In 2040, multidisciplinary collaboration will give us car designs that serve us better. The Lincoln concept you see here, created by a group of students from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, is the result of an experiment, one that Lincoln and ArtCenter consider a success not because it produced a full-scale concept car, but because it proved a whole new concept about how cars can be designed. Lincolns of 2040 may or may not look like the ArtCenter concept, but the 2040 design process will likely resemble this new approach.
Four teams of ArtCenter students were charged with creating a concept for a 2040 Lincoln. Collaboration between ArtCenter and the car industry is nothing new, but three elements set this project apart: First, the students didn’t just come from ArtCenter’s transportation design program; instead, they included film students, entertainment designers, illustrators, and animators. Second, their brief was to design not just a car but also a short film showing the people who would use it and the world in which it would exist. And third, because of the pandemic, the students would not be able to collaborate in person.
The time frame was one element that didn’t change: The students had just one 14-week term to complete their vehicles and their films. Jay Sanders, executive director of ArtCenter’s Transportation Design Department, explained the genesis of the project.
“This started a few years back when Kemal Curić, Lincoln’s design director and the driving force behind the project] met with Stewart Reed, chair of [ArtCenter’s] Transportation Design Department, and myself at a show where our graduating students were presenting their work,” he said. “‘We’d like to do a project, but we’d like it to be broader than just transportation design. ‘”
Curić recalled seeing the work of students from disciplines outside the department. “I was impressed at how far they stretched,” he said. “It was outside the normal automotive design world. We started thinking, ‘What if we put all of these departments together? What would the result be?’”
The result was a brand-new design process. “Everything was online, and the deliverable was a video,” transportation design professor Alan Pinkerton said. “In the past, the students would have made a clay model, but now the focus was to bring in students from film and illustration to help create these videos in addition to the actual design of the car. Very different from just creating a car, this project was very much about people and their personal life experiences.”
Fellow professor Marek Djordjevic explained the potential of this new method of working. “What’s the story you’re going to tell with this design? That’s how you need to approach this project,” he said. “Because every piece of design speaks, communicates. You’re embodying messages in that design, and you need to be clear about what those messages are.
“Students come in saying, ‘I know what kind of a car I want to do,’ but to be a truly effective and successful designer, you have to know who you’re designing for,” he continued. “Getting the students to understand that, to get into the shoes of their customer, their wants and needs, both practical and emotional, calls for a great deal of empathy. One of the highest virtues a designer can have is a sense of empathy.”
Xiaoyu “Shawn” Zhang, the student in charge of interior design for Team Anniversary—named, like the other teams, for the subject of their film—talked about how this project differed for him. “If I’m only paired with an exterior designer,” he said, “we spend more time on the vehicle itself. But the involvement of filmmakers and illustration artists really forced us to think about the concept, the story, and especially the user. How will they use this vehicle? How can we make a strong and romantic story that’s matched to Lincoln’s brand values? It made us think about that user in everything we designed.”
Team Anniversary’s exterior designer, Emi Taniguchi, further explained the process. “We started with the keywords Lincoln gave to us,” Taniguchi said. Using Lincoln’s Quiet Flight design buzzwords like “beauty,” “human,” “gliding,” and “sanctuary,” the team “came up with the concept of turning digital life into a physical experience with unique sensorial experiences.”
Team Anniversary imagined a couple setting off on an anniversary road trip, their Lincoln accessing their social media feeds to take them on a guided tour of their past.
“The vehicle needs to bring the outside into the inside to stimulate their memories,” Taniguchi said. “How can we do that without making them uncomfortable?” The answer was a series of movable gill-like vents that let outside air into the car but not rain or blowing sand. “They feel the same air, smell the same smells, hear the same sounds as when they were at that same place, years ago.”
Team Anniversary’s movie is beautifully rendered and surprisingly emotional, as are the other students’ films. Team Amongst the Stars showed a family on vacation, their Lincoln prompting them with information about their surroundings as the young daughter, an aspiring astronaut, learns her way around the constellations through projections on the car’s glass roof. Team Ensemble illustrated the gathering of six musicians on their way to a concert, their autonomous Lincoln serving as a quiet retreat as it rolls through the streets of a future Manhattan.
Perhaps the most emotionally charged film was that of Team Now You Drive, which shows a Lincoln designer flashing back to his youth, when his father would take him for rides in his classic Lincoln convertible—until disability renders Dad unable to use the pedals. “Hey, Dad? Now what?” the son asks. Dad says, “Now you drive.” Back in future-present, the designer shows up to his father’s house with a new Lincoln equipped with semi-autonomous functionality that allows his father to take the wheel again. “Hey, Dad,” the son says, “now you drive.”
That film “was one of my favorites,” Pinkerton said. “It really drove home the story between a child and his father. Sometimes it’s difficult, as a designer, to come up with a new idea or concept or inspiration when you’re just drawing four wheels and some shapes. The films and illustrations were really driving a lot of the concepts, which was helping the designers in their path, helping them bring it all together.”
The results are more amazing when you consider the teams worked remotely. Team Anniversary’s job was complicated not just by the pandemic but by the fact that exterior designer Taniguchi was in Japan while the rest of her team was in Los Angeles.
“It was far less challenging than we were expecting,” Zhang said. “We are able to communicate design without sitting face to face, and that saved us time. We don’t have to drive to one spot and wait for someone to arrive before starting the conversation. We can just do a Zoom meeting at 3 a.m. And trust me, that happened a lot.”
At the end of the term, the four student teams presented their movies to a group from Ford and Lincoln, which included not only design director Curić but also Lincoln president Joy Falotico, marketing and sales director Michael Sprague, and even Ford CEO Jim Farley. It was a rare opportunity for students to interface directly with management’s highest levels. All the films were well received, but Team Anniversary’s concept was chosen to be built as a full-scale model.
“It was an emotional decision,” Curić said. “[Anniversary] was just a beautiful story. You go into a restaurant, you might not remember the food, but you will always remember the experience, the way it made you feel. That’s the same with Team Anniversary’s vehicle. That experience was so incredible. We all felt it went beyond the aesthetics of the vehicle; there was a really emotional connection.”
Karen Hoffman, ArtCenter’s provost, sees this project as a turning point in the way the school teaches design. “As far as the approach, multiple disciplines, the ability to work digitally, the narratives, how they weaved stories around their projects, this is a benchmark, where it is all about the human narrative first and then the experience and the product to follow,” she said. “This project has gone to the next level, and it’s something I’ll certainly hold as one of the silver linings of the pandemic.”
“For me, personally,” Zhang said, “when I’m designing a car, I talk about the form, how to make the car beautiful, how to make the use of space more sophisticated. This process really made us talk about the user. We are designing a lifestyle that is unique to Lincoln, and vision drives us instead of the traditional process, where the physical appearance drives us. This was an eye-opening experience that really changed my design process.”
Djordjevic is still just amazed with how quickly it all came together. “Fourteen weeks, it’s still hard for me to believe that,” he said. “This is one of the most ambitious endeavors we’ve had students undertake.” Said his colleague Pinkerton: “I was blown away. It was one of the highlights of my teaching career.”
Keyword: Lincoln and ArtCenter Take a Fresh Approach to Car Design