Kia's Design Acumen On Display At Milan Design Week

Milan Design Week also welcomes automakers

You might wonder what automakers are doing at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano, more commonly known as Milan Design Week. Having started as a furniture design show, it now features a wide range of fashion-adjacent items, and cars certainly fall under that category. Consider Bentley and Bugatti, which showed room after room of furniture, but only one car ­– the newest Flying Spur. But unlike the Flying Spur, the wood furniture didn’t have book-matched veneer, which is criminal given its eyewatering price. This duo wasn’t the only automaker plying their wares at Milan Design Week. Others included Jaguar Land Rover, Lexus, Maserati, Porsche, and Kia.

It may surprise you to find Kia as the only marque here among non-luxury automakers. But talk to Karim Habib, Executive Vice President and Head of Kia Global Design, and it won’t surprise you at all. He was the driving force behind Kia’s third consecutive exhibition at the show, “Opposites United: Eclipse of Perceptions,” hosted at Milan’s Museo della Permanente. “We are not talking about design features, or the way things are meant to look,” Habib said during its opening. “What we are trying to do is create a mission statement, a mindset, a definition of the way we would like our designers to work.”

Kia’s mission statement

When Kia initiated its participation at Milan Design Week in 2023, Habib tapped the company’s own designers, who filled the museum’s many rooms with an incredible array of digital presentations. Last year saw the automaker’s designers collaborate with artists from outside the company. This year, the automaker left it to artists from outside of the company to render their interpretations of three driving forces behind the company’s Opposites United design language. It’s a design theory that originates from South Korean culture, one that is easily seen in the country’s capital city, Seoul. “You go into this vibrant city of Seoul and you see these incredible opposites,” said Andre Franco Luis, Advanced Design Manager at Kia Design America. “Traditional castles from 1395 alongside this vibrant pop culture that you see in K-pop. Everywhere reminds me of it.”

In the case of this year’s exhibition, it amounted to three rooms, rather than the multiplicity of displays offered in years past. The reductionism of this year’s vision helped clarify the carmaker’s message. In three large rooms, artists Philippe Parreno and A.A. Murakami create spaces that represent the three tenets essential to Kia’s Opposites United design philosophy: be in the cultural vanguard, pursue relentless innovation, and allow for creative risk-taking. That said, if you really want to experience the brand’s creativity, it’s actually on display across town at Milan’s Eastend Studios.

Kia’s smallest EV

Here, Kia revealed the new EV2, PV5, and PV5 WKNDER concepts. The big news here is that the EV2, a B-segment electric vehicle (EV), is designed to represent the smallest member of Kia’s electric vehicle lineup. Some felt it bore some resemblance to the Soul, although part of that is due to size as much as anything. Despite its size, it continues to mine the design language that debuted on the EV9, a vehicle designed at Kia Design America. That small stature also means that it won’t be sold in the United States, according to Kia executives. The language Kia employs is imitative of nothing and comes from an international design staff that melds a myriad of influences. Without a visual heritage to fall back on, Kia’s vehicles need to stand out from the competition. 

The blocky front end of the EV2 gives way to smooth side panels, with the lack of a shoulder along the beltline making for a distinctive look. Inside, designers have created an interior that you see through as much as look at. Check out the front bench seat, which allows an uninterrupted visual flow across the cabin. Peek through the seatbacks to the rear seat, look through the glass roof, or the rounded planes of its instrument panel. There’s little here that stops the eye, tricking you into believing that the cabin is larger than it really is. The rear seat bottom folds up, allowing the front bench to slide all the way rearward. The front seat has a slide-out drawer that converts to a seat to use while camping or tailgating. The EV2’s clean instrument panel incorporates a number of recycled materials, including recycled leather jackets. Its triangular speakers even double as removable Bluetooth speakers.

More interesting is the PV5 WKNDR electric van, which Kia revealed in Barcelona in February. Developed by Kia’s California design studio, its plethora of ideas is extensive, including a floor made from recycled Nike sneakers, interior walls with embedded slats to hold tools, or wheel-mounted wind turbines that generate power while the van is in motion. It’s just a hint of a flood of vehicles coming from Kia, including a redesigned Telluride, an electric midsize pickup, and a slew of hybrids.

All will feature the cutting-edge design for which the company is becoming known. “Upper management is actually pushing us. Even when we are kind of happy with what we present, we actually get nervous. Have we done enough versus is it too far?” said Jochen Paesen, Vice President of Kia Interior Design, adding, “too far has not been an issue.”

Final thoughts

Kia’s third annual exhibition at Milan Design Week reinforces its position as a design innovator. Its vehicles’ designs are unique, with solutions that reveal the deep, introspective thinking of Kia’s design staff. Their products are not merely following fashion or anyone else’s muse, except their own. That the automaker can mount an exhibit of its design philosophy and express it in pure artistic terms reveals the depth and intelligence of its commitment to breakthrough designs.