Shifting | Hugo Eccles
Hugo Eccles is an industrial designer operating in a domain that has historically resisted the discipline.
Trained at the Royal College of Art and with a career spanning more than three decades across firms including IDEO, Landor and Omnicom, Eccles did not come up through the conventional pathways of automotive styling; untrained and uninterested in the shaping of surfaces around predetermined mechanical packages. His orientation: systems before surfaces, constraints before expression.
Over time, Eccles’ work has come to occupy a specific position within motorcycle design—referenced, studied, and increasingly sought out at points where existing approaches are breaking down. Through UNTLD MOTO, his California studio, Eccles applies that methodology to motorcycles—primarily, but not exclusively. The work spans startups and incumbents, from companies like Zero Motorcycles to Harley-Davidson, as well as private clients. The studio tends to be brought in at moments of transition—when an existing language no longer holds, or when a company is attempting to define one for the first time. The output is often categorized as “custom,” or “special projects” but the underlying work is closer to applied research: prototyping, reconfiguration, and the development of new design languages under shifting technological conditions.
The shift from internal combustion to electric has exposed a structural problem. The motorcycle industry, broadly, is attempting to solve a new problem using an inherited lexicon. Electric motorcycles are frequently shaped to resemble their gas-powered predecessors, preserving familiar silhouettes and components even when their functional basis has disappeared. The result is not continuity, but contradiction: objects that look one way but behave another.
Eccles’ position is that this is not a styling problem, but a design problem. And design, in his definition, begins elsewhere.
The following is a set of Eccles’ positions—observations, distinctions, and working principles—from our conversations. As presented, they are not meant to resolve into a single system so much as describe the boundaries of one. Taken collectively, they begin to outline how Eccles broadly approaches design, and, more specifically, what he believes a motorcycle can and should be.
Design vs. Styling
Styling and design are often treated as interchangeable. They are not. Styling is surface-driven, operating on the exterior of an object—form, proportion, visual language—often after fundamental decisions have already been made.
Design is a first-principles discipline, beginning with constraints, physics, use, and human interaction. It is concerned with what the object is before how it appears.
The distinction becomes consequential in motorcycles, where the mechanical and the visual are not separable. The structure is the surface. Components are required to perform multiple roles simultaneously—functional, ergonomic, and aesthetic.
Applying a styling process to that type of object produces predictable results: coherence at the surface, incoherence underneath.
It also produces a particular kind of dependency. When styling leads, design becomes reactive—forced to accommodate decisions that were not grounded in use or performance. In that sequence, constraints are treated as limitations rather than inputs.
A correct approach reverses that order. Constraints are not something to work around; they are the material of the work itself. The form is not chosen. It is arrived at.
Nostalgia and Its Limits
There is a persistent backward pull in contemporary design.
There is a distinction between heritage and nostalgia. Heritage is interpretive. It uses real historical material as input and recombines it into something forward-looking. Nostalgia, by contrast, is imitative. It freezes an image of the past—often an inaccurate one—and reproduces it.
Nostalgia has a “cosplay” quality. It is not concerned with how things worked, only with how they looked.
This distinction matters because the current moment—technological, cultural, political—is saturated with nostalgia. That tendency carries into product design, where it manifests as an attempt to stabilize uncertainty by referencing familiar forms.
The problem is that those forms were derived from conditions that no longer exist.
Nostalgia also introduces a kind of constraint that is not acknowledged as such. It limits what can be built by defining, in advance, what something is supposed to resemble. The result is not continuity with the past, but dependence on it.
Heritage, in contrast, allows for discontinuity. It accepts that underlying conditions have changed and uses history as a reference point rather than a template.
American Form
Consider an earlier American motorcycle typology: the board tracker.
Not as nostalgia, but as a structural reference.
The board tracker’s long, low proportions and direct geometry align more naturally with the spatial realities of electric components than the bulk and layering of modern cruisers.
This is heritage as selection, not replication—choosing forms that remain compatible with new conditions.
A Conceit on a Conceit
The gas tank is a useful example.
On many modern internal combustion motorcycles, the visible “tank” is not a fuel tank. It is an airbox or a cover for intake systems. The actual fuel is stored elsewhere, typically lower in the chassis for center-of-gravity reasons.
The form persists despite the function having changed.
When that same form is applied to an electric motorcycle—where there is no fuel system at all—it becomes a replication of a replication. A visual artifact detached from both original and current function: a conceit on top of another conceit.
At a certain point, the layering becomes untenable. The object is no longer legible in functional terms, and the user is left to infer behavior from misleading cues.
This is not limited to gas tanks. It extends to exhausts, cooling elements, and structural gestures—features that once corresponded to necessity but now exist as visual shorthand. In aggregate, they create a language that signals performance without describing it.
Electric Is Not Gas
Electric motorcycles are not incremental evolutions of gas motorcycles. They are categorically different machines.
The differences are not subtle. Torque delivery is immediate and continuous. There are no gears, which alters both acceleration and braking behavior. Riders can brake later into corners, carry different lines, and exit without the need to manage gear selection.
These are not marginal changes. They fundamentally alter how the machine is operated.
Design that ignores this—by maintaining the visual language of gas bikes—introduces a mismatch between expectation and reality. The rider approaches the object with one set of assumptions and encounters another.
The issue is not aesthetic. It is behavioral.
It also affects how skill is developed. The cues that riders rely on—engine note, gear position, vibration—are either absent or transformed. Without recalibrating the interface between rider and machine, the design risks obscuring what the machine is actually doing.
In that sense, electric motorcycles require not just new forms, but new ways of communicating performance.
The Egg
There is a secondary problem.
Electric motorcycles are, in some respects, too effective. They remove friction—mechanical and cognitive—to a degree that can reduce engagement.
A mid-century analogy: early instant cake mixes that failed commercially because they required only water. An oversimplified process, users felt disconnected from the act of making.
The solution was to remove an ingredient and require the participant to crack an egg into the mix. The additional step reintroduced a sense of participation.
Electric motorcycles present a similar condition. The absence of gears, vibration, and other forms of feedback can make the experience feel flattened.
The argument is not for artificial complexity, but for intentional points of engagement—systems that require input, skill, or interpretation.
The goal is not difficulty, but involvement.
This introduces a design paradox. Efficiency, taken to its logical conclusion, can remove the very qualities that make an experience meaningful. The task, then, is to selectively reintroduce resistance—not as inefficiency, but as structure.
Sound and Feedback
Sound becomes one of the available tools.
In combustion engines, sound is a byproduct. In electric systems, it is not inherent. That shifts it from an incidental output to a design variable.
The approach of simulating engine noise is the equivalent of placing a playing card in bicycle spokes—an imitation that signals familiarity without adding meaningful information.
A more useful approach is to engineer sound as feedback. The straight-cut gear whine in certain electric motorcycles is an example: an intentional byproduct of mechanical choice that provides auditory information about speed and load.
The distinction is between simulation and signal.
More broadly, this reframes feedback as something that must be designed across multiple channels—auditory, tactile, visual—rather than assumed. Where combustion once provided a layered set of cues, electric systems require those cues to be reconstructed.
Motorcycles and Presence
The motorcycle itself, independent of a propulsion system, occupies a specific position among vehicles.
It is human-scale. It requires active balance. It exposes the rider to the environment rather than enclosing them within it.
These conditions produce a particular kind of attention. Riding a motorcycle does not permit passive engagement. The rider must continuously process surface conditions, traction, obstacles, and spatial relationships.
Riding a motorcycle, one is inherently present. The machine enforces a reduction of distraction.
This is not incidental. It is structural. The motorcycle demands a continuous negotiation between rider and environment.
Attempts to layer additional information systems—augmented displays, overlays—risk undermining that quality. They reintroduce the mediated experience that motorcycles, by their nature, tend to remove.
In that sense, restraint becomes a design decision. Not everything that can be added should be. Features are distinct from benefits.
Tangible Strategy
Process should be grounded in physical output.
Design is not complete at the level of concept or rendering. It must be built. Prototypes are not presentations; they are instruments for testing assumptions.
Design is a negotiation with reality. The phrase is literal. Materials behave in specific ways. Components interfere. Constraints emerge that are not visible in drawings.
Tangible Strategy operates within that negotiation early and continuously.
This produces a different kind of knowledge. Instead of predicting outcomes, the process reveals them. Decisions are adjusted in response to what actually happens when components are assembled and used.
It also limits abstraction. Ideas that cannot survive contact with reality are discarded early, rather than carried forward into more elaborate representations.
Cross-Pollination
The methodology extends beyond motorcycles.
There is value in looking outside a category for solutions. Problems in one domain often have analogs elsewhere, solved under different constraints.
As one example, organizational strategies from Formula One pit crews have been adapted within hospital intensive care units. The conditions—multiple actors, limited space, high time pressure—are structurally similar. References to role clarity, choreography, and communication have contributed to the reduction of error.
Industrial design, in this view, is not domain-specific expertise but pattern recognition across systems.
The implication is that limiting reference points to motorcycles produces limited outcomes.
By importing solutions from adjacent or distant fields—medicine, aerospace, industrial systems—the design process gains access to tested approaches that would not emerge from within the category alone.
Writing the Play
Designers are not fabricators of objects but authors of systems. They write the play and then build the props. The object is the visible result of a sequence of decisions that precede it.
This perspective addresses a recurring failure mode in product development: solutions in search of problems. Objects are created without a coherent narrative or context, and meaning is retroactively assigned.
In contrast, a designed object carries an implied history—decisions made, constraints navigated, trade-offs accepted.
In some cases, that history is constructed deliberately. One might imagine alternative timelines—parallel realities in which motorcycles developed under different technological assumptions. These scenarios act as frameworks for design decisions, providing internal consistency without relying on existing conventions.
The narrative is not decorative. It structures the design.
Direction
The current moment in motorcycle design is transitional.
Electric propulsion has removed a set of constraints and introduced others. The industry’s prevailing response—retaining established forms while altering underlying systems—produces inconsistency.
The alternative: begin again from first principles, using the new constraints as a basis for form, behavior, and meaning.
This approach is slower. It requires iteration, prototyping, and a willingness to discard familiar references.
It produces objects that are internally consistent—truly innovative and original.
Consistency, in this context, is not aesthetic alignment but coherence between what the object is, how it behaves, and how it is understood.
Design, in this sense, is not the act of shaping an object. It is the process of determining what that object must be, given the conditions in which it exists.
The form follows from that.
Control Surfaces
Electric motorcycles are not engines wrapped in structure, but systems defined by interaction—how a rider inputs and receives information.
In that framing, the emphasis shifts from components to interfaces: what the rider touches, sees, and feels.
Control becomes less about managing a machine’s limitations and more about shaping its responsiveness.
The motorcycle is no longer organized around an engine. It is organized around the rider.
Inside-Out
Form does not begin with silhouette. It begins with what the object must contain and how those elements behave.
Electric motorcycles make this unavoidable. Batteries, controllers, and thermal systems impose new spatial and structural realities that cannot be disguised without consequence.
Designing from the inside-out is not a preference. It is a requirement.
Attempts to reverse that sequence—to impose a familiar exterior first—tend to produce compromise. Volume is hidden rather than integrated. Structure becomes decorative.
The result is an object that resists its own logic.
Parallel Histories
Working method: Imagine an alternate timeline.
What would a motorcycle look like if it had always been electric? If combustion had never defined its form?
This is not speculative for its own sake. It is a tool for removing inherited assumptions.
By stepping outside the historical path, the design and its brand is freed from the obligation to reference it.
The goal is not to predict the future, but to remove the past as a constraint.
The Problem of Expectation
Design communicates before it is used.
The shape of an object sets expectations about how it will behave. When those expectations are incorrect, the user must recalibrate in real time.
In motorcycles, this gap can be consequential. A rider approaching an object that looks like a gas bike will assume certain responses—engine braking, torque delivery, gear-dependent behavior.
Electric motorcycles violate those assumptions.
The issue is not simply confusion. It is misalignment between signal and function.
Reduction as Clarification
Electric systems remove components—exhaust, fuel systems, complex transmissions. What remains is structurally simpler.
This creates an opportunity for reduction, but also a risk.
Without a clear organizing principle, reduction can become emptiness. The object loses not only parts, but meaning.
Treat reduction as a process of clarification rather than subtraction. What remains should be more legible, not less.
Constraint as Material
Constraints are often treated as limits to be minimized.
Instead, treat them as the primary material of design.
Battery size, thermal load, structural rigidity, ergonomics—these are not problems to solve after the fact. They are the inputs that define the object.
Design, in this sense, is the arrangement of constraints into a coherent system.
When constraints are ignored or hidden, they reappear as inconsistencies.
Legibility of Form
A well-designed object explains itself.
Not explicitly, but through alignment between form and function. The user can infer how it works by how it appears.
In motorcycles, this has traditionally been clear. Engine, exhaust, intake, frame—each visible and intelligible.
Electric motorcycles obscure that clarity. The core systems are less visible, less intuitive.
The task becomes one of restoring legibility under new conditions.
Performance Without Theater
Much of motorcycle design has historically relied on visual cues to signal performance—aggressive stance, exposed components, exaggerated forms.
Electric motorcycles complicate this.
Performance is no longer tied to visible mechanisms in the same way. It is internal, often silent.
This creates a choice: simulate the old cues, or redefine how performance is expressed.
Reject simulation. The alternative is to allow performance to be felt rather than signaled.
Duration
The experience of a motorcycle unfolds over time.
Not just in a single ride, but across repeated use. Familiarity, skill development, and subtle feedback accumulate.
Design that prioritizes immediate impression over long-term engagement tends to degrade. It reveals itself quickly and offers little beyond that.
The object should continue to reveal itself, not exhaust itself.
Hugo Eccles is a designer working at the intersection of mobility, product, and human experience. Through his studio, UNTLD MOTO, he collaborates with both emerging and established automotive manufacturers to conceive and develop motorcycles and other vehicles. He has spent decades practicing, teaching and refining a design approach rooted in first principles: function, constraint, and the relationship between form and behavior.
Written by Chessin Gertler with Hugo Eccles | Media provided by UNTLD MOTO