What does it take to design the next Corvette? According to General Motors, you need one vast, state-of-the-art design studio in Warren, Michigan, where 1500 designers work across multiple brands and dozens of projects. To do your morning rounds of the various departments, you’ll walk several miles before lunch. You also need four much smaller Advanced Design Studios around the world, each of which you’ll task with producing their own design studies that are practically guaranteed to go no further than the show stand.
You need a small army of designers, some with decades of experience, others with almost none but minds packed full of ideas. And you need technology – augmented reality, virtual reality and the best design software – but also sketchbooks and pencils, piles of clay and craftspeople who are skilled at shaping it with knives, picks, blades and shaving tools. You’ll also need dozens of robots that can be left overnight to whittle great blocks of the stuff down to the starting point from which those clay modellers will work.
It goes on. You need teams of people to create mood boards and microsites and even fictionalised social media accounts, none of which would ordinarily be seen publicly. Your studios should have elevated balconies so you can view your work from above, plus outdoor viewing yards where you can see it in natural light (and those yards absolutely must not be overlooked). It takes all that, and more, to design the next Corvette.
