Art thinking beyond Design thinking MAZDA design: Car as Art

This research proposes the importance of art-thinking as compared with design-thinking, using a case study of Mazda. The Japanese automobile firm has been introducing a series of successful new products in the past few years, featuring art-thinking approach. Mazda publicly declares that "the car is art," and has been winning numerous design awards. In our definition, design-thinking tries to meet specific customer needs, while art-thinking pursues more fundamental values. There are two critical differences between the two. First, art-thinking focuses more on fundamental values than specific customer needs. Artists try to express their emotions and beliefs. Second, with art thinking, designers would not compromise themselves easily, partially because they pursue internal expression. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of art-thinking and to investigate its actual application with in-depth study of Mazda. Design team at Mazda led by a charismatic design director, Ikuo Maeda, has been working on car design motivated by art-thinking. We have interviewed five chief designers and Ikuo Maeda to achieve these research purposes. We believe that this paper proposes the importance of a concept of art-thinking for social innovation, using empirical evidences from Mazda case.