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Do design and technology collide when it comes to creating cars? Is the redesign process a constant battle between engineers and designers?

Ian Callum says it's not.

"Design and technology don't collide," says the director of design at Jaguar during an interview last month at the Canadian International AutoShow (CIAS) in Toronto. "There's a lot of misunderstanding about technology and engineers and designers who are very aesthetically orientated. ... In design you have to pick up all of the facts. Some of them are negotiable. Some of them are not. Legals and safety standards are not negotiable. You have to work with them to create a product. That's what design is.

"People always say, 'Wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to do safety for the pedestrians or rollover crash tests?' Well, it would be better if you didn't have to put people in the car, frankly. Wouldn't it? But you do. So the reality is you deal with it and I love that challenge. I love the problem-solving."

Engineers and designers work hand-in-hand at Jaguar, where the average age of an engineer is in the mid-30s. "They're not just a bunch of old men," says Callum. "When we start off with the package of the car we default to the dimensions of the average of all our competitive set. We know the exact dimension of every competitive set car that's out there. We get our competitive cars and we take them apart. We know them inside out, back to front. Every manufacturer does that."

Then, Callum will try to negotiate features such as the shape of the new XE. It must have the sleek look of a Jag, which he feels is "one of the important features of Jaguar." The shape may not look like the competition, but it won't compromise the safety or structure, either.

"It just means you have a different shape inside," says Callum. "You could say there's not quite as much room as another car, but it does look better. And that's the balance we've got to achieve."

Negotiating with engineers may take a little haggling, but in the end Callum often wins. "I usually get what I want, actually. But you have to have pretty good negotiation skills. You have to convince a lot of people that's worth having."

During the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show, Alfonso Albaisa, executive design director at Infiniti, described the focus of a recent brainstorming session with engineers in Japan. "How can engineering help? Or what is the thing they can celebrate? I'm in love with the days when the sheet metal and the craftsman who made the body was engineer and designer as one. I love this."

In Japan, Albaisa has a team of 11,000 engineers. "It's quite impressive," he says. "We identified that the body is going to be one of their big achievements, of course, technology is a big thing, but the fingerprint of the artist is not design, its engineering.

"Our engineers are juiced. They're lungs are full of oxygen. They're doing some very clever stuff with metal. I love that. In the end, both win."

Peter Burgner, head of BMW AppCenter USA, agrees design and engineering is a delicate balancing act. "From my perspective, design and technology don't really collide. They come together in a nice way. Its functional design," he says from the front seat of BMW's all-new 7-Series sedan at the CIAS.

"BMW is very democratic. We look at what every department says and we make those decisions together. We do a lot of innovations out of different groups and later look at how they fit together and which ones we should go for. We do more tests and decide the technology isn't there yet or it generates new ideas like hand gesture controls," says Burgner, referring to an innovative feature that lets drivers complete various functions in the 7-Series including muting the radio without touching a button or a saying a word – simply by making the peace sign hand gesture near the volume knob.

"There's a lot of really cool, fancy innovations and you really need to think – do they really solve a problem that somebody has? How can we really do something that is valuable to our drivers? There's all sorts of fancy tech out there that you can do, but does it really help? From my perspective, that's the main challenge – identifying the technology that really makes sense," says Burgner.

Says Callum: "Technology moves every day. You just have to try and keep up with it and try to get a step ahead of it. Legislation, as well, moves every day. But you have to know five years from now where the legislation is going to be and, in some countries, that's obviously impossible. You have to be very aware. But we're thinking five years ahead all of the time."

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