Giving the Academy a Voice

I chose this unit to find out where my design process actually stood. After years of briefs with their edges already drawn for me, I wanted to test the waters of industry-level projects, to see how far I could push myself put together an answer for a brief given by the Academy.

What surprised me most was how much I came to care about automobiles. They'd never been my thing. But the Academy showed me how people see automotive design: the craft, the cinematism, the feeling an every part of a car carries before a word is said about it. I started to understand the rigour and sheer endeavour it takes to earn a place in that world. And being placed among peers I quietly knew would go places wasn't intimidating the way I'd feared. The community that was forming, the healthy competition, the kind where the talent in the room raises your own, is something I’d long to live through again.

My project was an attempt to give the Academy a voice in a scenario of an Open Day or Orientation Day, to bring an intermediary between people who want to know more about the Academy and the Academy themselves. Instead of one fixed story about who BMW and the Academy are, I built a conversational layer using LLMs, so BMW could build a narrative while each visitor paved their own path through it with the thread of curiosity, inquisitiveness and wonder. The visitor they composed their narrative, through the lens that they want to see in, and pick up the threads that they want to know more about. Empathy mapping sat at the core; Figma shaped it, and vibe-coding through Claude Code made the model actually speak.

The real discovery was about me. I find the descent toward the core of a problem genuinely fulfilling, the digging until the real need surfaces, on both the stakeholder's side and the user's. This internship was valuable in finding my own voice, through uncertainty, messy design processes and then go on to shape this voice so that it is also industry ready.

A note to future interns: If there's a question you genuinely want to chase, this is the unit. It gives you room to refine how you work and build a process that's actually yours, not a borrowed one. There's pressure here, but there's forgiveness too, and the chance to put your ideas in front of people whose feedback genuinely counts. More than anything, it's where you find out what your years of study have quietly added up to.

Thanks for reading,

Shriya Hoskere
BMW Group Design Intern, 2026