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Americas Design, for Ford. Which means that he has considerable responsibility for a variety of products, including the F-150 and Mustang, to name two of the more iconic ones, two of which are in the process of becoming anew. So yes, he understands what designers are up against on a daily basis. Which brings me back to what I said that evoked the laugh: Given that new vehicles come out every few years, don't designers have, well, a lot of time on their hands? HA! Callum explains that (1) "our cadence is good," with refreshes on the order of 2 to 2.5 years and new products in six and (2) "There is a lot of stuf to come out in the next couple of years." Yes, there are that truck and quintessential pony car, but he's mum on those subjects, in keeping with corporate protocol. "The last two years have been the busiest period in my career, easily." While some of that activity is undoubtedly the consequence of Ford becoming more design-driven of late (while car company execs are wont to say that they have always been that, the physical evidence on the road of current cars with the Blue Oval compared with older—but not old—cars with the FoMoCo badge tells the real story) and of Callum running an organization, not being on the proverbial drawing board, there is something else that's happened during the last few years for vehicle designers at Ford and everywhere else: "If you think about what it was to design a car 10 years ago, there was very little work done on the headlamps and the tail lamps. There was very little work done on radios and heating and cooling systems. The amount of work that design is involved with on doing a car has probably increased by at least 50%, if not doubled. Designing a headlamp itself is a monumental project. Tail lamps are the same. HMI [human-machine interface] systems are now an element of our lives. Five years ago we didn't even talk about it. Now the amount of time we spend on that is amazing. Every HMI screen has to be designed by someone." Thus, the laugh. The attention that headlamps are receiving by designers is something that Callum further amplifes. "The headlamp has become part of the accepted signature of the face of the car," he says, noting that it wasn't all that long ago that headlamps were little more than commodities. "Any research will tell you the front face of the car is the view that people will judge a car on," Callum p The Fusion (shown here in the plug-in Energi confguration) is where there is a combination of sleek form and aerodynamic execution. Callum says that pulling of that combination is "creative problem solving. We know all of our competitors are trying to solve the same problem"—creating a car that is attractive and efcient—"so we are trying to do it in the most beautiful way possible." 31