What does it mean to 'design' a tire?

I qualified as an engineer. I spent three years of my life after graduation as a design engineer. I was a designer. Fact is that the type of design I carried out depended on the strength of steel, arcs of motion, pressures in gas struts and so on. The appearance of the finished unit was of little importance.

If someone tells you they are a designer, then almost certainly they are very interested in the visual appearance of the finished product.

When I was a practising engineer, this ambiguity irritated me. I thought that visuals were much less important than functionality.

More recently, that irritation has come home to bite me.

About five years ago, I came across a man called Rob Dolton. He had just set up a design practice called Dolton & Dex with a friend and fellow designer. Previously he had worked at the time for Kumho in the UK and for automotive companies. He won awards for tire designs: visually stunning designs.

I was fascinated by Rob and his skills and loved talking to him. I had previously thought of industrial designers as people obsessed only with appearance, but Rob showed me that he had a good understanding of engineering as well. Not only that, but he understood a huge range of manufacturing processes, materials and finishing techniques which I, a humble engineer, really did not appreciate.

That revelation came back to me as I visited the Geneva Auto show in early March. On Goodyear's stand I ran into a guy called Sébastien Fontaine. He is one of several industrial designers within Goodyear. Some are based in the Akron Tech centre and others in the Luxemburg.

Most of their work is fairly routine. They are the people who have to make sure that the sidewall designs have space for all the legal information about size, date of manufacture, loadings, ply content and so on. They also work with he engineers to make the tread patterns a good balance between functionality and attractive appearance.

The exciting bit; the bit that makes them get up on the morning is developing concept tires.

A year ago just one of these concepts was on show at Geneva 2014. But this year there were two. I had the great privilege of speaking with Sébastien at some length about the projects and his relationship with the engineers.

Vehicle makers spend upwards of $1 million on each concept vehicle that excites us at the motor shows. Automotive designers meticulously develop materials and curves and apply glorious colours and stunning finishes to their vehicles. But the tires detract from those vehicles, unless the tires have had the same level of care and thought put into them as the main vehicle.

You can hand-cut tires, but they often look bad in comparison to the beautifully sculpted lines of the vehicle. So then you have to develop a mould and that can be expensive. And it takes time. Because tire makers tend to be poor at developing well-finished concept tires, the vehicle makers have struggled to finish their beautiful creations with equally stunning tires.

That is where Sebastien and his fellow industrial designers come in.

One of the tires on Goodyear's stand was called rather prosaically, the BHO3. It's beautiful. It's also completely impractical in its present form, but that is absolutely not the point. You can see a video of it here

The concept behind the tire is energy recovery. There is a mesh of piezo-electric wires embedded in the tire which generate electricity as the tire rolls. There are thermo-devices in the sidewalls which convert spare heat to electricity. There are features which permit the free flow of air to warm and cool the tire to maximise the heat recovery. There are black body panels on the tread to absorb sunlight to generate heat to drive the thermo-generators

None of this will work in a commercial product. Every engineer who reads this will fuss about the efficiency of energy conversion; thermodynamic efficiencies, wear characteristics of the panels and so on.

Don't.

In a regular tire, most of the work is done. Even when we claim to be designing a new tire from scratch, we know what the solution is going to look like. We know that it will have a carcass, tread, beads, sidewalls and innerliner and we know in advance, more or less what compounds and dimensions those will use. And of course, the manufacturing processes are constrained by the installed capacity.

With one of these concept tires, we are really designing from scratch. Maybe there will be more than one chamber to contain air. Maybe no chambers at all. Maybe the carcass material will be a conventional rubber compound. Maybe it will be a fabric, or 3D-printed. Maybe the carcass will be moulded or screen-printed or laser-welded.

In the case of the BH03, the tread uses laser-cut panels which absorb heat from the sun. These have the texture of fabric and the appearance of velvet. They are beautiful to touch and stroke.

No engineer would take such panels seriously. They would wear away in no time. But the point of the concept is to produce some creative, out-of-the-box thinking.

One of the great constraints on engineers — and tire engineers are worse at this than most engineers — is that they self-censor ideas. Something is thought up, and immediately rejected because there is no obvious way to make it work.

The industrial designer's job is to challenge those pre-conceptions and open the engineers to more creativity and flexibility in their thinking.

And to create something that triggers an emotional response through beauty and texture and feel or smell.

Having those people on board, working with engineers helps build OE partnerships on vehicle makers' flagship concept projects. Sounds like a cheap way to build stronger OE relations to me!