This GM design team’s work shows up in all kinds of places besides cars

WARREN, Michigan – Inside General Motors Co.’s Global Technical Center are teams of people creating new vehicles, but one of them is dedicated to completely different design projects.

From logos to refrigerated carts, charging stations to buildings, the product and experience team that’s part of GM’s industrial design organization has large tasks on hand, and all of them are crucial for the automaker’s electric, tech-centered future.

The team of about 40 is essentially a creative design firm within the legacy automaker, helping its brands better define their identities and project them to the public. They also are helping to complete the brand experience by designing the products that accompany vehicles, such as the electric vehicle chargers for models powered by Ultium, GM’s EV platform.

“We’re here because it’s good business and we can save money, but … fortunately, we’re positioned to be able to reach out and find opportunities,” said Jeff Nield, GM’s design director of product and experience, global industrial design.

“It’s part production studio, part advanced design, part strategy, part brand agency, and it’s really healthy because we can rotate people through here, and they’ll see things differently if they were to return back to a vehicle program.”

Central to the team’s mission is the customer – from helping them connect to a brand to enhancing their use of one of the brand’s products. The in-house operation aims to help save money as GM pushes further into its EV transition, allowing the automaker to leverage the architects and the product, graphic, environmental and automotive designers who make up the team for untapped growth areas.

“If a customer is trying to charge their new General Motors EV, we want to improve that entire experience for them,” Nield said. “And we have the capability to do that.”

Nield’s team covers an array of areas: product design, architecture experience and the corporate brand strategy. The team can work on various projects at once since it has the attitude of a startup company that’s connected to the capability of a legacy automaker.

Here, designers can get ideas on paper quickly. Fancy tech tools help bring them to life.

“We leverage a digital design process to enable speed and high-quality execution,” said Nield, adding that to save time and money, the team can work in scale and use virtual reality to showcase full-size designs to executive leadership.

“That allows us to work very quickly because we don’t have to go and prototype things in full size and bring them back up here,” Nield said. “We can just iterate really fast, on the fly.”

Departments across GM come to Nield’s team for assistance: “I just can’t say enough how impressed I am with the designers there in being able to navigate and do so much,” said Crystal Windham, GM’s global executive director of industrial design.

She says the team is “at the center, the core of the business, so we get to interface with marketing quite often, the brand teams. We work directly with a lot of the VPs throughout the organization.”

Because the potential projects are seemingly limitless, the team works to prioritize what’s within reach to make an impact in the near term and “then move on to the next thing,” Nield said.

Right now, the product side of the team is heavily focused on creating Ultium chargers for GM’s growing number of electric vehicles. This year, GM is launching electric versions of the Chevrolet Silverado, Equinox and Blazer. It also has the Bolt EV and EUV, Cadillac Lyriq and Hummer EV pickup and SUV.

To accompany those vehicles, GM sells the Ulitum PowerUp charger, a Level 2 home charger designed by the product and experience design team. Production of new charging products by the team will start by the end of 2023.

“When we think about Ultium as a brand for the chargers, it really gave us the opportunity to look at it as a total brand and build some consistency on how we show up and how we want to develop that brand going forward,” Windham said. Designing Ultium chargers could be beneficial for the brand’s growth.

“If they have a consistent look to them that is recognizable as ‘Oh, those are GM’s chargers,’ that could be a good thing, if they are actually reliable,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal e-mobility analyst for market research firm Guidehouse Inc., noting that other non-GM chargers have had issues with reliability.

The team is also designing public chargers. Last year, GM announced a collaboration with Pilot Travel Centers LLC to add 2,000 EV charging stalls at up to 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers.

The product team is also partnering with BrightDrop, the GM business focused on delivery and logistics, on automated grocery refrigeration. BrightDrop is working with Kroger Co. to introduce Trace Grocery, a temperature-controlled cart used for online grocery order fulfillment. It will also be marketed to other customers beyond Kroger.

The architecture experience team inside product and experience works on designs for GM buildings all around the world. The team can look out the window of its current Warren Tech Center facility and see two of its projects in process.

The team worked on GM’s Design West building slated to open later this year, adding 360,000 square feet of space to the design campus. There’s also the recently announced Cadillac House at Vanderbilt, a state-of-the-art facility for Cadillac Celestiq customers. The House will host customers to collaborate with designers on the development of the hand-built EV. The facility will welcome its first clients in late summer 2023.

For each architecture project, the team creates a digital model and reviews that with leadership before an architecture firm comes in.

“We can do a higher quantity of projects if we get involved up front and do the vision – so that was my strategy for this team,” Nield said.

The corporate brand strategy designers are focused on “brand tonality.” They review logos, photography, graphic designs and color palettes to help tell each brand’s story as an experience on a three-dimensional level.

“Moving into an EV world, it makes business sense to have branding – look, touch and feel – be responsible by the OEM,” said Warren Browne, an auto supplier consultant and former GM executive who spent 40 years working for the automaker.

The team behind GM’s major logo change in 2021 is tasked with figuring out the best ways to represent brands at dealerships, auto shows and other public displays.

“We will continue to influence that, and we’ll continue to explore what that looks like,” Windham said. “If that evolves into another type of format, we’ll do that, too. And I think by us being as flexible as we are and diverse as we are in the way that we pursue design, it really puts us in a good position.”