Calty Design Research is the North American design studio for Toyota Motor Corporation, the world's largest car manufacturer. Calty provides innovative designs for Toyota, Lexus, and Scion vehicles and supports North American production design. Over the last 50 years, Toyota has built more than 30 million cars and trucks in North America. Calty's Newport Beach, California studio focuses on future innovation and creativity - on concepts that are 5-10 years from release.

Andrew MacLachlan works with Calty's designers in California to plan new car concepts before the pen ever hits the paper. Designing a car for the future insulates it from the influence of trends. Car concepts need to take inspiration from deeper personal and cultural values and habits. A key principal in Toyota's culture is genchi genbutsu, which is a Japanese term meaning "go and see." So MacLachlan and Calty go in the field to learn about how people use cars today and they bring in experts and creative pioneers to learn about their processes. They've found that hearing from creators and designers in completely different fields encourages them to push their own creative boundaries.

My name in Andrew MacLachlan. I work in the Planning Strategy Group here at Calty Design. Calty is the North American studio for Toyota and Lexus. We are, right now, the largest car manufacturer in the world. My role here is concept planner. When we put a new car - a new idea of what a car could be, before we start putting pen to paper there has to be a concept, a story behind the car. Who's going to buy it? What's it for? Is it more a sports car? A utility car? And that kind of thing. So I work in the beginning with some of the key designers to put that story together.

We have here the FT-1 concept, this is an early model in that process, and this is a sports car that we showed in Detroit in 2013.

Trends change quite quickly sometimes. If you're doing a project that you won't see on the road for another five years, you can't really look at a trend like a fashion. It has to respond to a much deeper value that someone has.

But something that's key that comes from Toyota's culture is a term called 'Genchi Genbutsu.'

It's very subjective what we do, and that's why I think the right expert can take us a long way.

It is a process that's very time consuming, there are various constraints along the way, there's obviously confidentiality, financial issues as well. So the one thing that's really helped us is that GLG can be that one-stop shop that they deal with all the administrative side or the confidentiality, and then we can just go straight to the kind of person that we're after.

We're kind of pushing the boundaries all the time. So I love the initial problem, the solution that we come up with, and then seeing something physical at the end is fantastic.