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From Sketches to Clay, Ford Designers Bring Ideas to Fruition
Sep 08 2009 by Lori Hindman
Have you ever looked at a car and wondered, “What were they thinking?” I do that a lot. Sometimes I’m admiring an innovative feature, and other times it’s a poorly executed idea that’s caught my ire. Recently, Ford helped me get some answers to that question when they allowed me behind the curtain — so to speak — at the Ford Design Center in Irvine, Calif.
This is where 15 designers are creating the Fords of the future, both in cooperation and in competition with other Ford designers in Detroit, England, Germany and Australia. It’s an international effort to put out global cars.
From the designers to the bigwigs in Detroit, everyone’s ideas are fair game at the Ford Design Center. The group even receives custom requests, including one from NYC Transit Authority officials who are looking to replace their fleet of Crown Victoria taxis. The U.S. Department of Energy has also requested an ultra-efficient vehicle from the automaker. Well, Ford is happy to put their geniuses to work finding solutions to these requests.
Once an idea is born, it follows a path from pencil sketch to full-size clay model. Even in today’s world of high-tech design, a car design starts as a freehand drawing on paper. From there, however, it gets technical in mind-boggling ways. First, the sketch is scanned into the computer where the designer plays with the images until he likes what he sees. Then the design moves into a 3-D rendering program that lets the designer virtually sculpt the car by clicking and dragging a computer mouse. I’m so glad that’s not my job; I’d mess things up in a hurry.
Using the 3-D model, another program lets designers add shading and texture to the car. Then the car model goes up on what Ford designers call their “power wall.” It’s a massive computer screen that allows the designers to work with life-size images of the computer model. They can rotate it to see it from any angle, inside or out. All I could think when I saw the power wall was how much my kids would love to play video games on the giant screen — and how quickly they’d break it.
Once everyone is happy with the computer model, a clay model is made from lightweight but strong clay. A milling drill sculpts the clay right there in the design center. To me, it looked like a magic arm, and it wasn’t completely unlike the machine at the pet store that engraves my dogs’ names into their tags. (Don’t tell the guys at Ford I said that.) They even create tires with tread out of that clay. When the sculpting is complete, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a real car and the clay model. At least until I tried to open the door.
During my tour, I also got to see some amazing technology that’s headed our way. Ford is working on Emotive Voice Activation system that goes beyond responding to prompts with scripted answers and is more like having a conversation with your own personal assistant. What mom doesn’t need one of those? Ford calls her Eva (it’s an acronym). She even has an animated face, so you don’t feel like such a fool chatting with your car. Eva can read your email to you, search for news articles and read them to you, perform searches of your calendar or the internet, and probably teach your kids to tie their shoes. So far, the technology works, but Eva’s face is kind of creepy-looking in an overly computerized way. Hey, Ford guys? The face needs work. I’m just saying.
