Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/969348
28 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2018 Wischnack: That's a good question. It's not a standard of education. I don't care primarily about education. Of course, you need to know what's math and what's physics—you should have heard about this. But in the end, it's more important that you're open-minded, that you have your own creative ideas, and things you want to do. That you are somehow aggres- sive in finding solutions, you don't give up if something fails, and if it doesn't work you don't sleep at night because you want to find a solution. If it's five o'clock in the morning and you're still in the lab, as long as is allowed, this is much more important than being from a famous university and having worked for famous companies. So I always look at these people. I don't care for grades. I don't care for the companies they have worked at before, I try to find the people and try to find out if they're really interested in what they're doing. Matties: Is that a tough quality to determine if somebody has, until you work with them? Wischnack: And this is why it's beneficial to have young students as trainees, and you have them for at least half a year. Half a year is a long enough time to get to know someone and to find out what's on their mind, how are they thinking, how are they working, and then you can decide if they will be a good member of your next team. Matties: You started off talking a little bit about the environment in which you work. How many designers are at Porsche and how does the team work together? Wischnack: In hardware, we have about 10 to 15 designers. There is no strict rule about how we work together because everybody's right for the project and we are individuals, but some- times colleagues work together and on the next project you have someone else. We have different departments with strong cooperation between them, so it's very open, depending on the type of project. As we are an engineering service company, we always have to adapt to the requirements from the customer and not just to our own philosophy of whatever we want to do. Matties: It sounds like you've had an interest- ing career at Porsche. What have some of the highlights been for you? Wischnack: That's a good question—there are so many. First, one of the most challeng- ing projects happened a couple of years ago, when I had to recover a project. It was one of the infotainment systems for our cars and somehow, they failed to do the development in Asia. They assisted one of our suppliers. They already had been working on it for two years and we got four months to do it from scratch: new hardware, software, a very complex multimedia sys- tem. And to see this running at the end, to see that the cars are pro- duced with the systems after only four months was a good thing. I had some good colleagues on that team, and we had good fun. I think the other thing, which has even more risk, is the high- power charging stuff. Two years ago, I was asked, "Maybe you can look at how we could do it? Take care of this project, and maybe we can do something." And together with one of my colleagues we started to investigate how to make high-power charg- ing, something nobody had heard of before. Meanwhile, it's a department of 45 employees and we are the leader for this topic. Then the VW group officially announced that we have the first stations now out in the field and things are getting produced. So going from zero to all out mass-production in two years with a totally new product where we could define the base all over the world. So we're going to distrib- ute it all over the world and everybody now starts to define concepts according to what we defined two years ago. This was nice, some- thing you can do as an engineer maybe once in your life, where you really define the stan- Thomas Wischnack