Design - Freeman Thomas

This summer, DaimlerChrysler hired Thomas away from VW/Audi. At DaimlerChrysler, Thomas heads three of the company's advanced product-design studios. After his first full week of work in Detroit -- with his family still in California -- Thomas stretched out on the bed in his room at the Residence Inn and reviewed his week: what he'd learned, what he'd seen, what inspirations he'd gotten from the designers. "I just made a series of sketches. I sketched my week by sketching cars," he says. "Unfortunately, I can't show them to you because they're all top secret."

Freeman Thomas on Cars and Cooking

I'm not a workaholic. I make friends with my neighbors. At a certain point, you have to get away from work and look at as many different things as possible -- then bring them back to work.

Look at cooking, for instance. The great dishes have come out of peasant cooking -- from Italy, France, Germany. In Italy, it's just pasta and tomatoes. Look at all the different flavors made from those same ingredients.

In the studio, we don't want to homogenize cultures; we want to differentiate them.

Freeman Thomas could not look more ordinary. Passing him at the mall, pulling up next to him at a stop light, you'd hardly give him a second glance. In California, while at VW/Audi, Thomas often came to work in shorts and a T-shirt.

In the offices of DaimlerChrysler, where Thomas is one of four vice presidents who sit in a row of roomy glass boxes, he wears a coat and sometimes a tie. But he does almost nothing to draw attention to himself, contrary to what you might expect from a hip designer. No earrings, no shaggy hair, no all-black wardrobe, no outrageous fashions. His personal style is so unselfconscious, it's almost a statement of its own -- the absence of style.

If this straightforward presentation isn't exactly calculated, Thomas can nonetheless explain it. "A lot of people in the design world are full of BS," he says. "They want to create the facade that there's an extreme individual there. I don't want to be someone who can't be approached."

Thomas is no longer a kid sitting with his sketch pad and his Walkman, drawing cars and listening to the sound of roaring engines. Modern car design is, by necessity, a thoroughly collaborative process. There are transmissions to consider, the quality of surface materials, costs, manufacturability, safety and other government regulations, and marketability.

In that world, Thomas has evolved a role that serves both his artistic and his bureaucratic needs. "I'm a storyteller," he says. "I think of a designer as a processor of information -- like a scriptwriter or a novelist." Thomas sees himself as a kind of cultural filter and architect: Listen carefully to what's going on out in the world, consider history and context, and create a vehicle that matches the zeitgeist. The Microbus is an artifact of its era; so is the minivan.

Thomas believes absolutely that every vehicle needs a story. "What's the plot?" he asks of the Prowler, before answering his own question. Being able to communicate that story to consumers is one thing. But being able to articulate it to people inside the company is perhaps more important, if your designs are going to survive, and if they are going to transcend "committee-ization."

"It's important to be able to communicate, not just to designers but also to nondesign people," Thomas says. "If people don't have a vision, you have to be able to walk them through what you're talking about. You have to be able to connect equally with an engineer, with someone from marketing, and with someone from the fabrication shop. The question is, How do you get people to work together? Most companies have 'committee design.' That's not what I like. I like 'consensus design.' In a committee, people don't speak up. They don't say what they think. Nothing is allowed to come out. Consensus design means that you all express yourselves, and your ideas, and at the end of the day, you all agree to do something. You might initially be against an idea, but if someone walks you through the thought process, you might then be able to say, 'I see what you're talking about.' "

One of the many projects that Thomas has worked on is a series of forklifts for the German manufacturer Linde AG. His forklifts have style and curves, including a sassy reverse curve along the back of the cab. "It's like a little squirt, " says Thomas. Indeed, he sketches a forklift, and below it, he sketches a cartoon character named Esso, an animated guy whose head is a drop of oil. (The character is used to market Esso products in Europe.) "That's where the curve came from on the forklifts," says Thomas. "From the curve of Esso's head."

With all their functionality, the forklifts had that touch of whimsy that made some of Thomas's colleagues certain that the design would never be approved.