In the entire history of humans designing and making stuff, the Porsche 911 is part of a rare breed of objects you can recognise instantly from its silhouette.

Other members of the exclusive club include the original Coca-Cola bottle and Michelangelo’s David.

Designing something this memorable is an astonishingly hard thing to do.

And it didn’t happen by accident.

Porsche emerged from the design language of the Bauhaus where decorative excess was stripped out in favour of clarity, geometry and utility, and where speed was a function of simplicity.

Creating an icon also required astonishing levels of creative and engineering discipline.

Keeping this iconic shape true to its original form over the last seven decades is as impressive a design skill as coming up with the 911 in the first place.

In a hyper-reactive world, hundreds of thousands of decisions will have been taken to not mess with greatness, but instead constantly refine it.

So, as designers and engineers of cool objects, my brother and I couldn’t be more honoured to be partnering with Porsche on their next chapter designing for the future.

These are the guys who were creating futuristic masterpieces like the 550 Spyder that James Dean drove back in the early 1950s, before our parents were even born.

The 550 Spyder was a car so low you could almost step over it. Yet it won Le Mans. It embarrassed Ferraris on the Nürburgring… and if you drove it along any road in the world today, you would still stop traffic.

And of course partnering with Porsche also lets us join the same legendary timeline as Steve McQueen who raced the 917 on screen, and his 911S off it. So as we head into the future together, we know we’re in good company.