Spring Break
Hopeful auto designers display their projects
By: Michelle Krebs — krt campus
Issue date: 4/12/04 Section: News
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.
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 other seniors are assigned as their last semester project to design a GM vehicle for 2020. GM's sole requirement is that the futuristic vehicles use the skateboard-shaped chassis of its Autonomy fuel cell concept.
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."
Lyon then moves on to the next student, spending the evening critiquing sketches that will be turned into three-dimensional clay models for a final grade and likely a ticket for a job this spring when Horozic and 16 others, including nine from Michigan, in her class graduate.
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."
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