This episode of tech Stuff is sponsored by Nissan. Welcome to tech Stuff a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and How the tech are you Now. I don't often spend much time on this show talking about the actual design process when it comes to tech. I might talk about discoveries and innovations, or ways that people figured out how to take an innovation and then make a product based on it. I've also talked about how developments like three D printing aka additive manufacturing have revolutionized tech by streamlining the process from going from the concept to the physical. Mena festation of that concept, But what goes into actually designing a product? So in this episode, using our sponsor Nissan as the model, I thought I would talk about the design process for a vehicle. And just like your typical vehicle, there are a lot of moving parts. Designers and engineers have to take into account, everything from the technical specifications of the engine to the ergonomics of the cabin. In some cases it might mean tweaking an older design, and others it could literally be a case of going back to the drawing board now, y'all. I believe in being transparent with my episodes. When I was approached with the opportunity to work with Nissan to talk about the art and science of design, I got excited. See the auto industry in general, a Nissan in particular, have known that design is absolutely critical. You have to create a design that resonates with people. And because we're talking about a vehicle that carries real life human beings, you need it to be safe. You need to be secure, and you need it to be compelling. The experience of using the technology needs to be a positive one. A lot of us spend a whole lot of time in our vehicles, and if that time is uncomfortable or unsatisfying, well, that can translate into poor sales. When you consider how much money goes into the development and then the manufacturing of a vehicle, you start to see how large a challenge it is to design something that checks all the boxes. Plus, I'm not gonna lie. Brie Larsen is a spokesperson for Nissan. She hosts a lot of videos that give an overview of the company's design philosophy and processes, and I hoped I could land her for an episode of tech Stuff, but it turns out she's busy with something called the Marvels. So my plans to have her on the show while I talk about how great she was, and Scott Pilgrim kind of went nowhere. That being said, Bri, You're welcome on the show anytime. So let's talk about design in Nissan. So over the years we can see trends come and go with the auto industry. Some of those trends might seem kind of puzzling when viewed by today's driver. So, for example, in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties, the years of my childhood, there was a tendency for vehicles to have really boxy designs with lots of sharp angles and flat surfaces. Finding a curve incorporated into a vehicle in those days was rare unless you were looking at luxury vehicles. It's not like cars from older generations were all boxy. If you go further back, classic cars had beautiful curves worked into them, So you might be tempted to think that there was some practical reason for the seventies and eighties vehicles to go with these sharp angles and straight lines like maybe it was easier to manufacture vehicles that way or something, but really a big reason for the change was simply that in America, tastes were changing. The boxy cars were bigger, with more interior space. There wasn't so much concern about not taking up too much room, and gas was cheap in the early seventies, so there was less of a consumer push for vehicles to have aerodynamic designs and to really emphasize things like fuel economy. So we got an era of big, powerful, boxy cars because that's what people wanted. However, toward the second half of that span of time, the boxy cars got a lot smaller because the world went through an oil crisis. The story behind that is a complicated one. But while the cars were smaller, they were still kind of boxy, and it wasn't until the mid nineteen eighties that companies began to introduce curved lines in car bodies again for American drivers, and the change proved to be popular. So one major part of design is common sense. You need to design something that appeals to people. Now, maybe you're following a trend, something that you already know people want, because well, that's what they're buying already, or maybe you're taking a risk and you're creating a design that is outside the norm with the hope that your work will become the new trend. In the tech world, we've seen a few of these moments where a company introduces a product that doesn't fit a mold, but then defines a new mold. It is hard to do, but when it works, buckle up. Of course, the design of a vehicle goes beyond esthetics. There are practical considerations as well, whether it is reducing drag to increase fuel efficiency, adjusting the size because you plan to put a larger engine under the hood and you can't do it if it's too small, or you have this crazy idea to incorporate some of the features of an suv into a sedan, something Nissan has actually done in the past. Those decisions will guide a lot of future decisions. It's a marriage of practicality and art that goes into industrial design, then a balance that, when it is done right, produces a vehicle that performs in a delightful way while looking amazing. As it does so with some models, just the appearance of the vehicle gives you an impression of what it must be like to drive it, or to paraphrase my buddy Carl, it's going fast, we'll stay in still still what is run deep? But how the heck does this process all start? Well, typically a vehicle starts in a way that might not seem that exciting. It starts as a business plan. So if you were to look at a vehicle at the very earliest stages of development, you wouldn't see a vehicle at all. You wouldn't see a picture, you wouldn't see a sketch. What you would see would likely be a spreadsheet with a whole bunch of numbers on it. But those numbers represent a goal and the journey to that goal. That's where all the cool stuff happens. One early consideration designers must make is how the driver is going to use this vehicle. What is the purpose of the vehicle itself, apart from just taking someone from point A to point B. Is it meant to be a commuter car? Where someone's going to be taking this vehicle every single day to and from work and shopping and entertainment and all sorts of things. Is it something that's designed for off road adventures? A vehicle that needs a lot of cargo space. These are questions that will guide teams of designers. They land a little bit more on the practical side of considerations, and they guide designers so that they can follow the best path, one that doesn't compromise on the vehicle's purpose. But that's a pretty broad set of guidelines. Beyond that, designers look at all sorts of objects to get inspiration for a vehicle's design. For example, when designing the twenty twenty three Nissan Z a sports car, Nissan's team looked at the curves of a samuraized sword as part of their inspiration. They saw how light would play across the blade and use that to guide them when designing part of the vehicle's body. And knowing that this was a starting point, and then looking at the finished product of a twenty twenty three Nissan Z, you can actually see where that fits in with the car's design. If you look at an image of the Nissan Z, you're looking at it from the side, and you focus on the silver roof element that's on the side of the vehicle, the one that extends from the A pillar on the side and then goes all the way down past the back window. You see the katana blade there, that's what it was modeled after. But the designers also incorporated an interesting element that occurs in nature and has a surprising tendency to pop up again and again, and they put that into the Nissan Z and that was the golden ratio. But what the heck does that mean? Well, let's say you've got two objects. You have object A and you have object B. A is larger than B, and we can express the difference in size as a ratio. Now, we could do that if things were really simple, in a very easy way. So if A were twice the size of B, we would say A is to B, but it is not to B. Wait, what's the question? Before I go on a hamlet tangent, let me get back to the golden ratio. So the ratio is not two times. Rather, the ratio is one point six ' one eight zero, three, three, nine, and then a bunch of numbers extending into infinity forever endeavor. But what is special about this particular ratio. Well, if you take object A and you compare it to object B, and you say, object A is this ratio times as large as object B? That's one thing. If you add A and B together to create a larger object. Something really interesting happens because you get a new object. Let's say object A plus B, which we will rename as objects C. This is the larger one that represents the combination of the first two. If we combine object C with the original object A, we'll see that same ratio holds true that A is to B as A plus B is to A. And you can repeat this. You can do this over and over. You can add A to C and you create an even larger object D, and D will have this same ratio relationship to C. So this mathematic curiosity inspired countless philosophers throughout antiquity to pursue all sorts of paths while exploring this ratio and its implications. And it also inspired artists to incorporate this ratio into their works. And you can find the golden ratio represented in many different artistic endeavors, from tilework to architecture. And in the twenty twenty three Nissan z the designers purposefully built elements of the vehicle to be in alignment with the golden ratio because for centuries it's been thought of as esthetically pleasing. Now you probably wouldn't notice this without someone pointing it out. Unnless you happen to be one of those ancient philosophers who are absolutely gaga about maths. But it does make a difference. It makes an impact, even if you cannot articulate why it does. Now, before you start getting into specifics like a katana blade or the golden ratio, you have to work out your ideas, and designers typically start with a sketch. That sketch could be old school. There's some designers who use paper and pencils to create their sketches. They will start off with basic shapes and they'll refine their ideas from there. They'll add color, they might even add some effects, like create some little blurder lines in the back to give the impression of a vehicle in motion. Or they might start with something much more high tech, like a waycom tact and they'll create a digital two dimensional sketch of their ideas. But generally speaking, the first visually appealing part of the design process is a two dimensional sketch. This initial sketch is really just a starting point, and the designer will likely go through many versions before honing in on what will be the actual design to be used as the generative element for the whole vehicle. In fact, the early finished sketches can be abstract. They might give a sense of shapes and colors, of lines and reflective surfaces. They're there to impart a feeling that this car was meant to go fast, or this car is meant to take you on an adventure. Ideally, the sketch marries form and function. It looks like the type of vehicle that will take your breath away but also be perfectly suited for its intended purpose. Those sketches aren't just for car exteriors either. Artists will also sketch out cabin interiors and the like, giving a hint at the color schemes, the materials, the positioning of controls, the ergonomics of the car's interior. These sketches can also hint at what the driving experience is aiming for. So what happens after this flurry of sketches, Well, we'll get to that after we take this quick break for a word from our sponsor. So we've created a bunch of sketches. Where do we go from here? The design team has to select which sketch is really going to be representative of where this vehicle is headed from a design perspective, of course, and then it's time to hand that over to a three dimensional design team. To be clear, everyone on the design team is three dimensional. I just mean this particular team specializes in creating virtual three dimensional models. So it's their job to take this two dimensional sketch and, using software like ALIAS, build out a virtual three dimensional model. These tools, these software pieces are collaborative and they include computer assist features, and they make it much easier to adjust a design, which allows the team to iterate quickly and even pivot if necessary. So if it turns out that something that was in the original sketch is impractical or impossible, they can make adjustments to that without going all the way back to the beginning. The virtual three dimensional model can be viewed on a computer screen. It can be imported into an environment where someone can don a VR headset and carry a controller, and then can virtually walk around the model and see what it would look like in person. The three dimensional model has to accommodate for all the technical requirements of this vehicle, so it's not just the aesthetics. It has to also be there to allow for things like the powertrain for the vehicle that has to be built into this model as well. And design software has really come a long way over the years, so these days this software can simulate all sorts of lighting conditions, for example, so designers can actually see what a vehicle would look like at noon or at sunset, or in the light of street lamps. You can even export designs so that they can be milled out of clay or foam and create a real world three dimensional model based on this virtual computer model. Now, just because you can have a milling machine guided by computers cut out the basic shape of a vehicle in a block of clay doesn't mean that sculptors. Human sculptors don't play an important part too. They do. A milling machine can reduce an enormous block of clay to a vehicle design, but it's the team of sculptors who come in to refine that rough cut into something special. They use tools that are descended from centuries of artistry and by hand. They use these tools to shape that model, to define edges, to create curved surfaces, to use site and touch to get the feel of the vehicle just right, something that a machine can't do. They work as a team to reach the goal envisioned in those early sketches, to create something that people will want to interact with. So while the clay model might begin with a computer, the human artists are the ones to mold the vehicle from there. Interestingly, after this step, it's time to get the vehicle designed back into the virtual realm. Nissan uses sophisticated optical scanners to get a precise three D model of the sculpted clay. So we start with a two dimensional sketch, we go to a virtual three dimensional model. We then go to a real world three dimensional model from clay that then gets reshaped and refined by artists, and then we scan that to create a new virtual three dimensional model. Eventually, this design process narrows in on what will be the final design, and the information that was used to create that finalized virtual model then can be used for the actual manufacturing process. The stamping dies and the production molds that are used in manufacturing can come from this data. There are other departments that also play an integral role in determining what the finished vehicle is going to look like and how it will perform. This also includes things like color design. These teams elect the colors that will give the vehicle its own personality. That includes both the exterior and the interior colors, with a guiding principle being harmony, a harmony between the intent of the vehicle and its appearance. A car that's meant to thrill needs to have a color palette to match. After all, that also includes the actual materials used for the interior. How are they going to feel, how is it going to look, how are they going to capture color? How will they reflect light? All of these considerations play a part and ideally are in alignment with the intent the purpose of this vehicle. It's pretty remarkable how every decision in the design process has to do several things. It's like having multiple bosses and you have to please all of them because the design needs to meet the requirements of that initial business plan. It needs to perform in a specific way depending upon the intended function of the vehicle. It needs to evoke an emotion, It needs to be esthetically pleasing. If the process fails in any of these duties, it can mean going back to the drawing board, sometimes literally. So a quick word about the twenty twenty three models Nissan has designed, because I think it's fun to know what sort of influenced the designers as they worked in those early stages, as they sketched and three D modeled and sculpted. I already mentioned that the Z, Nissan's sports car, incorporates the Katana as part of the vehicle's design. There's also the Frontier, a truck that with a grill that took inspiration from warrior helmets, which I think is amazing, this idea of really being able to tackle the world like a warrior in this in this truck. And then there's the Aria, which Kon says followed a Japanese concept of welcoming openness. The Aria is a crossover vehicle. It's an all electric suv with really cool inset button controls that light up on the interior surfaces of the car. Honestly, as I watched video demonstrations of the vehicle, it made it seem like you're in a spacecraft. I really really dug it. I really want to be inside one. I have not actually set foot in an Aria yet. So in their twenty twenty three models, Nissan's goal was to create designs that impart the feeling of what it must be like to drive those vehicles before you even opened a door, let alone turned it on. By the time a car rolls off the production line, dozens of people have played a critical part in the vehicle's look, feel, and operation, all aligned with this goal of imparting a specific emotional response the thrill of driving. To me, this entire process is incredibly inspiring because it's going from the psychology of human beings, how we react when we see something that appeals to us. It also incorporates both traditional and modern techniques for design, everything from shaping clay to using additive processing. Three D printing can play a big part as you're printing out specific components to see how they fit in with the overall concept of a vehicle. It's this marriage of the traditional and the modern that I find really interesting. It isn't all about let's abandon the old way because we have a new way. It's how do these things work together in harmony to produce the result that we have intended. And in the case of Nissans vehicles, it really makes a lot of sense because you start to see where that appeal really comes through, and you realize, if we left this all up to automated processes, we probably wouldn't end up with anything even remotely as esthetically pleasing and thrilling as what we get through the marriage of all of these methodologies working together. I want to thank Nissan for sponsoring this episode. It's always fun to really take into consideration what has to happen for a product to come together. Often I just look at how the product works and the various technologies that allow it to work, without really considering how did teams decide what that product would look like and how it would feel to use it. So putting myself in that mindset, it's a bit of a stretch, and you know what, we could all use a stretch now and then in the middle of the day. Thanks for listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

This episode of tech Stuff is sponsored by Nissan. Welcome to tech Stuff a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and How the tech are you Now. I don't often spend much time on this show talking about the actual design process when it comes to tech. I might talk about discoveries and innovations, or ways that people figured out how to take an innovation and then make a product based on it. I've also talked about how developments like three D printing aka additive manufacturing have revolutionized tech by streamlining the process from going from the concept to the physical. Mena festation of that concept, But what goes into actually designing a product? So in this episode, using our sponsor Nissan as the model, I thought I would talk about the design process for a vehicle. And just like your typical vehicle, there are a lot of moving parts. Designers and engineers have to take into account, everything from the technical specifications of the engine to the ergonomics of the cabin. In some cases it might mean tweaking an older design, and others it could literally be a case of going back to the drawing board now, y'all. I believe in being transparent with my episodes. When I was approached with the opportunity to work with Nissan to talk about the art and science of design, I got excited. See the auto industry in general, a Nissan in particular, have known that design is absolutely critical. You have to create a design that resonates with people. And because we're talking about a vehicle that carries real life human beings, you need it to be safe. You need to be secure, and you need it to be compelling. The experience of using the technology needs to be a positive one. A lot of us spend a whole lot of time in our vehicles, and if that time is uncomfortable or unsatisfying, well, that can translate into poor sales. When you consider how much money goes into the development and then the manufacturing of a vehicle, you start to see how large a challenge it is to design something that checks all the boxes. Plus, I'm not gonna lie. Brie Larsen is a spokesperson for Nissan. She hosts a lot of videos that give an overview of the company's design philosophy and processes, and I hoped I could land her for an episode of tech Stuff, but it turns out she's busy with something called the Marvels. So my plans to have her on the show while I talk about how great she was, and Scott Pilgrim kind of went nowhere. That being said, Bri, You're welcome on the show anytime. So let's talk about design in Nissan. So over the years we can see trends come and go with the auto industry. Some of those trends might seem kind of puzzling when viewed by today's driver. So, for example, in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties, the years of my childhood, there was a tendency for vehicles to have really boxy designs with lots of sharp angles and flat surfaces. Finding a curve incorporated into a vehicle in those days was rare unless you were looking at luxury vehicles. It's not like cars from older generations were all boxy. If you go further back, classic cars had beautiful curves worked into them, So you might be tempted to think that there was some practical reason for the seventies and eighties vehicles to go with these sharp angles and straight lines like maybe it was easier to manufacture vehicles that way or something, but really a big reason for the change was simply that in America, tastes were changing. The boxy cars were bigger, with more interior space. There wasn't so much concern about not taking up too much room, and gas was cheap in the early seventies, so there was less of a consumer push for vehicles to have aerodynamic designs and to really emphasize things like fuel economy. So we got an era of big, powerful, boxy cars because that's what people wanted. However, toward the second half of that span of time, the boxy cars got a lot smaller because the world went through an oil crisis. The story behind that is a complicated one. But while the cars were smaller, they were still kind of boxy, and it wasn't until the mid nineteen eighties that companies began to introduce curved lines in car bodies again for American drivers, and the change proved to be popular. So one major part of design is common sense. You need to design something that appeals to people. Now, maybe you're following a trend, something that you already know people want, because well, that's what they're buying already, or maybe you're taking a risk and you're creating a design that is outside the norm with the hope that your work will become the new trend. In the tech world, we've seen a few of these moments where a company introduces a product that doesn't fit a mold, but then defines a new mold. It is hard to do, but when it works, buckle up. Of course, the design of a vehicle goes beyond esthetics. There are practical considerations as well, whether it is reducing drag to increase fuel efficiency, adjusting the size because you plan to put a larger engine under the hood and you can't do it if it's too small, or you have this crazy idea to incorporate some of the features of an suv into a sedan, something Nissan has actually done in the past. Those decisions will guide a lot of future decisions. It's a marriage of practicality and art that goes into industrial design, then a balance that, when it is done right, produces a vehicle that performs in a delightful way while looking amazing. As it does so with some models, just the appearance of the vehicle gives you an impression of what it must be like to drive it, or to paraphrase my buddy Carl, it's going fast, we'll stay in still still what is run deep? But how the heck does this process all start? Well, typically a vehicle starts in a way that might not seem that exciting. It starts as a business plan. So if you were to look at a vehicle at the very earliest stages of development, you wouldn't see a vehicle at all. You wouldn't see a picture, you wouldn't see a sketch. What you would see would likely be a spreadsheet with a whole bunch of numbers on it. But those numbers represent a goal and the journey to that goal. That's where all the cool stuff happens. One early consideration designers must make is how the driver is going to use this vehicle. What is the purpose of the vehicle itself, apart from just taking someone from point A to point B. Is it meant to be a commuter car? Where someone's going to be taking this vehicle every single day to and from work and shopping and entertainment and all sorts of things. Is it something that's designed for off road adventures? A vehicle that needs a lot of cargo space. These are questions that will guide teams of designers. They land a little bit more on the practical side of considerations, and they guide designers so that they can follow the best path, one that doesn't compromise on the vehicle's purpose. But that's a pretty broad set of guidelines. Beyond that, designers look at all sorts of objects to get inspiration for a vehicle's design. For example, when designing the twenty twenty three Nissan Z a sports car, Nissan's team looked at the curves of a samuraized sword as part of their inspiration. They saw how light would play across the blade and use that to guide them when designing part of the vehicle's body. And knowing that this was a starting point, and then looking at the finished product of a twenty twenty three Nissan Z, you can actually see where that fits in with the car's design. If you look at an image of the Nissan Z, you're looking at it from the side, and you focus on the silver roof element that's on the side of the vehicle, the one that extends from the A pillar on the side and then goes all the way down past the back window. You see the katana blade there, that's what it was modeled after. But the designers also incorporated an interesting element that occurs in nature and has a surprising tendency to pop up again and again, and they put that into the Nissan Z and that was the golden ratio. But what the heck does that mean? Well, let's say you've got two objects. You have object A and you have object B. A is larger than B, and we can express the difference in size as a ratio. Now, we could do that if things were really simple, in a very easy way. So if A were twice the size of B, we would say A is to B, but it is not to B. Wait, what's the question? Before I go on a hamlet tangent, let me get back to the golden ratio. So the ratio is not two times. Rather, the ratio is one point six ' one eight zero, three, three, nine, and then a bunch of numbers extending into infinity forever endeavor. But what is special about this particular ratio. Well, if you take object A and you compare it to object B, and you say, object A is this ratio times as large as object B? That's one thing. If you add A and B together to create a larger object. Something really interesting happens because you get a new object. Let's say object A plus B, which we will rename as objects C. This is the larger one that represents the combination of the first two. If we combine object C with the original object A, we'll see that same ratio holds true that A is to B as A plus B is to A. And you can repeat this. You can do this over and over. You can add A to C and you create an even larger object D, and D will have this same ratio relationship to C. So this mathematic curiosity inspired countless philosophers throughout antiquity to pursue all sorts of paths while exploring this ratio and its implications. And it also inspired artists to incorporate this ratio into their works. And you can find the golden ratio represented in many different artistic endeavors, from tilework to architecture. And in the twenty twenty three Nissan z the designers purposefully built elements of the vehicle to be in alignment with the golden ratio because for centuries it's been thought of as esthetically pleasing. Now you probably wouldn't notice this without someone pointing it out. Unnless you happen to be one of those ancient philosophers who are absolutely gaga about maths. But it does make a difference. It makes an impact, even if you cannot articulate why it does. Now, before you start getting into specifics like a katana blade or the golden ratio, you have to work out your ideas, and designers typically start with a sketch. That sketch could be old school. There's some designers who use paper and pencils to create their sketches. They will start off with basic shapes and they'll refine their ideas from there. They'll add color, they might even add some effects, like create some little blurder lines in the back to give the impression of a vehicle in motion. Or they might start with something much more high tech, like a waycom tact and they'll create a digital two dimensional sketch of their ideas. But generally speaking, the first visually appealing part of the design process is a two dimensional sketch. This initial sketch is really just a starting point, and the designer will likely go through many versions before honing in on what will be the actual design to be used as the generative element for the whole vehicle. In fact, the early finished sketches can be abstract. They might give a sense of shapes and colors, of lines and reflective surfaces. They're there to impart a feeling that this car was meant to go fast, or this car is meant to take you on an adventure. Ideally, the sketch marries form and function. It looks like the type of vehicle that will take your breath away but also be perfectly suited for its intended purpose. Those sketches aren't just for car exteriors either. Artists will also sketch out cabin interiors and the like, giving a hint at the color schemes, the materials, the positioning of controls, the ergonomics of the car's interior. These sketches can also hint at what the driving experience is aiming for. So what happens after this flurry of sketches, Well, we'll get to that after we take this quick break for a word from our sponsor. So we've created a bunch of sketches. Where do we go from here? The design team has to select which sketch is really going to be representative of where this vehicle is headed from a design perspective, of course, and then it's time to hand that over to a three dimensional design team. To be clear, everyone on the design team is three dimensional. I just mean this particular team specializes in creating virtual three dimensional models. So it's their job to take this two dimensional sketch and, using software like ALIAS, build out a virtual three dimensional model. These tools, these software pieces are collaborative and they include computer assist features, and they make it much easier to adjust a design, which allows the team to iterate quickly and even pivot if necessary. So if it turns out that something that was in the original sketch is impractical or impossible, they can make adjustments to that without going all the way back to the beginning. The virtual three dimensional model can be viewed on a computer screen. It can be imported into an environment where someone can don a VR headset and carry a controller, and then can virtually walk around the model and see what it would look like in person. The three dimensional model has to accommodate for all the technical requirements of this vehicle, so it's not just the aesthetics. It has to also be there to allow for things like the powertrain for the vehicle that has to be built into this model as well. And design software has really come a long way over the years, so these days this software can simulate all sorts of lighting conditions, for example, so designers can actually see what a vehicle would look like at noon or at sunset, or in the light of street lamps. You can even export designs so that they can be milled out of clay or foam and create a real world three dimensional model based on this virtual computer model. Now, just because you can have a milling machine guided by computers cut out the basic shape of a vehicle in a block of clay doesn't mean that sculptors. Human sculptors don't play an important part too. They do. A milling machine can reduce an enormous block of clay to a vehicle design, but it's the team of sculptors who come in to refine that rough cut into something special. They use tools that are descended from centuries of artistry and by hand. They use these tools to shape that model, to define edges, to create curved surfaces, to use site and touch to get the feel of the vehicle just right, something that a machine can't do. They work as a team to reach the goal envisioned in those early sketches, to create something that people will want to interact with. So while the clay model might begin with a computer, the human artists are the ones to mold the vehicle from there. Interestingly, after this step, it's time to get the vehicle designed back into the virtual realm. Nissan uses sophisticated optical scanners to get a precise three D model of the sculpted clay. So we start with a two dimensional sketch, we go to a virtual three dimensional model. We then go to a real world three dimensional model from clay that then gets reshaped and refined by artists, and then we scan that to create a new virtual three dimensional model. Eventually, this design process narrows in on what will be the final design, and the information that was used to create that finalized virtual model then can be used for the actual manufacturing process. The stamping dies and the production molds that are used in manufacturing can come from this data. There are other departments that also play an integral role in determining what the finished vehicle is going to look like and how it will perform. This also includes things like color design. These teams elect the colors that will give the vehicle its own personality. That includes both the exterior and the interior colors, with a guiding principle being harmony, a harmony between the intent of the vehicle and its appearance. A car that's meant to thrill needs to have a color palette to match. After all, that also includes the actual materials used for the interior. How are they going to feel, how is it going to look, how are they going to capture color? How will they reflect light? All of these considerations play a part and ideally are in alignment with the intent the purpose of this vehicle. It's pretty remarkable how every decision in the design process has to do several things. It's like having multiple bosses and you have to please all of them because the design needs to meet the requirements of that initial business plan. It needs to perform in a specific way depending upon the intended function of the vehicle. It needs to evoke an emotion, It needs to be esthetically pleasing. If the process fails in any of these duties, it can mean going back to the drawing board, sometimes literally. So a quick word about the twenty twenty three models Nissan has designed, because I think it's fun to know what sort of influenced the designers as they worked in those early stages, as they sketched and three D modeled and sculpted. I already mentioned that the Z, Nissan's sports car, incorporates the Katana as part of the vehicle's design. There's also the Frontier, a truck that with a grill that took inspiration from warrior helmets, which I think is amazing, this idea of really being able to tackle the world like a warrior in this in this truck. And then there's the Aria, which Kon says followed a Japanese concept of welcoming openness. The Aria is a crossover vehicle. It's an all electric suv with really cool inset button controls that light up on the interior surfaces of the car. Honestly, as I watched video demonstrations of the vehicle, it made it seem like you're in a spacecraft. I really really dug it. I really want to be inside one. I have not actually set foot in an Aria yet. So in their twenty twenty three models, Nissan's goal was to create designs that impart the feeling of what it must be like to drive those vehicles before you even opened a door, let alone turned it on. By the time a car rolls off the production line, dozens of people have played a critical part in the vehicle's look, feel, and operation, all aligned with this goal of imparting a specific emotional response the thrill of driving. To me, this entire process is incredibly inspiring because it's going from the psychology of human beings, how we react when we see something that appeals to us. It also incorporates both traditional and modern techniques for design, everything from shaping clay to using additive processing. Three D printing can play a big part as you're printing out specific components to see how they fit in with the overall concept of a vehicle. It's this marriage of the traditional and the modern that I find really interesting. It isn't all about let's abandon the old way because we have a new way. It's how do these things work together in harmony to produce the result that we have intended. And in the case of Nissans vehicles, it really makes a lot of sense because you start to see where that appeal really comes through, and you realize, if we left this all up to automated processes, we probably wouldn't end up with anything even remotely as esthetically pleasing and thrilling as what we get through the marriage of all of these methodologies working together. I want to thank Nissan for sponsoring this episode. It's always fun to really take into consideration what has to happen for a product to come together. Often I just look at how the product works and the various technologies that allow it to work, without really considering how did teams decide what that product would look like and how it would feel to use it. So putting myself in that mindset, it's a bit of a stretch, and you know what, we could all use a stretch now and then in the middle of the day. Thanks for listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. I will talk to you again really soon. 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