles around existing combustion typologies, which would be good to see challenged and reimagined. I’d love to see more designs going back to first principles, designing for new audiences and really upsetting the status quo. Let’s use this opportunity as designers to reimagine what vehicles, and the concept of “transport” as a whole, can become.

You’re also a design professor. What advice do you give your students?

I’ve been teaching industrial design for about 25 years, alongside my professional practice. It’s a privilege to help shape the next generation of designers, and some days I think I learn as much from them as they do from me. I always advise my students to push themselves to think more broadly and more deeply, to look at things from every conceivable angle and turn “impossible” problems into innovative opportunities. Today these skills are more valuable, and more valued, than ever. Consumers crave innovation and appreciate great design. At a societal level, there are huge challenges that need solving. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a designer, and I want my students to be able to affect a positive impact. As designers, at this unique moment, we have a very real opportunity to improve the world. Let’s not waste it.