Don’t spend all your weirdness points in one place
My first thought when I saw the Tesla Cybertruck was “Wow, that’s a really ugly car.” When I showed a picture of it to my family members, they agreed. But maybe my family and I just have some weird genetic mutation that makes us blind to the beauty of sharp angles. I know there are plenty of strong Cybertruck supporters out there too, so why does its unconventional design rub me so wrong? In this article, I want to analyze how the Cybertruck purposely violates design conventions, which is a choice that can sometimes bring large benefits but can also sometimes backfire.
A picture of a Tesla Cybertruck, taken from Wikimedia Commons [1].
Distinctive designs help with social signaling
The Cybertruck’s design is meant to look distinctive, futuristic, and cool, and it certainly achieves the distinctive part. This is important because my biggest praise of the Cybertruck is how its appearance and branding make it a strong social signal.
Social signaling is how you convey to other people that you are a person of high social status by acting in ways that only high-status individuals act. It’s why some birds, like peacocks, grow large and colorful tails; only a fit and healthy peacock can find food and avoid predators while hauling such a conspicuous tail behind it [2]. Humans don’t have large and colorful tails, and so they use things like fancy cars as status signals. The more conspicuous, the better.
But social status is really complicated. An expensive car is a signal of wealth, an electric vehicle is a signal of environmental consciousness, a pickup truck is (sometimes) a signal of practicality and rugged individualism, and a motorcycle is a signal of freedom and adventure and possibly disregard for safety. After all, half the value of a vehicle is being able to brag about it! But the message needs to be clear, you really want the car to be able to brag by itself. This is why the distinctive angular design and sharp corners on the Cybertruck let it send such a strong signal. I’m a little confused about what exactly it’s a signal of, I think it’s some combination of “electric vehicle supporter” and “Elon Musk supporter” and “maverick who disregards conventional aesthetic norms.” Different people may use it for different signaling purposes, so that might be why I’m confused.
To apply this idea to engineering design, if you can correlate your design strongly with some desirable social attribute, then making the appearance more conspicuous can help boost the signal it sends. A similar point has been made in another recent Design Review article, with more of a focus on product branding [3]. I think it’s an important idea to grasp, which is why you should take a minute to internalize it before moving on to the next section, where I talk about how it can go wrong.
Weirdness points are a finite resource
While a distinctive design can help you with branding and signaling, you can’t just make the design conspicuous in any way you want. There are rules and aesthetic norms for what types of designs are acceptable. Consider the Segway. When the Segway was invented, it was an innovative personal transportation device that could get you around town without needing to buy a whole car and without having to pedal a bicycle. So why didn’t everyone start riding Segways? One reason is that people thought they looked too weird [4]. They had a sort of futuristic look that made people feel awkward, and they were bulky in a way that violated modern trends of minimalistic design. Segways stopped being made in 2020, but now there are hoverboards and electric unicycles that do basically the same thing as a Segway. The difference is that the hoverboards have a minimalistic design that makes them less of an eyesore. Hoverboards don’t look weird like Segways did. With that, I would like to segue into talking about weirdness points.
A Segway taken from Wikimedia Commons [5].
A hoverboard taken from flickr.com [6], with credit to urbanwheel.co.
Sometimes people get uncomfortable or take you less seriously if you deviate too much from what they are expecting. This idea is known in the social sciences as “idiosyncrasy credit”, but I was first exposed to it in this blog post [7], where it is referred to as “weirdness points.” You can only deviate from people’s expectations so much before they stop taking you seriously. You only have so many weirdness points to spend, and so you should make sure to spend them on things that actually matter.
Did the Cybertruck spend too many weirdness points? In the idiosyncrasy credit model, the amount of credit (or weirdness points) you have depends on your previous reputation. So, this question could be rephrased as “Does Tesla have a high enough status and a reputation for good design that it can afford all the weirdness points it spent by giving the Cybertruck such a distinctive and futuristic appearance?” And I think the answer is unclear, which is what makes it so fun to talk about.
Let’s look at applying this idea to our own designs. What if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a brand or a reputation, does that mean you have no weirdness points to spend? My thinking here goes two ways: first, you probably are less likely to get away with violating aesthetic norms if you aren’t well-established. But second, you also have nothing to lose, so why not try it anyway? There is probably a tradeoff between these two ideas, and where you land will depend on your tolerance for risk.
The last thing I want to touch on here is marketability. As design engineers, we like to think that if we make a high-quality thing, it will just catch on because everyone can see the superior quality. That’s not actually true in the real world, you need to be able to market it, and ugly things are not as easy to market even if they are high quality. So please seek feedback from others to make sure that what you make isn’t ugly.
Chesterton’s fence protects you from mistakes
Often, if there is an established way of doing things, then it’s there for a reason, and innovating it away can cause problems. Here are some examples:
The Cybertruck does not come with a clear coat of protective paint, it’s just a stainless steel exterior. (Which Elon claims is bulletproof.) It makes it look shiny and futuristic, but early reports said that it would develop rust spots in the rain just days after being shipped [8]. It turned out that it wasn’t rust, it was surface contamination [9], but a coat of paint would have prevented that too.
The Cybertruck has a trunk in the front. They call it the “frunk”. The frunk closes automatically when you press a button, and it doesn’t have a sensor to tell if there is an obstacle in the way [10], potentially including someone’s fingers. Youtubers love to demonstrate this by placing carrots on the edge of the frunk, closing the door, and watching the carrots get sliced in half.
Tesla vehicles open by pressing a button on the door; there isn’t a door handle. Numerous Tesla owners have claimed to be trapped in their vehicles after they lose power [11]. Apparently, there is a way to open the doors manually, but it’s not clearly marked, it’s not intuitive, and you only know about it if you’ve read the owner’s manual in detail.
All these problems could have been avoided if the designers had stuck to conventional wisdom instead of trying to innovate. This reminds me of a philosopher named G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton wrote about a principle that can be summed up as “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.” Or, in car terms, “If every other vehicle in the world has paint, make sure you know the reason before deciding not to add it”. Or, “If every other vehicle has a handle on the door, make sure to consider all the failure modes before deciding not to add one.” Now, the Tesla people are smart and almost certainly thought about these things, performed a cost-benefit analysis, and decided it was still worth making the change. But, as designers, I sometimes worry that we haven’t internalized this principle of Chesterton’s fence. To help it sink deeper, here are a couple of other proverbs in a similar vein: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, “Measure twice, cut once”, and “Look before you leap.”
So what?
So, am I saying you should never innovate? That you should always stick to tried-and-true designs? No! What a horrible thing to say! There are probably many reading this that need to innovate on their designs more than they currently do - myself included. But I wanted to show that there exist soft constraints on how far in the “novel and untested ideas” direction you should go.
Also, keep in mind that these concepts (signaling, weirdness points, and Chesterton’s fence) should only be applied later in the design process. If you avoid exploring an idea early on because it sounds too weird, then that would be a mistake that limits your creativity. But before you create your final version, ask yourself the following questions: Is this design marketable? Is it too weird? Or maybe the opposite, is it not distinctive enough for social signaling/branding purposes? And did I break any rules without understanding their purpose? The Cybertruck is truly a divisive design with both pros and cons, and proponents and opponents, but ultimately we should walk away with lessons learned resulting in better designs in the future.
[1] wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Cybertruck_Parked.jpg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
[3] washingtontimes.com/news/2003/jul/10/20030710-102842-7522r/
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Segway_xt.jpg
[6] https://www.flickr.com/photos/135310117@N08/21981198458
[7] lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely
[8] https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-stainless-steel-cybertrucks-may-be-rusting/
[9] https://qz.com/tesla-cybertrucks-rust-stainless-steel-engineer-1851277631
[10] https://autos.yahoo.com/drove-tesla-cybertruck-7-design-161523350.html?guccounter=1
