"As long as we're physical, there'll be physical beauty."

I think the current design polarisation in the industry is exciting – the Jaguar Type 00, the Honda 0 Series Saloon, even the Slate truck. The investments are enormous, which, by definition, ends up driving more conservative executions. So, I’m delighted when there are unexpected solutions. It helps the whole conversation go further.

China is coming into its own as far as its own design value system and it is reflecting and manifesting in the hardware. It’s very interior focused and screen dominant. But the physical integration of the screen into an instrument panel, door or console isn’t the relevant part. The screen is an armature. What they’re valuing is my phone experience, my UI experience, what I’m doing on that screen.

Yet, oddly, things are consistent, almost homogenised, across the world at a luxury level. Global cultures are so different in so many ways, but they get connected or constricted in this luxe space. Everybody’s rightfully trying to hold on to the specific characteristics of their cultures. And it’s forcing them to kind of define what those really are now.

For Cadillac, we’re rebooting the brand and honouring a real promise – the latest in propulsion, manufacturing, tech integration, display integration and UI – while saying, we want to be the best. In the context of an American luxury execution, we have to answer to people’s heavily imprinted expectations. Where’s the American opulence? Where’s the American spaciousness? Within that homogenisation in  luxury, is there a way to create a different offering, and a different point of view that is original, American and honest.

In contrast, a lot of Chevrolet’s success is more from a fast-fashion mindset. That’s what keeps the tempo, the momentum, the demand. To me, GM has the best of both worlds, where you’re strongly curating at one end, and in this high-tempo mode on the other. Then with Buick, the success of the Envista has been enormous. It mines this kind of in-between space, between a sedan and a crossover, and that’s interesting, because it’s a take on where the automobile could be going beyond the SUV.

One of the other fundamental changes is how to build more experiential value during a vehicle’s lifetime, trying to future-proof the hardware for use cases we’re not even sure will happen. With AI and the phenomenal compounding of its capability, machine cognition is on such a curve that we can’t be sure what or how people will be using things, even in the near future. Anyone who says they’re certain, I ask, ‘Really? How sure are you?’ because I’m pretty sure you weren’t using Copilot six months ago to write the email you just sent.

In terms of AI in the studio, for me, it’s finding the right applications. I’m fine using it for the kind of tedious work that isn’t adding any value to the goal of creating fresh design – like pulling competitive images for clinics. And we’re using it a lot now for taking sketches and animating them, building a low-fidelity surface and pulling it into a background that’s lit correctly no matter what and putting it in motion.

A lot of my job is communicating to the larger organisation why a certain design is important. The better the visualisation tools, the better I can get cross functional understanding from engineering, marketing, communications or executives. Design has an indirect leadership role in moving the organisation out of its comfort zone – the good wine takes pressing – so, we have to keep pushing forward. AI is an enormous enabler for that.

But we can’t forget our history, and our history is significant. Car design as a discipline basically started at GM, and that history has imprinted on the organisation. Our leadership, thankfully, respects that. The work we’re doing today is, I think, some of the best work we’ve done in decades. To me, that’s a reflection of how much the senior leadership value design and value its contribution to the bottom line.

Also, the bandwidth at GM is amazing. Not every company has this kind of breadth of product, from curated luxury all the way down to entry-level EVs, from full-size work trucks to halo vehicles like Corvettes. As we’ve matured and grown into interface development for UI and UX, the digital design space is also very large and expanding. And we’re all over the world.

We’ve got a studio in the UK, we’re here in Detroit and Southern California, and we’ve got a footprint in both Korea and China. The design department is growing relative to the needs of the organisation and the vehicle experience.

But there’s still the beauty of the object. People talk about how we’re just going to be staring into VR goggles. And I’m like, ‘No’. Physical beauty is still so powerful in our lives. And as long as we’re physical, there’ll be physical beauty. Until we upload to the cloud.

This interview was originally published in Car Design Review 12. To order your copy, please click here.