There's even room in front of the screen for a full-sized truck, so Lear designers can bring together the real and the virtual whenever their work calls for that. Another temptation that Lear executives faced was to think that CAD and VR would let them break down traditional job barriers and combine the roles of designer, sculptor, and animator into a single worker. In Lear's experience, the seemingly artificial barriers between jobs often turn out to be quite natural. So Lear drew back from the notion of combining jobs. Indeed, they treat the center not just as a place to use technology but also as a place to meet.
People get very comfortable in here.
In the summer of 1999, people from Lear heard through the Detroit rumor mill that GM wanted to make better use of its commercial-van business. Leaders at GM's van division thought that there might be a profitable niche market for an updated version of the conversion vans that were popular in the 1970s. A team from Lear, meanwhile, had independently arrived at a similar idea. The team took that idea to people from GM's van division, who liked what they saw and paid Lear for the concept. And speed was of the essence.