In the bustling streets of Milan, this year’s Design Week delivered a revolutionary message for the future of mobility. Lexus, the Japanese luxury automotive brand, unveiled “Time,” a double interactive installation by prominent global designers that showcased its vision for the automotive industry of tomorrow.

In the beautiful, lush setting of Art Point and Art Garden at Milan's Superstudio Più pavilion, Lexus brought together a dream team of designers and artists, asking them to embody the essence of its new age of personable luxury at the wheel. How will technology shape the era-defining shift to software-defined vehicles (SDVs), and how will having different cars under the same body change our driving experience?

Designer Hideki Yoshimoto and composer Keiichiro Shibuya answered these questions with “Beyond the Horizon,” an immersive indoor installation that merged the evolving space of high-tech innovation with traditional Japanese craftsmanship. The result—a glowing juxtaposition of Japanese washi paper, large screens, 10 luminous sculptures, and the futuristic electric vehicle LF-ZC, set to hit the market in 2026—was enough to make the audience’s heart skip a beat. "I wanted to show magnificent, mesmerizing landscapes to visualize the Lexus challenges going into the future," Yoshimoto explains. "To go beyond the horizon means to go into outer space: a statement of exploration, of finding a new dimension," he adds. Yoshimoto, founder of the London-based design studio Tangent, is a former acquaintance of Lexus: He won the prestigious Lexus Design Award in 2013, when he was a graduate student. "It changed my life," he recalls.

The immersive music of Keiichiro Shibuya whisked the audience away in a crescendo to an ever-changing, surreal world. "The lights filtering through the washi paper made me think of the project as kind of cinematic," Shibuya shares. "My inspiration for abstract music came from the works of Gerhard Richter and Wolfgang Tillmans," he adds, noting that AI is giving him more possibilities in creating music. "I think sometimes people are too scared by artificial intelligence, while they should embrace its opportunities instead," he says.

Outside, in a sunny garden, sat a kaleidoscopic rendition of the LF-ZC made up of 10 translucent scrims that marked out the aerodynamic lines of the already iconic vehicle: It is Marjan van Aubel’s “8 Minutes and 20 Seconds,” first presented at Miami Art & Design Week 2023. The Dutch solar designer, as she likes to call herself, composed a sunlight-powered tribute to Lexus’ commitment to driving towards a future of carbon neutrality and sustainable luxury. "To me it was a dream to think of an artistic answer to the question, ‘How will the future of mobility look?’" van Aubel shares. She praised the design of the concept car and the future of software-induced customization: "The aesthetics and the feeling it creates are wonderful," says the solar designer. In a not-so-distant tomorrow, concluded van Aubel, “You will be able to define your driving mood: It is all in the software, so if you want to be in a sweet sports car, you just change the settings.”

Perhaps no one is more enthusiastic about the software-defined path ahead of the car manufacturer than Koichi Suga, general manager of design at Lexus. How will it work? "It is going to be like your smartphones, in a way. Everybody installs different apps, it depends on individual tastes," explains Suga. "The car will provide a custom experience tailored to the customer’s preferences. This is our brand mission: to make luxury personal."

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