Car Design News: OK, Jeff, fascinating conversation on stage about leadership and we touched on various different elements. One of the things that came up inevitably, was the use of AI.

Jeff Hammoud: AI is obviously the hot topic. You hear about it everywhere right now. My team has been experimenting a lot with it and I truly believe it is a tool, an iterative tool. I don’t think it’s something that’s going to replace creativity, but in terms of being able to iterate, come up with ideas faster, it is very good at that. 

And what you teach the model is what it’ll put out. It’s an amalgamation of putting a bunch of different things together and then spitting something out based on that. I don’t think it’s going to replace creative thought, but it is going to be a tool that can accelerate some of our design thinking.

CDN: And will that necessarily give us more space for more creativity in the long run?

JH: I do believe that. I use a simple example where the amount of hours my CMF team would spend trying to find the right image for a CMF board. Now they can just put something in there, describe the product they want to set up, they want it to be metal, they want it to be green, whatever it is, and then an AI image generator can immediately put that there. So that also just makes the design process of telling a story faster.

 

We can spend more time designing instead of doing some of the remedial tasks

Even when we’re doing UX user journeys and we want somebody by a campfire, you know, with their truck lights, instead of sketching something to illustrate that to help tell a story to another department, we can create AI images for that really quickly. And it doesn’t really matter because it’s just a tool to communicate. We can spend more time designing instead of doing some of the remedial tasks.

CDN: You spoke about how it was important to have the space to doodle, having stuff on the wall, because it facilitated a discussion that AI work could not.

JH: I think regardless of tools, AI, Blender, all these digital tools that you’re seeing a lot of designers get into, if everything you’re looking at on the wall is super polished and super finished, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for discussion because it’s a finished thought. You might say, I don’t really like that front end or maybe this facia needs more detail. But because the pictures are already painted for you, it doesn’t leave room for that open discussion. That’s where a doodle really comes in.

You remember as a designer, you’d have all these beautiful renderings that you spent hours on and your head of design would focus on this little doodle that wasn’t finished because it allowed that space to imagine what it is. And that invites the conversation, not just with your design leader, but the other designers, and everybody starts to pitch in because they all interpret it differently.