Switching from the real to the virtual and inventing new worlds to build the future is a task Anne Asensio helps us nderstand along with the stakes invovled.

Interviewed by Sabine Chabbert

Anne Asensio studied design methodology and industrial design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris. And since the school was opening to transportation design, she did her first internship at Heuliez. At the time, joining a company wasn’t very status-enhancing for a designer, “but the collaborative atmosphere won me over.” The only woman working in this field, she left to do postgraduate studies for a year at Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies, one of the two best American schools of transportation design to establish it a bit more. When she came back, she started to work at Renault. She stayed there 13 years, notably as head of ranges, and then joined General Motors in the USA in 2000 to restructure the methodology and the team and create concept cars before getting the call to become the VP Design at Dassault Systèmes. Smiling and determined, she knows her weaknesses, which she was able to transform: “My critical mind, which was difficult to tolerate when I was young, is very useful in this job. It’s a driver of motivation and energy that makes it possible to advance.” Anne loves to read, draw and spend hours in bookstores to get ideas from images. And to take refuge in the preserve of her Catalan husband, in a small village, a Mecca of prehistory and also artistic 
expression in the eastern Pyrenees. She likes its wine and the “culture of conversation” among the elderly in the village. Two rare, precious features.

How do you define innovation?
I prefer the English word “change” and even more, “breakthrough,” and the idea of enlightenment, of a new idea that makes it necessary to go farther.  With the idea that you can’t be afraid to break what exists, because the value will come about in the process of recomposing. Innovation sometimes conceals an absence of risk-taking: the ideal would be a balance between the two, with more daring in the breakthrough and more organization in the context of innovation.

You can’t be afraid to break what exists, because the value will come about in the process of recomposing.

How do you breathe enlightenment into corporations?
The problem is to create a framework for generating a breakthrough, in a context of “social innovation,” meaning collective intelligence. Using the “etiquette” of innovation: accepting making mistakes, refusing a dogmatic approach, taking risks and initiatives, accepting constant changes, not allowing organizations to get stuck on best practices (the death of innovation is the best practice!). But what makes organizing all of this possible and meaningful is a vision. Building these scenarios is the work of designers who create a medium of collaboration by making the object-subject visible. Or virtually modeling it, and that’s what we do at Dassault Systèmes, because the subjects that we have to handle are now of a very great complexity (from aircraft cabins to consumer products). So we move from one approach, where the virtual world is there to validate known phenomena identical to the physical and the real, to an approach where the virtual world becomes a matter of defining un-known worlds, of creating virtual worlds. The role we have in the design studio is to create (“design”) experiences, virtually. I have a new material, never used, that will enable me to make models through my imagination and by managing the collective imaginary worlds of the community in which we are. I become the interface, perfectly suited to these two newly brainstormed worlds and how to represent them to one another, between the pertinent vision of a need and the perception you’ll have of it. And at a certain moment, everything swings into the real world, simply because we say to ourselves: “But why don’t we do it?” So it becomes obvious. It’s not a matter of industrialization but of an organic form of cognitive human sciences. That’s the breakthrough, but it doesn’t exist naturally in our minds.

Why did the beauty world get a late start in this thinking?
This is just my personal view, because I’m not an expert in this sector. But beauty brands didn’t see these advances hap-pening. It makes me think of the Renault 5, full of innovation and a symbol of women’s lib in the 1970s. The breakthrough is that the concept met the need for a very profound change in French society and that it crystallized it. It really resonated in the society. Having understood that, Peugeot made the 205, all the other automakers followed suit, and Renault lost its lead. In the beauty industry in general, everything was done based on intuition, then there was marketing.  The luxury world became “masstige,” it democratized and we are getting to the end of a change cycle.

What could happen tomorrow?
We are no longer in a world of dogma. People don’t want to have a face imposed on them, a projected beauty. Beauty today is “me,” it’s “my” beauty. Cars are a sign of power, but today it’s not the object of desire that it was. The luxury industry rode on a vision of beauty that was monolithic, with makeup that was often dogmatic and pushed women to express their personalities and their desires, even if it meant putting dogmas aside for gothic looks. We are no longer in one model, and the rise of well-being is opposed to appearance.  This is where our 3-D offer is relevant – its approach enables women to seek ways of expressing their beauty. Elsewhere. To change their body as they wish. These virtual worlds are going to help us. We are in a great period of questioning, in a new area of understanding of what people expect, with interactive tools to understand their needs. For brands, it’s no longer enough to have the most magnificent technologies available, they have to know what they can do with them.

What would you like to say to the beauty industry?
That they invest too much time and money shooting a dead horse. These big players all look alike, and what’s more serious is that the budgets spent on marketing and promotion don’t help them get ahead. They have to stop and look at what they can do with these: build with design-ers of every background, listen to customers, generate experiences that physically concretize everyone’s desires. The first brand to have the guts to do it will leave everyone in the dust. Today, we are still using the same business model, still updating what exists. Brands have to try to do things that are a matter of sensory experience, by using the virtual world to establish a relationship in time and to have an understanding of the offer. My feeling is that the people who are in place are at ease with technologies such as 3D. There are people able to change, to learn and others who think you have to stay in control. It’s a cultural thing.  Brands have to analyze what they have to do, minimize the gap between what they want and reality, be honest and transparent.  It took a lot of time to get design accepted as a strategic force. Today, brands are realizing that you can work and collaborate with designers, but everything seems set in stone. We have to find new levers to get the machine going again, and restart the thinking process. As for the CEOs of major groups, they are realizing that they are becoming more and more distant from users, that they need more functionality and differentiation on the shelves. The pressure of innovation is fizzling out. It’s a model that has to be modified. We have to raise our heads, slow down, and tell ourselves that there are creative spaces left and right. And look at everything happen-ing elsewhere, like we do everyday because we are in many sectors. Cross-fertilization is more necessary than ever.

Sabine Chabbert

Beyond Beauty MAG #28