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THE PHILIPPINES, JANUARY 10, 2012: Before the Benz, it was toys, furniture, and package design on Winifredo “Wini” Camacho’s drawing board. Camacho opened this year’s DesignTalks at the Ayala Museum on January 7 with an intimate session where he traced his journey from Industrial Design undergrad at the University of Santo Tomas to a 30 year-old student at Art Center in Switzerland, and now as the renowned designer of the Mercedes-Benz E-Class series. Today, this 100% Filpino designer leads a team of younger talents over at the new Mercedes-Benz design studio in Beijing.
More than a showcase of his work, Camacho made the audience privy to some of his earliest sketches, starting from his personal works to his design pitches for different Mercedes-Benz models. His works revealed a clean and classic aesthetic, and the word ‘understatement’ figured numerous times in his descriptions of the Mercedes-Benz style.
With more than ten years working for the iconic brand, Camacho credits the German company’s working process in honing not just his style, but also his discipline. He tells of the pitching process that all designers go through weekly, where they would be asked to design car parts or entire automotives, either for an entirely new concept or to remodel an existing design. Then there are the ‘futuristic’ pitches, an exercise where designers are given free rein to re-imagine the future of the Mercedes-Benz style. On a regular basis, the works are opened for critique, and the emerging best would be given a chance for digital or clay rendering. Revisions are also encouraged in the process, as well as collaboration—so much so that a single Mercedes-Benz model we see on the streets is in fact a fusion of the best works from different designers.
Working for more than a decade at Mercedes-Benz, Camacho shares how his personal taste has naturally become more seamless with the brand, and shares how car design spans more than the artistic work. “A car designer is not just a stylist. We have to think a lot more about what the company’s core values and philosophies are, the engineering requirements and constraints, ergonomics, and marketing inputs. So it’s a very complex word, and styling is just a part of it," says Camacho.
