Lear Won't Take a Backseat

Yet Lear soon realized that it would be a mistake to throw out the old clay-modeling ways altogether. "Our goal is always to get to market faster," says Steven J. Allen, 46, former virtual-design engineering manager at Lear. (Allen left Lear early this year to take a job at Ford.) "But you've got to be able to put a qualified rear end in the seat. If you don't understand sculpture in the real world, you can't sculpt on a computer."

At some point, in other words, reality has to stop being virtual. After all, car design ultimately depends on extremely tactile impressions: how firm a seat is, how its upholstery or leather feels. Designers themselves need to see and touch a physical version of what they are working to create. So do those who are investing in that design. For deCADes, auto executives have read the lines of a clay model with their hands, or poked their way around the foam and plastic of a designer's mock-up. Because those habits die slowly, Lear typically makes at least one physical prototype of every product that it develops in the Reality Center.

The Lear team has also discovered that VR technology sometimes falls short even on its own terms. Trying to mimic real life inside a computer can produce results that are just a little too perfect. So the team infuses "mistakes" into its virtual designs. It might, for example, scan in real leather textures -- textures that have imperfections in them. "Real life isn't flawless," notes Jaron Rothkop, 30, a senior industrial designer at Lear.

Building in minor flaws gives Lear an edge with customers, who appreciate knowing that what they see in Lear's virtual world is what they will get in the real world. "My goal is to destroy the difference between what's real and what's perceived," says Allen. "I don't want any doubt that you're looking at a product, not a concept."

Real Collaboration

In exploring new technologies, the Lear team was tempted at first by the prospect of using them to change long-standing ways of working together. On the surface, those practices seemed to pose a big barrier to efficiency. But here, too, the limits of technology quickly became apparent. "Technology is a tool; it's not your job," quips Rothkop.

Take the Internet. By digitizing much of the design process, Lear has made it possible for designers to send their work back and forth over the Net -- thereby creating a virtual workplace that brings together people from all around the world. In November 1998, for example, Rothkop traveled to a Volvo design center in Sweden and used the Net to work with colleagues at the Reality Center back in Southfield. Where the Internet extends or enhances communication, the Lear team has embraced it. For the most part, though, the real work of designing auto parts remains an up-close-and-personal business.

For that reason, when it came to building the Reality Center, Lear put a premium on creating an environment that would foster collaboration. "We wanted it to be a working room, like a design studio," says Rothkop. The hot thing in virtual reality is the stereoscopic "cave," a space in which people can sit and be completely surrounded by a screen. While that arrangement simulates being in a car, "it can kind of make people nauseated," Rothkop says. Worse yet, only one or two people at a time can sit in the cave -- a situation that has dismal implications for collaboration. The Lear team considered a cave version but chose a simpler design for its virtual-reality room, one that has a flatter screen and a more open space. There's even room in front of the screen for a full-sized truck, so Lear designers can bring together the real and the virtual whenever their work calls for that.

Another temptation that Lear executives faced was to think that CAD and VR would let them break down traditional job barriers and combine the roles of designer, sculptor, and animator into a single worker. Wouldn't it be more efficient, the thinking went, to train one person to be a kind of superdesigner? Think again. In Lear's experience, the seemingly artificial barriers between jobs often turn out to be quite natural. So Lear drew back from the notion of combining jobs.

Today, designers and engineers, sculptors and animators all work together in and around the Reality Center -- talking, arguing, creating. Indeed, they treat the center not just as a place to use technology but also as a place to meet. "There's no control booth, so everyone can operate the system," Rothkop says. "People get very comfortable in here."

Real Business

In the summer of 1999, people from Lear heard through the Detroit rumor mill that GM wanted to make better use of its commercial-van business. Leaders at GM's van division thought that there might be a profitable niche market for an updated version of the conversion vans that were popular in the 1970s. The basic idea: Take the outer shell of the commercial van, and -- in place of the standard gray plastic seats and black rubber mats -- outfit the vehicle with deluxe leather seating and flip-down, flat-panel screens, along with other high-tech gadgets.