For Huge Moves: Meet the Woman Behind BMW’s Color-Changing Car

The color-shifting BMWs that stole the show at CES two years in a row were born after Stella Clarke took apart her Kindle e-reader for fun.

Clarke will tell you that she’s been doing this her entire life. As a kid growing up in Australia, whenever her family would throw something away, she’d insist on dismantling it first to learn more about how it worked.

As an adult, and as an engineer at BMW, taking apart the Kindle yielded something else: an idea of how its proprietary black-and-white displays integrating “electronic ink,” made by New England’s E Ink Corporation, could be used in automotive applications.

Initially, she imagined its color-changing properties could be used in the car’s interior to allow for more individual personalization or to help deal with sunlight and darkness on display screens. Then, the idea evolved to exteriors.

“I think [e-ink] is totally underestimated in the Kindles, and — compliment to us — it just wasn’t an obvious idea to do,” says Clarke, now a project leader based in Munich.

[Read the rest at Huge Moves]