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Detroit college producing many
of the world’s best auto designers
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Amina Horozic, 21, a senior studying transportation design at
Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, nervously waits for
Dave Lyon, General Motors’ executive director of design, to
give some sign whether or not he likes her car sketches that cover
the wall.
His expression and questions to her provide no clue.
Since she and her brother played with cars in their Harrison
Township home, Horozic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, has had a
lifelong dream to be a car designer. Now, with her final school
project, the dream is within her grasp.
She and the other seniors are assigned as their last semester
project to design a GM vehicle for 2020. (Four major automakers
alternate sponsoring the senior project.) GM’s sole
requirement is that the futuristic vehicles use the
skateboard-shaped chassis of its Autonomy fuel cell concept,
unveiled at the 2002 Detroit auto show.
Horozic’s egg-shaped concept looks more like wild sci-fi
transportation than a current car. She’s designed the vehicle
from the inside out, with the idea that the vehicle has replaced
the family dining table as a place to converse and interact.
At long last, Lyon, a 1990 CCS graduate, delivers his verdict.
“It’s spooky,” he says. “In a good way. Do
one even more outlandish.”
Such design reviews are daily drills at CCS, one of the
world’s top breeding grounds for car designers, but one that
few Detroiters outside the auto industry realize has a global
reputation.
“CCS is the nation’s best-kept secret in design
education,” said CCS dean of academic affairs Imre Molnar,
who moved to CCS in 2001 from the rival Art Center College of
Design in Pasadena, Calif., the nation’s other major school
for car designers.
CCS’s transportation program draws students from the Detroit
suburbs as well as from all over the world, like 25-year-old
Sung-Yeah Song from South Korea, who picked CCS because
“it’s the best in the world. It’s famous in
Korea.”
One of the strong points of the CCS transportation design program
is its close association with car designers working in the
profession. Ralph Gilles, a top DaimlerChrysler designer who most
recently designed the just-introduced Chrysler 300C and Dodge
Magnum, is a professor for the senior class.
Once restricted to mostly GM, Ford and Chrysler designers,
CCS’s transportation design program has gone international in
its associations with foreign car companies and their
designers.
Toyota, for instance, recently gave the school $1 million for a
visiting speakers program. Many of the foreign makers have
Detroit-area design operations that lend their support to the
school.
Changes in store for the transportation studies program will be
more focused on digital skills used for rendering concepts, as well
as on conversion of sketches to math-based data so models can be
made on high-tech equipment like the school’s new milling
machine.
“We’re trying to stay at least up to date or ahead of
the curve with the changes in the auto industry,” Rogers
said.
The school also plans to offer a graduate program in transportation
design, a first in the United States, said Rogers, who says CCS
would then be the only school in the world to offer transportation
design at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He says a
graduate program would appeal to a different student population,
perhaps people in other design fields or people with the skills for
transportation who want to make a career change with a graduate
degree.
Michelle Krebs
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)