Human Centric Design and the Mazda CX-30

to you by Mazda. The company invited me to come out to the Los Angeles Auto Show in November two thousand nineteen to check out their cars and specifically to get some hands on time with the c X thirty suv, and that included the chance to record an episode on the show floor inside a c X thirty. And I was talking about the concept of human centric design, specifically within the context of designing vehicles and even more specifically the c X there. So what you're about to hear

is the audio from that. It was recorded on Friday, November twenty second, two thousand nineteen, from the Mazda booth at the l A Auto Show. You will also hear some audio from a separate conversation with Dave Coleman, who's an engineer at Mazda. He's with their research and development division, and he talks in more detail about the kinds of decisions that go into creating a specific experience, which is kind of at the heart of the philosophy of human

centric design. There are a couple of other notes I want to mention before we jump into this. First is that this episode was recorded live in the Los Angeles Convention Center, and so it's not going to sound like the studio recordings. You'll likely hear a lot of extraneous sounds.

I even comment on it at one point. Another is that you may hear some other familiar voices when we get to Dave's discussions because Lauren voege Obama Brain Stuff, and and savor Uh and Jack O'Brien and Miles of the Daily Zeitgeist we're also there at the show, so they are occasionally chatting as well. You might hear their voices, and I will be popping in from the studio as in from where I'm recording right now a few times to help kind of bridge a few gaps between Dave's

discussions and the episode I recorded. So with all that business out of the way, let's hear that intro all over again, So take it away past Jonathan. Hey there, and welcome to text stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with my Heart Radio and I love all things tech and ladies and gentlemen. I am having quite the experience right now. I know a lot of you listeners out there. You like to listen to

me while you're in your car. Well, guess what. I'm recording this from inside a Mazda c X thirty at the l A Auto Show. Yeah. For once, I'm talking to you in a car. Let's just let's just hang out together for a while, shall we. So today I have the incredible opportunity to talk about the philosophy behind human centric design. This is something I've always been fascinated by. It's something that applies to all elements of design, no

matter what you are trying to create. But I'm specifically going to talk about it in the context of the Masda c X thirty because I happen to be sitting in the front seat of one, and it is also comfortable. This is actually tri I don't know where you are right now, but this seat is really good. So if you can talk to Mazda and find out how to get the seat in the studio to be just like

this one. That's great, and if you don't, you're fired. Okay, So I want to talk about the general principles behind design in the first place, and then we'll narrow it down. You guys know how my show goes. So let's say you're an engineer and you have defined what goal you're going for. You've identified a specific goal that you want to achieve. And beyond defining the goal, that's obviously one

of the first big parts of this process. You need to figure out what are your objectives and what are your challenges, what are the things standing in your way of achieving your goal, and you start to make decisions to try and get to your goal as best you can. Those decisions can sometimes end up having things that conflict with each other. You have to find a way to resolve those conflicts and to actually achieve the goal you have defined for yourself. This is not necessarily an easy

thing to do. It's one of the biggest challenges of engineering. It's why a lot of the engineers I've talked to relish their job. They love the process of sitting down and going from concept to reality and all the processes that go along with that. Now, some of that can end up being a lot of trial and error. A lot of it can end up being having to to retrace your steps, and if we're all being honest, not

all of it is super fun. Sometimes you try out an idea that you were convinced was going to be perfect and then you realize that, oh, you know what, it's good, but it just broke everything else. So it's a very tough process to actually go through. But once you have figured out all the different challenges, you defined your objectives, you start to ideate your solutions. You start to think, this is the way I think is the best for me to achieve the goal, and then how

do I go about actually making that reality. You go through that process, which can be laborious, and then you test it and you find out how well you did, and maybe it turns out that the solution you have is incredible on paper, but in reality it turns out to fall short. That's something that actually does happen quite a bit in all realms of technology, and I've seen this a lot in my uh storied career as a

technology journalist. You see attempts to try and achieve something really revolutionary, let's say, and in the process you might end up losing sight of what your initial goal was in the first place, which was to deliver something to an end user, whoever that may be, that is meaningful and and produces a specific result. Maybe that the thing you've created works really well again on paper, but that it doesn't feel like it works really well when you get it in the hands of the end user. That

is what human centric design tries to address. It tries to keep in mind that at the end of the day, you are making something to create a human experience, and that every decision you make ultimately needs to be geared toward that. Also, I'm probably gonna be dropping a lot of car puns unintentionally. It's just because I'm in this environment. So we've talked about that little element of challenge, this idea of trying to, you know, I, identify what your

goal is and to work your way to it. The next thing you have to think about is how your goal may end up working with, integrating with other goals that other people have, or it may conflict with those Because, as I'm sure you're all aware, something like a car, a vehicle. Uh, it's actually a collection of many different systems. Now, each system needs to contribute toward that end goal, that human centric goal where you're creating this feeling that you

want your end user to have. But they don't necessarily all work in harmony together natively. You can't expect that if you're working, let's say, on a drive train system and someone else is working on a different system, that those two are just going to magically work together and produce the perfect experience when it all comes out at

the end. You actually have to do a lot of collaboration, and sometimes that means that you're having lots of complicated conversations weighing your different goals, weighing your different priorities, and deciding which ones are going to take priority in one case versus another. You might be able to make some concessions. You might be able to kind of find a middle ground. You might be able to find use cases where one philosophy wins out over another. For example, we had a

chance to talk with a great engineer, Dave. He talked about how with the Masta c X thirty, there was this balance between performance and making sure that the ride was nice and quiet. And the problem is that as you start to weigh one of those, the other one begins begins to uh end up having needing more attention. So you have to figure out, well, where's the balance here. We want to make sure that we have all the elements here so that we create the feeling that we

really want our end users to have. And that is not something again that is natively obvious. It means that you have to have a lot of conversations, a lot of collaboration. Uh. And in the case of Mazda, as we learned while we were here at the auto show, that ends up being a lot easier because the teams are more closely located to one another. They aren't spread across the globe where you might have one team working

completely independently of the others. And then when you bring all the systems together, only then do you realize that you start seeing these conflicts. Hey, it's Jonathan from the booth again. But I just wanted to tell you that we're going to take a very quick break and come right back to the episode, So don't go anywhere, all right, guys,

it's Jonathan from the studio again. Now I figured This is a great spot to insert some audio that we captured with Engineered Dave Coleman that really helps illustrate what I was talking about earlier on. In this episode, we're going to start with Dave giving us the sort of mission statement his team had in mind and how they

went about trying to achieve it. So I guess at a high level, what we're trying to do with this car is gets something that is we'll let you do kind of just whatever it you want to do, wherever you want to go whatever. It's not really specifically tune to one particular kind of driving. UM. It's supposed to be really sort of natural and easy and capable enough to to do whatever hurt you're interested in. UM. So we wanted to make it so it's it's comfortable and

quiet every day, it's efficient, it's fun to drive. When you go out on twisty road and you want to go to some you know, rock climbing place or hiking trail and mountain bike and that's way up some dirt road that's really tricky. It's got to off road capability to get you there too, and it's balancing all the kind of the right way is a big trick. Um. We're we've been working on some new sort of off

road capabilities. It's mostly electronic trickery. UM, and sort of had to figure out where we draw the line on making our cars taple on offer. We've always been a completely on road company. Uh, and so we've we've sort of drawn the line that, uh, well, there's a lot of stuff you can do to make cars super capable offer road that ruins how it drives the rest of the time. So we've drawn the line that we won't do anything to compromise how it drives on the road,

but we still want all the capabilities to get places. Um. And this is the first car that we've got that's got an offer button that changes a bunch of the settings. UM. So some of the some of the kind of trick stuff that we're doing under the skin. UM. We've got our new all the drive system and the G Vectorian control system, which is a very weird, subtle thing for making the car behave in a way that feels more natural to people. UM. So we've I'll start with the

G factor in control. So, UM, we found that as you're driving, the very first moment you make the steering input The cars are a little bit Every car is a little bit inconsistent about how it makes that first bit of the turn. And the reason is because you're sitting on these theneumatic tires. It's just a balloon, right Uh. And in its straight ahead state, both sidewalls are sort of unloaded, and when you corner, one of sidewall goes slack and one starts pulling, and that's what's pulling the

car in the corners. So there's this transition period as the car starts to transition into that corner, and that's where things are kind of the most nervous for the driver's subconscious as they kind of DESI will when do I turn and how much do I turn? And once you get into the corner and everything feels naturally, you figure out what you're doing. But people aren't really consciously nervous.

But if you watch someone's steering inputs as they turn into a corner, a lot of times they turn in and back off and adjust a couple of times because they get it figured out. Uh. And so designed the system to try to attack that subtle problem that people didn't know they were doing. Um. And what we do is we figured out that we can we can wait, but a little bit more weight on the front tires just as you turn. Uh. And this is a trick

that we learned from race driving. Um I used to race rally cars racing off road in the gravel, and the rally drivers always using the left foot on the brakes. You turn the wheel and put a little bit of extra weight on the front tires and it makes them grab into the into the grab or turn the car. UM. A lot of broad racing guys will do this to one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, unlike on the street where you're left foots on the

clutch or just resting. But you've got one on each of you can you can constantly adjust the weight balance of the car. So we started sort of from that idea and tuned it and tuned it and tuned it, trying to make it so it's so subtle. You don't feel the car slowing down to shift weight under the front, but you do feel the response in the way the car turns. Um And now we've got a tune. So

there's steering system. As you turn the wheel, the electric power steering knows exactly what the put you're giving it, so it looks at the steering speed and that communicates with the engine computer and it tells it to reduce power just a hair and it dips a little bit of extra weight onto the front tires and tightens up the tires so they respond more directly. Um, we don't have any on off switch for that. They'll never feel it. It's it's soon so well that it just kind of

just feels normal all the time. Right. We've built a couple of cars with on off switches for that, and it's it's really funny because it's it's it's not super obvious, but it's once you kind of pick out what it's doing, it actually makes a difference even just driving completely straight ahead, because you don't realize is when you're driving straight you're making constantly making little corrections, right, and if each one of those has a little delay, and then to catch up,

you're you're constantly overshooting and coming back. And as soon as we turn the system on, people just just settle up because they make repression and would stick and they wouldn't have to make the next one of the next one and the next one. Um. So that's in all of our cars now. Um that that's called g Vactric control.

We just came out with the electric control plus which helps when you start straighten the wheel back out, um, and the the car will sometimes be a little bit slow to kind of come backing up the pull wheel straight and so to avoid that, we actually will drag the outside break just a hair and it suddenly just kind of kind of helps it straight back out. You don't again, you don't feel a break when you can switch it on and off. What you feel is it

feels soally normal. And then if if you were to switch the system off, you feel like steerings kind of going yeah, gun, yeah, gun's a good but yeah, it's just kind of overdamped and you kind of have to pull it back. Um. So we're really kind of down in the weeds of these little subtle details to get the car to feel natural and to feel totally almost so you don't notice all the work we did, right.

Is there like a general like description drivers have that like now that this stuff has been corrected, or do they just like say it's smoother, like you know, we've always had a focus on this kind of area. Um, so we've always sort of tuned our cars to feel just feel right and just feel until it used to be our slogan decades ago. It just feels right right. That's It's we've kind of always been trying to do the same thing. Um. So I don't think adding GBC

wasn't like a dramatic change. Was another tool in our toolbox of all these things that we're trying to do. If we took this system and put it on the car built by people who didn't care about this stuff, it wouldn't be enough to pick it right, but it's enough to sort of add in our direction of making the car, you know, more natural. Um. Sort of our our ind goal is to make driving a car so naturally you don't think about it. You're just you just drive,

just do exactly what you wanted to do. Um. The whole wheel drive system in this car we mechanically is the same as almost everybody's. You drive the front wheels, there's a clutch where you can connect the rear wheels sometimes when you need it and not when you don't.

And all the magic is in the software to figure out when you need it when you don't exactly how much, right, because if you're always driving the rear wheels, it uses a lot of extra fuel and it actually UM diffront reules have to go to the same speed when they're locked together, and so the car doesn't want to turn, and so you're always balancing its ability to turn with

its ability to drive the rear wheels. UM. We've come up with a system where we're running software algorithm that's basically kind of like a video game algorithm that's looking at the vehicle speed and cornering G acceleration G hand calculating exactly how much loaders on each tire based on

the vehicle dynamics model of how this car behaves. And so it's constantly calculating what load is on each tire and then distributing torque where it's needed to take advantage of that UM, which means that this actually can expand the performance envelope even on dry paving, not just in you know, wet or slippery conditions. UM. And that lets us use the OL wild drives to an advantage without using it in places but we don't need it waste

fuel right UM. And then there's a couple of places where those two ideas the g vactor control trying to get the car turning in precisely, and what the oil drive is doing where they don't get along where we're If we're driving the rear wheels at a certain time, it will make the car resists turning in because they're trying to go the same speed. And so we have to integrate those two systems so that the g vactor control gets the authority right at the moment that it

needs the car to turn. And then when you're steady state, it goes back and sends more to the rear, and then it straights back out and can even drag a little bit more to the rear to help. So it is a really complicated interplayoffs software to get all these systems and the cars to talk to each other. Uh. And it's it has to to get it to work at the speed that our mind is processing things so that it feels so that we were really fast in

what we can recognize, UM. So to to make it so we don't feel that it's doing something, but it just feels seamless, and it feels like as one unit. We had to redo a bunch of the computer hardware in the car to communicate faster, to get the signals from the steering into the into the thing that makes the decisions, and then into the into the e c U two from the to change the engine, now putta

to change the all world drive. Um, if I remember right, I think we've got fifty milliseconds from steering input before something has to happen at the other end or else people will notice. All right, Jonathan from the booth again, we're going to rejoin Dave a little further into that

conversation he had with us. You know, we talked about a lot of stuff in that conversation, not all of it pertains kind of to this human centric design concept, but he gave us a little more insight into the challenges behind making the interior of a vehicle quiet without making it too quiet. Again, this gets to that concept of you want to make an experience for the end user, but you have to make sure you're giving the right experience.

It's not just an experience, but the correct one. So we learned there's a very delicate balance to all of that. Here's Dave to explain a little further. Hopefully the first thing I'll notice is that it's quiet. You know, that used to be a weak point of ours. Because well, again, steering handling and n VH guys are fighting each farther, and we always wanted our cars to handle really well and sort of trying to elevate ourselves to the point where we can have the steering handling and have the

car drive right and still be quite uncomfortable. I'm recognizing how important that is. UM. We've sort of expanded our our performance envelope and a lot of looking at sort of how people hear things, what frequency ranges matter to them,

and what how it actually affects people. Um. And one of the things we've started figure out is that we're super sensitive to direction of sound, which means that if you hear, if the sound does get into the car and then uh, you hear reflect off the other window, you'll pick up that reflection, maybe not consciously, but it bothers you more than that same amount of noise just coming one high. So we put more damping into the car so that found from do get in damp out quickly.

It should be good for recording, right right. UM. And we've also worked really a lot on isolation from outside noises, so you don't hear the car next to you so much, and that We're trying to strack a balance because if you isolate too much, it's you don't practical reason became the Siren's But also at a more subtle level, you don't feel connected to what you're doing well, and you

you feel like you're not really controlling the car. You're driving a video game, like you don't feel We want to hear the road and feel the road just enough to feel connected and not enough to be annoyed. And that's the same with outside noises, like you want to know that car is there, but you don't want to know exactly what's wrong with his brakes. Jonathan, run the

boot one more time. Another thing that Dave said that I wanted to share was about how the team worked on the sound system for the Maths to See X thirty and they did to put the sub whiffers in a very special section of the vehicle and move it away from the traditional place, which is within the doors.

And in order to do that, they had to communicate and collaborate with the safety team to make sure that this design element they wanted to include would be factored into the structure of the vehicle from the very beginning. Here's what Dave had to say. One of the kind of trick ways that we improve the noise, the outside noise isolation in this car and improved the audio quality in the car was taking the big speakers out of

the doors. Everyone has their their subs in the door, right, because that's whether you have enough room for Um, that's a really inefficient place for a driver. Uh, in terms of the space of the car. It's it's driving the sounding that volume in the long spot. Um. And it also is a noise path from the outside, right. So um, we moved them up into the under the dash in sort of in the corner of the room. Because anytime you corner a load of speaker, the sound quality is

a lot better, right. Um. So it's a much more efficient way to get sound in the car. So if we don't have to put as much power in to get a better sound quality at the people's ears. Um. But also let's to steal off those doors. Um. This

is something I think everybody understood should be done. It's incredibly hard to do because the corners of the of the interior are actually a really critical crash structure and there's a lot of there's a lot of other departments buying for for real estate there right, Because the if you crash into something, the load from the bumper goes into the frame rails, which go right back into that corner of the car, and that's where the load has to stop crumpling things. We want everything in front of

the windshield to crumple and everything inside not too. And so that's a really strong structural corner. So normally you develop a car, you develt a crash structure first and

then everybody gets to work on after those. And we had to get this concept of trying to move the speakers up into the corners before we started the platform development, to say, hey, crash guys, you have a space for the speaker while you're doing that, and build that concept in all right, and and so it was a really sort of big accomplishment for us to pull off logistically. Dave was a lot of fun to talk to, and he helped us understand how these decisions to craft a

specific experience manifest in actual real world decisions and engineering choices. Now, these are things I typically take for granted. Whenever I use a product, I generally only think, you know, something like, wow, this thing is really easy to use or wow, this is a lot of fun, or sometimes on the flip side, because not everything is positive. Sometimes I think, who the heck thought this was a good design choice? Is so

inconvenient it's hard to get to. If you ever had a user interface where you've had to navigate, you know, five steps beyond what you thought would be necessary, you know what I'm talking about. It's it ends up being so frustrating that it actually creates a disincentive for you to use the technology. But I rarely give it much

more consideration than that sort of surface level. But talking with engineers really reveals how much thought has to go into this, and it also explains that sometimes it goes wrong because you have multiple groups all trying to get their various pieces of the puzzle into place, and sometimes that means that their peace and someone else's piece, while they were meant to fit together, don't. They might overlap, they might conflict, they might be a gap between them.

Those sort of things can happen when things don't go well. Now we're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, will rejoin me in the Mazda c X thirty. All right, So now we're gonna pick back up with me at the auto show, So you're gonna hear the audio audio quality change again, and I'll be talking about the importance of collaboration and communication, and away we go. That ends up saving a lot of time

in the design process there. I've seen a lot of different products come out where it was only in the testing phase that they realized that there were these sort of issues, and then it just meant having to go back through a redesign process, and typically it tends to be very similar to the first design process, which means you still have that problem of these isolated silos, these isolated departments that are each working towards their own goal

and not collaborating closely enough to get the end result they want. So that's a huge challenge in design in general. So you get to the point where you've built your solution, you've tested your solution, Uh, your systems are not in isolation, You've figured that part out, You've got your systems all working together, and then you see how well it works on paper, and then you throw people into it and

eyes you know technology. I've I've often told this to people when I talk about my role at the podcast Realm. You know, I've got a lot of podcast friends, a lot of coworkers who do great work in all sorts of fields. But they're talking about stuff like, you know, society and culture and and and money and stuff. What don't make sense, y'all. Technology, it makes sense. It either works or it doesn't. I have the easiest job, don't

tell anyone. But when you throw people into things, it gets messy because people they have expectations, they have desires, they have motivations, they have things that technology on its own does not have. As long as sky net has not yet gone you know completely, you know, self aware. I'm assuming that we're okay at the moment, but yeah, people make things complicated. When people are involved, you then have to really evaluate what your work actually means in

the real world. I want to give you, guys an example that's unrelated to vehicles for a moment to kind of explain what I'm thinking about here. I once intended to talk with some roboticists who were talking about the challenges they faced when they were trying to design a robot that would that would interact with humans within a human space, and that is a difficult thing to really engineer. To create a robot that can seamlessly interact with humans.

So they sat down and they identified their various goals and objectives. They sat down and said, all right, these are the things that are important to us. We need to make sure that our robot does these things. And they were parameters like this is how close a robot can get to another human being before it has to stop because otherwise it's going to be crowding someone. Or this is how close a robot can get to a stationary object. This is how fast the robots should move

through the environment. This is how the robot should respond if someone were to address it. So a whole list of rules that they had to figure out and then design, and this took months and months and months of testing. There was a point where a robot was staring at a door for two hours trying to figure out how to open it. That's the sort of stuff we're talking about.

They solve all these problems and then they put the robot into an actual human environment, and that's when everything went pear shaped, I guess we could say, because they realized that the human beings in that particular environment had an expectation of how the robot was supposed to behave. It was a robot, but the robot wasn't behaving the

way they thought a robot should behave. The robot was behaving the way the engineers had thought the robots should behave based on the way humans behave within the same sort of social space. Now that meant that the people who were actually encountering the robot, we're uncomfortable around the robot. It felt weird. It was the sort of Uncanny Valley,

except instead of appearance, it was in behavior. So uncanny valley, for those who are not familiar, is this gap when you start to approach something that appears to be alive but still has certain elements that indicate it is not truly alive. We usually use it to describe things like c G I characters, where a c G I character looks almost but not quite real. The same thing is

true with behaviors. So the roboticists discovered that these robots were not performing the way they needed to, that people were not responding to them the way that they had anticipated because it wasn't robotic enough. They actually had to go back to the drawing board and go through and start rethinking their whole process of creating robots that could interact in social spaces and make them more robotic. That

was a fail. You're of an approach of a human centric design in the sense that the people creating the robots had not anticipated that human reaction, and it shows that when you throw humans into an equation, things get a little more complicated. It's not as straightforward as saying this particular piece of technology needs to do task in why amount of time and it has to have a

certain level of reliability. It means more than that. It means defining things like a feeling, intention, defining how a person should experience the technology. And this goes well beyond technology. Obviously, it goes to everything that we ever designed. But really in tech, it's something that you either get or you don't, and if you get it when you're designing, you can create something that actually has a legit special feeling when

you experience it. It's a very tough challenge because obviously, the other big issue you have is that people are different. You know, we have general things that kind of unite us, but we're all individuals. We all have our own preferences, our own things that that maybe annoy us, uh and our own expectations, so it also means having to identify which ones are the most important to whatever end result

you're looking for. So one of the things that really we heard a lot when we were here over in the auto show over at Mazda's this this concept of feel alive, that you want to feel alive when you're actually using the vehicle, and vehicles are such an important central piece of technology in our lives. That is not a small task, and it's not lips service. It's not something that is just a tagline. It's a guiding philosophy.

That's the philosophy that guides the decisions that the engineers are making in order to make a vehicle that is fun to drive, that it's safe, that's efficient, that it has all the things you expect a vehicle to have, but that when you are behind the wheel and you're actually driving it, you have the sensation of feeling alive. That's sort of exhilarating feeling, and that it's something that

goes beyond just your experience behind the wheel. It's something that is actually integrated into your experience of moving through an environment. So when you start thinking about that, you're thinking not just trying to define everything that's on a dashboard or just an easy reach of the driver. You're thinking about an experience that goes well beyond that, as

the driver's maneuvering through different environments. That ends up being a very important concept to guide all of your design philosophies. And I was really impressed with the passion that I encountered when I talked with people from Mazda. All shared that same sort of uh, deep desire to create that kind of experience. And this is not something that is easy to engineer. It's not something you typically hear from engineers. Uh. This also kind of brings us to a dichotomy I

tend to encounter in the field of technology. Broadly speaking, there are two major camps I tend to encounter when I'm looking at different types of gadgets and vehicles and things like that. One is that I see a camp that really emphasizes esthetic over everything else, so that the look of it is supposed to be extremely evocative and that it makes you want to use it in some way,

but that is the guiding principle behind the design. The other I've seen is a more I think of it as the engineering approach in the sense that it needs to work, it needs to be able to do the things that it was supposed to do. Uh, And that becomes primary and aesthetic is is secondary, or maybe tertiary, or maybe for some companies, not really a thing that anyone thinks about. Uh. I'm sure many of you have owned gadgets out there that fall into that category where

you think this thing is ugly as sin. It does what it's supposed to do, but I don't like to look at it. The real goal, I think, is trying to bridge the gap between those two different philosophies, bringing together the aesthetic and the desire to get the engineering just right. Uh. I think a lot about my experience

with different things like mobile devices. That's the one that I always think about about how I've had experiences with ones where it looks really nice, it looks really sexy, looks like it would go fast just standing still, and others that it doesn't look so good, but you can definitely see how everything works. Uh. And maybe you have to learn the peculiarities of that particular system in order for you to have a deeper appreciation, but you once

you do, it works just fine. Marrying those two is really challenging, but it's also a very important part of this human centric focus. Knowing that people do value both the aesthetic and the function of a device, and again for something as important as a vehicle, it becomes even more imperative that you get that just right. So to achieve this, it's all the all these different processes, all these different philosophies I've talked about, have to come together.

We heard about how at Mazda they are still very focused on very traditional ways of modeling, say the exterior of a car, doing it through clay first and sculpting it so that you can get exactly the right feel.

You know, you can very carefully shave away a tiny slow ver of clay in order to get just the right shape or just the right curve, and doing all of that to meticulous detail until you do a full scan of it and three D and then maybe then at that point you can go to additive manufacturing, like a three D printing sort of approach and create your first three D printed version of the thing that you

have sculpted out of clay. They talked about how even getting to a point where you could build the full sized version of uh like a door, for example, that if it wasn't just right, their engineers would take hand uh handcrafted approaches to making sure they got exactly the curve that they wanted in order to achieve the result that they were going for. And that kind of level of attention to detail is something that I find really inspiring.

It's also kind of intimidating you think about the scale that that requires, and uh, that's not something that's easily tackled either. So it's I feel like this is one of those cases where you hear about the philosophy and then you hear the stories behind it, and you really feel that that you're talking to a company that's that's walking the walk. They're not just talking the talk, they really follow through with that, uh, and that to me

is really exciting. So I hope that I'm able to kind of illustrate to you this incredible journey the the from the point where you actually identify what it is you want to do to the point of seeing it come together and all the different challenges that face you along the way. Uh. There are so many different examples of that with any kind of technology, including vehicles, where you can look at this and say, like if if one of these systems didn't work just right, then it

would affect everything else. It becomes a cascading effect, and no matter how good the design is on other elements of the vehicle, you would still fall short of your goal. And it really does drive home how enormous a challenge this is. So I think they're playing me off. No, I think that this has been an incredible experience for me. This is an awesome studio. I can't wait to have it installed in Atlanta. Uh everyone's laughing. Okay, well it

would still be great. I think uh Tari would have fewer instances of me having you know, Diva fits in the studio if I were recording in something like this every single episode. Uh. Plus, I mean, there's it's spacious. I could have so many guests in a single episode and we could all have our own, our own nice comfortable seats. I'm just really, it's a practical thing. I'm saying, Like my studio back in Atlanta, we can fit maybe

three people in there before we get it's crowded. This time, I can cram a lot of folks in here, including sound engineers. So Tary it benefits you too, is what I'm saying, but I want to think masdo for having me come out here and to experience this and to get a firsthand look at the culmination of this idea.

I've heard a lot about this philosophy. I've talked to people who have been sort of really passionate about the concept behind human centric design, but it's rare that I actually get an experience, a truly immersive experience, because I am actually in it where I see the fruition of that.

And when you get a chance to see that and you you understand the decisions that went behind all those design choices, you get a deeper appreciation for that process and all the work that goes into just making something actually happen. I think we all take for granted what it makes to create a piece of technology like this. You know, we might think of the manufacturing process, because that's one that is easy to illustrate. It's you see the factory line, But it's so much more than that.

The process takes years of work, years of engineering, years of iterating and building upon past uh learnings, and two continue to innovate on top of that. It is a really interesting and inspiring experience to actually see this in person. With that, I think I'm gonna wrap up because, um, you know, I think I think i've I've covered it

pretty well. And plus I really want to have a little more experience jumping around in the back seat of this thing, because I've been saying in the front the whole time and I haven't even experienced what the back seats like. And I don't think anyone's gonna stop me as long as I hold a microphone in my hand. So I'm going to sign off, but don't tell anyone who's actually here that I've done that. I'll just I'll pretend like I'm still point. Oh they're broadcasting the whole

thing right now. Okay, well, alright, so on that. No, guys, we're gonna wrap up this episode. Remember if you want to reach out to me, text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop onto Facebook or Twitter. That's tech stuff hs W and uh, I look forward to talking to you again really soon. And it's Jonathan back in the studio. So I want to thank Mazda for having me out at the auto show and getting a chance to experience just a tiny sliver of the

work that they put into the c x thirty. You know, I didn't get a chance to ride in it, but it was really cool getting to see it up close and actually sit in it and record an episode. It was a fun experience. And uh and everyone there, by the way, was incredibly kind and very helpful. So I had a really good experience with everybody over there. So

thank you guys a lot. You guys are awesome. It also reminded me that with every piece of technology I encounter, no matter what it might be, there typically dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of people who helped shape that technology, maybe a little bit, maybe they helped define it, but they all had their impact on that technology before

I ever got a chance to touch it. And that when it all goes right, when everything is falling into place properly, when people are able to collaborate, when they're able to communicate, then they can produce technology in turn creates a specific experience that reflects whatever the original intent was of the design team. That comes to the very goal of human centric design. And again, this is not

an easy thing to achieve. It is incredibly challenging. You might define what you want people to feel like, but then it may turn out that when people actually experience the product, they feel something entirely different, and that you could argue that that represents a failure on your part as far as the design goes, and you have to factor in human psychology and human behaviors that aren't something

that are so easy to quantify. As you know, how efficient an engine is running, or how long a tire can can be in service before you need to replace it. Those are things that you can quantify much more easily. So this human centric design philosophy is something that I think is really fascinating, incredibly challenging, and when you get it right, amazingly satisfying. All right, Well, that wraps up

this episode. And I know I gave a sign off in the live section, but you know, I I feel like if I don't do it again, I'm not really doing my job. If you guys have suggestions for topics you would like me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you can reach out via email the addresses tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or you can pop onto Facebook or Twitter the handle for both of those Text Stuff hs W. You can also pop on over to our website that tech Stuff Podcast dot com.

You'll find an archive of every episode that we've ever recorded and published. It's all there's searchable. So if there's a specific topic you would you know I want to know more about, you can search and see if I've already done an episode on it, and if not, then use the aforementioned ways to get in touch with me and let me know about it and I'll get right

on it. And also there's a link to our online store where every purchasing make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again and really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.