Visceral experience is a powerful teacher. Perhaps we should pay more attention to this form of learning. Not everyone learns in the same way.

Launched in 1958, the Honda 50 motorcycle, or Super Cub as the Japanese know it, is the most produced motor vehicle ever. In 2017, Honda assembled the one hundred millionth Super Cub in one of its fifteen international production plants.

Maurice, who had studied there himself before the war, knew that the Royal College of Art, a wholly postgraduate college, was conducting an experiment by taking three students without first degrees to see how they compared. I applied, took the exam, was interviewed, although possessing a scant knowledge of furniture woods, and was thrilled to be

Before the Mini in 1959, there had been cars with transverse engines, notably the Saab 92 in 1947, a wind-cheating, rally-winning saloon engineered by a small team led by Gunnar Ljungström, an aero-engineer and keen sailor, and stylist Sixten Sason, a former Swedish Air Force pilot and designer of Saab military aircraft. In fact, the transverse car

wanted to make new things—things that might seem strange—and not things you make because you know they will sell. The ultimate challenge, I suppose, was to design, make, and sell inventive and wholly new products. To do this, you need to be more than a designer or engineer. You need control over the whole process just as my exemplars Soichiro

Bernard was a fundamentally serious person. During my first face-to-face tutorial with him he said, “When you design something, everything about it has to have a purpose. There has to be a reason.” I looked around at the best designs of the time like Issigonis’s Mini, the new architecture of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and at the radical

Inflation, meanwhile, had risen to 16 percent in 1974, peaking at 24 percent the following year. Interest rates also peaked at 24 percent, making it difficult to pay back even the interest on loans. This was hardly the time to think of borrowing money and setting up as an entrepreneur in the manufacturing sector, especially since there was no help

Dad died the following year, in 1956, when he was only forty. He had been thirty when he came back from Burma. Three years later he was diagnosed with cancer.

But think of the story of Paul Magès, inventor of self-leveling hydropneumatic suspension, around which the Citroën DS of 1955 was designed and engineered. Magès’s invention, developed for Citroën in secret in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War, led to oleo struts for aircraft (patented in the USA in 1960) and to gas-filled shock