Mazda's re-emergence after 2000 involved more than the success of its Zoom-Zoom campaign, which launched that year. It had as much to do with a vehicle design revolution. The automaker, whose U.S.
sales, marketing and design headquarters is in Irvine, Calif., went from a lackluster has-been brand in the late 90's and early millennium -- a marque with little meaning beyond the collective memory
the car that goes "hummmm" -- to a sporty, design-leading brand that helped force the competition to develop mass-market cars that actually looked good. Now Mazda is about to make a big change to
its design philosophy. The somewhat avian visual language (by former design chief former design chief Laurens van den Acker) embodied by concept vehicles like the fluid Nagare and more prosaically by
RX-8, Mazda 6, 5, 2 and Miata is being shift to a more aggressive look by new design chief Ikuo Maeda. The new design language is called "Kodo - Soul of Motion". The new look is epitomized by a new
concept called Shinari. Maeda, the head of Mazda's Design Division at the Hiroshima, Japan-based company said the new design theme continues a nature-themed inspiration. "In our work to further
evolve the expression of motion, Mazda Design has focused on the strength, beauty and tension found in the instantaneous movement seen in animals," he said, in a corporate release on Friday. He said
the company's four design studios located in Japan (Hiroshima and Yokohama), Europe (Frankfurt, Germany), and North America (Irvine, California) are developing global cars in collaboration to
incorporate the new language in future products. The company says Shinari means "powerful yet supple appearance of great resilient force when objects of high tensile strength, such as steel or
bamboo, are twisted or bent" or "the appearance of a person or animal as it flexes its body in preparation for a fast movement." The concept is a 4-door, 4-seat, sports coupe meant to be the
quintessence of the new look.
