Period:
April 2024
Client:
LG H&H
Role:
3D
Art Direction
Compositing
Tools:
Cinema 4D
Redshift
Photoshop
The road becomes optional —
the people inside don't.
By 2040, the industry's default optimization axis — driver convenience — has extended into the back seat. The autonomous cabin becomes a personalized capsule: four people, four screens, one moving room. HYNION starts from the opposite axis — what if the cabin pulled the family back toward each other instead of further apart?
The form came from a memory of glamping — why does conversation rise so naturally around a campfire? Three principles fell out: warmth, centrality, and defamiliarization. The next chapter shows how each principle became a piece of the cabin.
01
Chapter — Craft
Concept · 01
Warmth,
borrowed from a fire.
The temperature of firelight is the first thing the technology of 2040 is likely to lose. Warm-toned CMF, wood grain, and ambient lighting put it back into the cabin before any screen turns on.
CMF · warm wood + matte off-white
Form · capsule envelope
Soft inside,
signed outside.
Concept · 02
Centrality,
pulled toward the middle.
Form pulls people. Four seats rotate to face a single object at the centre — a hub the bodies orient around the way they used to orient around a fire. The geometry does the work that the conversation prompt usually has to do.
Layout · 4 swivel seats, central hub
FORM & LAYOUT
Interior Architecture
Capsule-like cabin geometry creates a protected, intimate atmosphere. Seating is subtly angled inward to support group interaction, with a clear line of sight to the center object from every seat.
Function · lantern hub
Concept · 03
Defamiliarization,
firewood at 200 km/h.
A primitive medium dropped into a futuristic vehicle. The Lantern Hub borrows the silhouette of stacked firewood — out of place enough to register, familiar enough to soften the wariness people still bring to autonomy. Projection light was rejected for the same reason: it would have been absorbed into the future, instead of contrasting with it.
Hub · Lantern, stacked-firewood form
02
Chapter — Exhibition
Takeaways.
Designing for autonomy is mostly designing for the people inside. Once the wheel and the dashboard stop dictating the room, the cabin can be built around the conversation, not the commute.
The harder move was choosing not to add — no extra screens, no projection light. A primitive analog object inside a smooth future does the contrast work that an extra interface would absorb. Questioning the industry's default optimization axis turned out to be the actual design decision; the form was the second one.
Outcome — graduation exhibition (2024). In-house designers from Hyundai Motor commented that the analog–autonomy fusion was visually well-resolved — confirmation that meaning-through-contrast crossed from concept to professional read.
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