Interview: Pinky Lai

Currently residing “somewhere in the middle of Stuttgart and Strasbourg” Germany, Pinky Lai has led a life many Hong Kong natives have never thought of – not only because he can speak both Italian and German, but because he is the mastermind who designed the Porsche 996, otherwise famously known as the Porsche 911. The free-form silhouette of his designs have earned him multiple international awards, making him “one of the people who brought Porsche back to their feet” after the company experienced a disappointing period in the early 1990s.

Lai was once an ordinary teenager in Hong Kong who, after spending a short spell in the shipbuilding industry, decided to pack his bags to leave for a design school in Rome. After honing his design skills for 30 years, during which he had also worked at Ford and BMW as a designer, Lai recently compiled a design book titled Ideation that comprises 120 of his famous sketches, in both colour and black and white. He has chosen Hong Kong as the first and only city to launch the book and we reckoned we couldn’t let slip this opportunity to talk to one of the most coveted car designers in the world.

HongKongTatler.com: What is one valuable lesson that you have learnt working as a designer?
Pinky Lai: If you call it work, you’re not worthy of getting an answer, because for us it’s not work, it’s a hobby! Also, in design there’s a saying: “If you’re hot, you’re hot; if you’re not, you’re not”. I learnt that during my first year at Ford. I knew I had to step up.

HKT.com: How do you step up and become hot then?
PL: To become hot, you have to step up from having an animal instinct to killer instinct, then you have to know all the dirty tricks, like being competitive and quick. There are so many of them, but are all really circumstantial. For starters, your design has to be different; you’ve got to have a message. You can turn the existing design into 200 per cent emotional of the original. Take any surface, any line and you can make a drama out of it.

HKT.com: Tell us about how you were given the Porsche 911 design project?
PL: It’s a huge competition, everybody in the company was invited to submit some design ideas and then you go from a selection of ideas into making it a full-sized 3D model. It was a period when [Porsche] was going downhill, just about getting sold to Mercedes Benz and Toyota. We weren’t even allowed to design a car with a moving spoiler because there’s no money! But my design connected with my director’s ideas and so I got picked.

Read our test drive report on the Porsche 911 Carrera S

HKT.com: How different are yours approaches compared to other car designers?
PL: I don’t experiment with lines. Some people throw in 100 curves and hope at the end of the day they could get one or two nice ones. I spend a lot of time visualising the design, sort of like a mind projection before I even start sketching. It’s like I have a polaroid picture in my mind – a finished design! It’s like a training, you train your mind to do that, it’s not difficult!

HKT.com: You were trained in industrial design when you first started, what are the differences between industrial design and car design?
PL: Industrial design is very much focused on personality, and ergonomics and the lifetime of a design is very short. Car design focuses on the emotional aspect because functionality is a given fact. When people drive past a showroom without slowing down to look at a car, then you start to wonder ‘what is missing?’ The magnetic effect, the emotion and the dramatic value aren’t there.

HKT.com: Can you give us an example of what is an emotional design?
PL: The 996 Turbo is very emotional. Ferrari, once in a while, can be very good. The current one [458] is nice. Enzo is very emotional. Maranello is not bad, it’s old school but it has a very special feel to it – hardly any mistakes.

HKT.com: Any advice for aspiring car designers?
PL: In a way, a designer is to look really far ahead, the best ones look really far ahead than the others, and a lot of times I asked myself, ‘is this far enough? Take another step further’. Instead of one step ahead, take two.

We also took a spin in the 2013 entry level Porsche Boxter S