Adjusting to the coronavirus lockdown and the move en masse to working from house has actually been much easier for some occupations than others. We have actually been doing it given that day one here at Ars, since typing at a computer is just as simple to do in the house as it remains in a crowded workplace. That’s less simple if you’re, say, a car designer. “The design studio is a big workshop; it’s a huge collective workshop,” states Julian Thomson, Jaguar’s director of design, who, like the rest of the company, now finds himself working from house in the UK. We spoke to Thomson today to see how that’s impacting his 300- strong group, what legacy this pandemic might leave on the cars and trucks that get developed in the future, along with what to search for in the current F-Type style refresh and the upcoming XJ electric sedan.
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The last couple of weeks have required a little adjustment for the Jaguar style studio. “In an organization like Jaguar Land Rover there are a great deal of individuals who do just stand at a computer system screen all the time. It’s very abnormal for a designer or a modeler to do that” he explained. Pre-pandemic, Thomson states, he would hardly ever be found in his office. “I ‘d invest the majority of my time just roaming around looking at designs, talking to individuals, seeing what they’re doing. If I have a question, typically, I walk over to the person’s desk,” he told me.
Thomson– whose design credits include the initial Lotus Elise and the first-generation Variety Rover Evoque– has actually had the top design job at Jaguar for a little under a year, changing his previous boss Ian Callum last July. A couple of months later on, he and the rest of the company’s designers moved into a brand-new design studio in Gaydon, England, a 130,000- square-foot area with modern CNC clay modeling equipment, VR caves, and a 36- foot 4K show wall. “An entire brand-new studio was built around a very collaborative communicative space. Therefore now to be stuck in my attic tied to an iPad is pretty weird for me and has had its moments,” he said.
Each new Jaguar design is the work of numerous individuals but needs to appear it’s a particular vision, not the product of a committee. “That’s why we need to have such excellent interaction and in such a close-knit group. So it’s challenging to copy that circumstance when we’re all separated like this, however it’s working out all right,” he discussed.
His most significant aggravation is not having the ability to see or c