Mercedes-Benz adds to its global network of Advanced Design Centres. In 2018, the brand with the star will open a new Centre in France’s “Silicon Valley” on the Côte d’Azur.
With its Centre in the Sophia Antipolis Science and Technology Park, Mercedes-Benz is strengthening the creative and innovative potential of its global design network, which, using specialised skills, keeps track of trends around the world while allowing new ideas from different continents and cultures to feed into automotive design. Some 50 designers from every discipline will help to endow the brand and products of Mercedes-Benz with unmistakable and timeless forms.
With the new Centre on France’s Mediterranean coast, Mercedes-Benz is making a return to one of the birthplaces of the brand. It was in 1899 that Emil Jellinek, a business man resident in Nice, took part for the first time in car races on the Côte d’Azur under the pseudonym “Monsieur Mercédès”, the first name of his daughter Mercédès. In 1902, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) registered “Mercedes” as a protected trademark.
“With the new Design Centre in France, we are systematically expanding the ‘creative spaces’ for our worldwide design network. Having Design Centres around the globe means that we are at home everywhere in the world, and that we are constantly working and living in the future.
The network of Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design Centres
The Mercedes-Benz Design team’s daily work centers on evolving vehicles which only see the light of day many years down the road. Their colleagues at the Advanced Design Center journey even further into the future, drawing on global trends and taking up new ideas from other continents and cultures.
Globally, Mercedes-Benz has set up several Advanced Design Center, which pick up the newest trends at local level, analyzing them and applying them to the creative process. In this way they act as detectors, as it were, for trends in areas such as art, culture and architecture. In particular, this involves intuitively picking up on developments which might be suitable for incorporation into timeless design and acquiring an instinct for important, lasting trends.
“French Connection” – a link steeped in tradition
The choice of location for the new Design Centre also marks a return to the roots of the Mercedes-Benz brand, as, alongside Mannheim and Bad Cannstatt, Nice was one of the cradles of the brand. Almost 120 years ago, it was the businessman and marketing strategist Emil Jellinek who promoted “horseless” Daimler automobiles among the highest circles of society in his adopted home, which, at that time, was a meeting place for the “Haute Volée” of France and Europe, especially in winter.
Tags: Mercedes-Benz Design Centre
