Who's Where: Toyota design chief moves to head-up Yamaha design

Akihiro Dezi Nagaya has moved from his position as chief designer at Toyota to Yamaha Motor Company, where he will take up the post of chief general manager of design. The move became effective on 1 July, and sees Nagaya move from his position as CEO of Tecno Art Research, a freelance design office for Toyota projects located in Nagoya, Japan. His replacement at Tecno Art Research is Hiroshi Kawahara, Toyota's former general manager of advanced design.

Nagaya was responsible for the exterior of the second-generation Toyota Prius, and the development of Lexus' L-Finesse design language. For the past two years, Nagaya has been CEO of Tecno Art Research, where recent projects have included the exterior of the Lexus RC F and work on color selections for Lexus' Super GT racing team.

He has now transferred to Yamaha as part of the reciprocal shareholding that Toyota and Yamaha has with one another, and is part of the latter's acknowledgment of the importance of design in the success of its future product portfolio. This spans from boats to motorcycles to golf carts and robots. The firm has a developing interest in the automotive sector too, showing the Motiv.e city car concept at last year's Tokyo motor show.

Yamaha's board, headed by CEO Hiroyuki Yanagi, has elected to bring more of its design activities in house, instead of using contractors, such as GK Design Group in Tokyo with whom Yamaha has had a long-standing contract.

From today (15 July), Yamaha Motor Company's design section will be reorganized into three divisions - Corporate Design, which will oversee the brand's design strategy; Product Design, which is responsible for overall product design development from planning to 3D and color design; and Design Promotion, which will take care of supplying design information for development and manufacturing.

Nagaya will become general manager of all three design divisions.

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By Tom Phillips