There are a myriad of teams and departments that you have to bring together to deliver harmonised user experience in a vehicle.

Delivering an effective cockpit experience is a highly complex undertaking. Anyone who’s a design leader knows how hard it is to bring all of the moving parts and teams together.

You have to be able to talk to electrical engineers with PhDs in widgets. You have to be able to talk to design grads who draw things which are beautiful but don’t have a clue how they work. To a dev team that only work between the hours of 10pm and 3am! To human factors engineers that want everything to be the size of a house but clearly won’t fit in the car. To the body engineers that know how a car goes together and keep adding 30mm to the console width.

You need to talk to the brand team who have very specific thoughts on how the interior must feel. And to marketing who will tell you every inch of screen real estate is worth another 5% on the sticker price of the car. The programme team, who want you to reduce your bill of materials by getting rid of half the physical controls. You need to talk to the purchasing department to make sure they don’t go with the cheapest supplier; but they do go with the best supplier with the highest quality.

There will be members of the executive team who have a very specific thought on the one switch that they can’t stand and so insist it must be changed in this updated model.

None of these inputs are wrong.

And yet, you have to balance all the inputs, and make a cohesive product. You have to know what each of them is talking about, and appreciate it, while also being able to challenge back, and to know which battles you need to really fight, and which things you can let go. And while you are doing this make sure everything you do is simple, relatable and has a beauty that is aligned to the brand aesthetic.

This is what Östra will do for you.