Article: Former Saab designers Padian and Gustafsson recruited by Hareide Design in Göteborg, Sweden

[nordwulf]

The Hareide Design firm based in Göteborg has recruited two former Saab designers Simon Padian and Anders Gustafsson. Hareide Design is a design consultancy working with local and international companies, helping them to create and bring to market meaningful products, services and experiences.

Hareide Design was founded in 2000 by Einar Hareide in Moss, Norway. The company is now headquartered in Oslo with a Swedish office located in Gothenburg. We work across a wide range of industries including automotive, maritime, consumer products, medical, and design strategies.

According to their website, automotive design has always been an important area for Hareide Design. They have experience within the fields of exterior- interior- and accessories design from both large and small companies within the transportation industry.

Their clients include Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, Bombardier, Vest and SnoWolverine.

Simon Padian

Simon started his career as a designer in 1987 and got employed by Saab in 1989. During his time at Saab Simon had been working on all the major cars from Saab like the 9-5 estate, 9-3 Sport Combi, 9-7x including a number of great concept cars.

The most unique period of Simon’s career started in 2005 when he was asked to establish and run the Saab Brand Design team, this was partially formed from the original Saab Design department, which at this time became fully integrated into the GM global design organization. While still maintaining design responsibility for all Swedish produced Saab’s, the focus was to lead the only permanently brand specific design team within GM, developing the Saab Product Pillar (Progressive Design) and feeding the GM design organization with Saab relevant design trends, strategy and conceptual proposals.

This not only covered mainstream products but also included the task of developing and being responsible for the design of Saab Expressions merchandising. The design strategy and many of the ideas from this work were realized in the new (2010) 9-5 as the first of Saab’s next generation products. The work also targeted a longer time frame working on defining and visualizing the Saab portfolio for 2020.



Anders Gustafsson

Anders Gustafsson former senior designer at Saab Automobile recently joined Hariede Design's Gothenburg studio.

Anders began his career as a designer at Saab in 1991. (He was hired by Einar Hareide the design director at the time) During his many years at Saab Anders has been working on exterior and interior design of the 9-3 and the 9-5 product line, and numerous concept cars like the beautiful 9-x. Anders is married with three kids and enjoys gardening, oil painting and skiing in his spare time.