It’s not about the truck
Well, of course it’s about the truck. But, and this is the point, if the truck isn’t right for the person driving it, it simply isn’t good enough. This came out loud and clear when I spoke to Toyota head of design Magnus Oliveira Andersson and fellow designer Mattias Nilsson. “It’s about putting the human being at the centre. It’s about the human dimension,” said Oliveira Andersson.
We bundled into one of those glass-fronted conference rooms with a cup of coffee in front of us. Nice, since I’d been up since five that morning. Oliveira Andersson, comfortably in charge and smiling amiably, kicked the interview off by introducing Mattias Nilsson, who, it turned out, has been at the Design Center for nearly four years. His main job has been to mastermind a new model of the Toyota BT Reflex reach truck. Presumably under the watchful eyes of Oliveira Andersson, with whom he worked in tandem.
So, how had he gone about the job? I asked him. “Ok,” said Mattias Nilsson in a low voice, “there were quite a few things that were… new, but we still called it a facelift.” His task was tweaking a design originating in 1982, and which has undergone any number of changes and improvements since then, the last one in 2008. “We put a lot of effort into the details, like designing a new wavy floor pattern that speaks Toyota, and makes it a member of the product range,” explained Nilsson. This, as I understand it, is just one of any number of examples of how design is meant to facilitate the lot of the working man, the person behind the wheel of a truck somewhere in the world.
BT Reflex R-series truck
HUMAN BEING AT THE CENTRE
Ergonomics is not only about the technicalities, the designers told me. “The challenge is expressing the good ergonomics in the actual design, so that the user experiences it,” said Oliveira Andersson. And he went on to talk about a design philosophy he says is Swedish, essentially. That of putting the human being at the centre, of emphasising the human dimension. In the case of the recently updated BT Reflex, it was primarily a question of highlighting the softer values, as the truck structurally remains the same. The new wavy floor pattern design that Mattias Nilsson was responsible for wasn’t just a question of aesthetics, I was told: “The new pattern is a way of helping the driver see where he should put his feet, and get a good grip,” Oliveira Andersson said. “We actually compared with how tennis shoes are patterned.”
“IT WAS ABOUT THE HUMAN FACTOR, AND COMPANIES WANTED TO GO DOWN THAT ROUTE.”
A crucial aspect of any forklift truck is the driver’s seat. The 2008 version of the Reflex featured the first in-house design of a Toyota forklift seat. But there are always ways of making things better. “There’s a lot of wear and tear, particularly on the corners of the seat, and now we were wondering how we could improve it,” explained Oliveira Andersson and Nilsson, and said that it took quite a bit of work to find a supplier who could deliver the right thing at the right price. “In the end we arrived at a material called Superfabric.”
Looking back over the years you realise the man-versus-machine balance tended to be in favour of the machine. In the case of the reach truck it wasn’t until 1982 that anyone stood up for the driver of the vehicle. “It was the first time the human being was really taken into account,” explained Oliveira Andersson. “It was then that people were put at the centre of the design process. It was about the human factor, and companies wanted to go down that route.”
