School of Communication/Hyundai Exchange Produces Insight into Car Culture

Since its foundation in 1967, the Hyundai Motor Company has produced competitive vehicles within the global automotive market. Hyundai approached the RCA to engage in a unique collaboration of ‘open innovation activity’ with its communication experts, to bring new thinking to its goal to become the world’s ‘most loved’ automotive brand.

Hyundai are a forward-thinking company – they combine technological progress with human experience, and promise to create products that will help consumers share ‘precious moments’, ‘enrich our lives’ and create ‘clean mobility technologies’ for the future. They believe that change comes from innovative thinking, and that these enlightened moments can come equally from fresh approaches by outsiders or experienced employees. In this context they were open to creative RCA staff and students providing ideas to move Hyundai towards becoming a favourite consumer brand, and they got what they came for.

Seokhoon Kang, Director of the Market Insight Group at the Hyundai Motor Company explained: ‘We went to the Royal College of Art in London to meet the most creative students in the world… from which emerged a daunting number of challenging questions about cars and mobility. The project team made an unexpected suggestion: to shift the focus of the project towards a broader perception or notion of the car from that of merely developing new marketing messages.’

The RCA understands that the new attitude of openness between the ‘art school’ and businesses can provide resources for innovation, creativity, applied design thinking and new kinds of learning experiences for both partners, and it is this complex engagement between global art and industry that sparked the publication The Horse is Dead, Long Live the Horse, which is the outcome of this collaboration.

The book drives a multi-lane textual and visual highway through car culture, from asking where the car will be within the next ten years by exploring current trends, to presenting a case for a city without cars, or unpacking a critical perspective on why ‘Gen Y’ deems eco-friendliness to be important, and why car companies should be targeting their branding strategies at the smaller, niche markets.

For the RCA, the project demonstrated the benefits of knowledge exchange, its effectiveness in promoting learning for design educators, and in fostering students’ and staff members’ critical perspectives on the processes and contexts of design.

Professor Teal Triggs, Associate Dean, School of Communication, commented: ‘For us, this journey with Hyundai was more than a conventional industry-based project; the true value of knowledge exchange resides in collaboration –  where both organisations gain tremendous value from the learning experience.’

Seokhoon Kang added, ‘This collaboration with RCA staff and students was a truly fruitful experience for us. I am already imagining further collaborative work we can undertake with the Royal College of Art.’