You know the shape of the leaf of the lily.

You know, it's as simple as the format that it is, long and sweeping, just this beautiful line.

Take a leg of a grasshopper, so elegant, so strong, you know, and it's proportionately

beautiful. When I need help with proportions or beauty and design and textures, I always go to nature.

And I get blown away every time. My name Eric Watanabe.

Design influences every part of our lives.

Think about what you wear, what you drive, how you interact in the world, how entire cities operate.

Almost everything in our lives is designed by people.

Eric Watanabe is an industrial designer at Skunkworks.

He collaborates with conceptual designers to imagine future aircraft.

One of these conceptual designers is Eric Schrock, a director at Lockheed Martin and former lead of the Skunkworks conceptual design team.

Well, ever since I was a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere, western Pennsylvania,

I want to design airplanes for the skunk quirks. Not only did I like airplanes, but all of my

favorite airplanes came from one place. I think conceptual design is a little bit different than a lot

of other engineering disciplines because you have to be comfortable

with a blank sheet of paper. And a lot of times, if you look at the way that engineers are schooled,

they have a lot of the parameters they need in order to solve a problem. But a conceptual design problem

is so much more broad than that because so much is yet to be determined. It's what makes it a really

exciting playground with so many different unknowns.

So conceptual design is the very beginning stages of aircraft design, and really it's the essence of the skunk works. Not only we determine in conceptual design how an airplane looks

and how it performs, but also a lot of the things about how it's going to serve its purpose

for its entire life. Aircraft design is really unique because it is the ultimate in form follows

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