One of the rewards of participating in design education is to follow the progress of your students when they start their careers in industry or with design consultancies.
I have been active in design education for more years than I care to recall, eleven years as a one day per week tutor at the Royal College of Art in London and for the past ten years chairman of transportation design at the Center for Creative Studies.
Now I have the great pleasure, when reading journals devoted to automotive design, to frequently discover the faces and the work of old friends who have become major forces in automotive design. To give an example, looking through issue number 103 of Auto & Design, one sees a feature on the new Audi A6 with design chief Peter Schreyer peering out from page 35. Peter was part of a remarkable group of German designers at the RCA which included Achim Storz, Gert Hildebrand and Irwin Himmel, all of whom have important careers in design.
Following that, one sees a feature on the new Volvo C70, which had major input from RCA alumni Peter Horbury, design chief at Volvo, and Ian Callum as a consultant. A little further on in the issue is a feature on the splendid Chrysler Concorde and Dodge Intrepid. Chrysler has given major credit for these designs to Mark Hall (Concorde) and Bob Boniface (Intrepid), both very recent alumni of CCS. What a start to a career in automobile design! Further on we see Luciano d’Ambrosio, an RCA alumnus who has the prestigious position of chief exterior designer at Bertone.
Next we see a feature on Geoff Upex, director of design for Rover. Geoff, an RCA alumnus, also worked with me at Ogle. Rover’s Mini proposals were a delightful surprise at the ’97 Geneva show. Finally there was our article on work done at CCS during the academic year 1996. The graduates of this group are working with Alias, Ford, General Motors, Honda and Storz Design in Austria. For my review of the class of May ’97 I have chosen to feature four designers whose work was extremely well received by the automobile design fraternity.
Indeed all four designers had at least seven job offers each. Mark Micelli and John Norman have gone to Honda, Jon Gaudreau to Chrysler and Nicki Kwee to Ford in Germany. But in their class there were also eight other talented young people all of whom had one or more job opportunities.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 107
