Buttons are back and storage is king when it comes to car interiors

As with interior design for houses, interior design for vehicles is also subject to fashion trends. And like any fashion trend, even the best ideas can become stale and played out with overuse. Some ideas weren’t the best, either, like demonstrably worse human-machine interfaces that add to driver distraction; yet, they still proliferated throughout the industry and across the cars offered for sale.

正如房屋室内设计一样，汽车内饰设计也受时尚潮流的影响。和任何时尚趋势一样，即使是最好的创意也会因过度使用而变得陈旧乏味。有些想法本身也并非最佳，例如那些明显更糟糕、增加了驾驶员分心风险的人机界面；然而，它们仍然在整个行业和市售车型中泛滥开来。

But the good news is that the pushback seems to be working. “When the trend of the Piano Black and the switchless interior was happening, it was during a time when designers and companies and engineers and everybody were thinking that, ‘Hey, we can just get rid of all these switches on the interior. We can put it all in the software. It’ll save money. It’ll save us tooling up all these extra parts for unique cars and all this stuff and make the interior more like a software experience.’ And it was done with those intentions,” said Hiren Patel, senior design manager at Nissan.

但好消息是，这种抵制似乎正在奏效。日产高级设计经理 Hiren Patel 表示：“当钢琴烤漆和无开关内饰的趋势出现时，当时的设计师、公司、工程师以及所有人都在想：‘嘿，我们可以去掉内饰里所有的开关。我们可以把一切都整合进软件里。这样能省钱，能省去为不同车型开发额外零件的模具成本，还能让内饰更像一种软件体验。’这些设计初衷确实是出于这些考虑。”

That resulted in cars with minimalist interiors that looked good in the dealership. But people drive their cars on roads; they don’t just sit inside them, parked inside a dealership. “So lots of people were complaining about it and saying, ‘Hey, it takes my eyes off the road to change the temperature or to adjust my seat or do whatever.’ It’s not as easy as doing something on your phone where it’s just right at your fingertips and intuitive,” Patel said.

这导致了许多内饰极简、在展厅里看起来很漂亮的汽车出现。但人们是在路上驾驶汽车，而不是仅仅坐在停在展厅里的车里。Patel 说：“所以很多人抱怨说：‘嘿，调节温度、调整座椅或做其他操作时，我必须把视线从路上移开。’这不像在手机上操作那样直观，触手可及。”

In part, blame the increasing complexity of modern cars, which have multiple subsystems that need to be controlled. “It’s really like I’ve got to go in all these menus and do stuff, and all the car companies have a different way of doing it, too. So maybe nobody’s really figured out a great way of doing it.”

部分原因在于现代汽车日益复杂，拥有多个需要控制的子系统。Patel 补充道：“这真的就像我必须进入所有这些菜单去操作一样，而且每家汽车公司的方法都不一样。所以也许还没有人真正找到一种完美的解决方案。”

Most recently, Patel was responsible for the new Rogue, Nissan’s bestselling family SUV. And its interior is a good one. Less minimalist than the all-electric Ariya, the new Rogue Hybrid has buttons and switches for most of its controls and a useful amount of storage built into the interior. Yet it’s not a boring design—the seats are a standout, taking inspiration from puffer jackets. And no, there’s no Piano Black in sight.

最近，Patel 负责了日产最畅销的家用 SUV——新款 Rogue 的设计。它的内饰表现出色。与纯电动车型 Ariya 相比，新款 Rogue Hybrid 的极简程度较低，大部分控制功能都配有实体按钮和开关，内饰中还内置了实用的储物空间。但这并不意味着设计乏味——座椅是一大亮点，其灵感来源于羽绒服。而且，这里完全没有钢琴烤漆的踪影。

“People want easy, intuitive controls,” Patel said. “They want wireless charging. They want surfaces that are easy to manage and clean, keep clean and clutter-free, and they want lots of places to store things. Oh, and the last thing is, they want easy access.” So the new Rogue’s rear doors were engineered to open to 90˚ to make it easier to put in a kid’s car seat or help an elderly parent into the back.

“人们想要简单、直观的控制，”Patel 说。“他们想要无线充电。他们想要易于打理、保持清洁且整洁的表面，他们还想要大量的储物空间。哦，最后一点是，他们想要便捷的进出体验。”因此，新款 Rogue 的后门被设计为可以 90 度开启，以便更轻松地安装儿童安全座椅或帮助年迈的父母进入后座。

Utilitarian need not mean prosaic, however. As designers since the Bauhaus movement have proved, “everyday” doesn’t have to be ordinary. Patel shared that sentiment. “One of the exciting things and one of the really big challenging things of doing a car or doing design for a product that is a usable everyday product is when you can make that product beautiful,” he said.

然而，实用并不意味着平庸。正如包豪斯运动以来的设计师们所证明的那样，“日常”不必等同于“普通”。Patel 也认同这一观点。他说：“设计汽车或任何日常实用产品时，最令人兴奋也最具挑战性的事情之一，就是如何让产品变得美观。”

“There’s so much more that goes into our everyday usable products in terms of cost, engineering, usability, feasibility, everything. And then on top of that, we’re struggling and really trying our best to fight for every little millimeter that we can get that we feel is important to making sure that that product is appealing from a visual standpoint.”

“我们的日常实用产品在成本、工程、易用性、可行性等方面涉及的内容要多得多。在此基础上，我们还在努力争取每一毫米的空间，我们认为这对于确保产品在视觉上具有吸引力至关重要。”