Sharon Gauci, executive director of industrial design at General Motors, in Warren, Mich., Oct. 15, 2018.NICK HAGEN/The New York Times News Service
Thirteen years ago, Sharon Gauci became the first woman asked to join the judges’ panel for her native country’s Australian Design Awards. The annual laurels had been handed out since the 1950s, so Ms. Gauci may be forgiven if she viewed the invitation – a career highlight – as a smidge overdue.
“Things are better now,” Ms. Gauci, General Motors Co. executive director for industrial design, said recently. “But the numbers still aren’t what we’d like them to be. Our industry needs and wants creative people from different backgrounds – women, minorities, everybody.”
Today, as one of her company’s top design professionals and a member of its leadership team, Ms. Gauci, 48, plays an important role in the “visual expression” of General Motors and its brands around the world. In 1993, however, when she graduated with honours from Swinburne University in Melbourne, she was one of just two women in her industrial design class.
Only a handful of colleges and universities offer bachelor’s degrees in automotive design, typically called transportation design and often a subset of industrial design. Women still account for a small percentage of graduates, but their numbers are increasing, the schools say.
“We see more women in industrial design generally, with transportation design a part of that,” said Chris Livaudais, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America. He estimated that 25 per cent to 35 per cent of the society’s working members are women.
During the past seven years, the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., has noted a 25 per cent increase in the number of women enrolled in the school’s transportation design programs. Alumnae have gone on to key industry posts.
Michelle Christensen, who graduated in 2005, helped shape the NSX Supercar as a lead exterior designer at Acura. Tisha Johnson, class of ’99, is vice-president for interior design at Volvo in Sweden. A surfer, motorcyclist and former sky diver, Ms. Johnson described cars as a natural extension of her fascination with motion in Dot, the ArtCenter’s twice-yearly magazine.
At Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, “only about 10 per cent of our transportation design seniors are women,” said Paul Snyder, who heads the school’s undergraduate program. But every one “will be in high demand when they graduate,” he added.
Crystal Windham, director for design at General Motors, in Warren, Mich., Oct. 15, 2018.NICK HAGEN/The New York Times News Service
Crystal Windham, a 1994 graduate of the college, who directs Cadillac’s interior design team, knew little about cars as a teenager. Encouraged by a high-school teacher to pursue her passion for art, however, she attended an invitational event at the College for Creative Studies and “fell in love,” she said.
Ms. Windham, 45, saw automotive design as “a chance to create products that impact so many lives.” After sophomore- and junior-year internships, she joined General Motors upon graduation.
Transportation design majors usually study automotive manufacturing processes; color, materials and finishes (CMF in industry parlance); and “vehicle packaging” – how engines, drive trains, braking and suspension systems, as well as chassis length, window size and fuel tanks, influence design. Model building and 3-D printing skills are important parts of a typical curriculum.
Even so, the beating heart of automotive design will always be art, Mr. Snyder said. “Digital tools have lightened some of the burden,” he said, “but first and foremost, a transportation designer must learn to draw.”
Many automotive designers spend most of their careers focusing on color, materials and finishes – virtually everything on or in an automobile that is touched or seen. At a large company such as GM, they work in studios where concepts often precede production by years – what Ms. Gauci calls “the landscape of the future.”
A sketch by Darby Barber, a creative designer at General Motors, in Warren, Mich.NICK HAGEN/The New York Times News Service
By contrast, Jo Lewis at McLaren Automotive works just minutes away from her employer’s production line. “We’re very hands-on,” said Ms. Lewis, who leads the British automaker’s nine-member CMF team. “I’m down there at least once a day.”
Since many of the company’s cars are built on a bespoke basis, those visits are often made to ensure compliance with a particular customer’s wishes. Interacting with car buyers and suppliers is a favorite part of her job, said Ms. Lewis, who was named to Autocar magazine’s list of “Great British Women in the Car Industry” last year.
“I’m always thinking of ways to reduce weight,” added Ms. Lewis, 35, who concentrated on materials and processes in her postgraduate work at London’s Royal College of Art.
For example, the choice of paint cut 9 pounds from the Senna, her company’s newest hand-built supercar. Ms. Lewis’s search for lighter finishes was part of a McLaren initiative that chased every gram of savings – even the choice of bolts.
Some believe the natural evolution of automobiles will spur greater demand for female designers. For much of the past century, vehicle design largely focused on an auto’s exterior, said Raphael Zammit, who heads the graduate program at the College for Creative Studies.
“You didn’t want to get stuck doing interiors and door handles,” he said.
However, as automobiles became more mechanically refined – and as safety requirements imposed greater conformity on exterior designs – interiors grew in importance. With the advent of self-driving autos and an anticipated decline in privately owned cars, that can only continue, Mr. Zammit said. Vehicles, he said, “will become more like homes or offices.”
A future in which autonomous vehicles roam beneath the sea intrigues Grace Lee, a second-year transportation design student at the ArtCenter in Pasadena. A former microbiology major “who was always good at drawing things,” she said, she is fascinated by how images from nature influence automotive shapes and concepts – the correlation between the Corvette Stingray and its inspiration, the mako shark, for example.
“I always viewed the car world as male-dominated,” Ms. Lee said, “so it’s really nice to see design become a more welcoming environment for women.”
Many automakers and schools support internships, student-parent visits and other outreach programs to encourage greater diversity among designers.
The ArtCenter has “been trying to recruit more women into the transportation program for at least the last decade,” said Teri Bond, a school spokeswoman. She said the initiative was driven less by the national push to get more girls into STEM fields (for science, technology, engineering and math) than it is by a fact of commerce: the auto industry’s growing share of female buyers.
Ms. Barber’s exterior drawings won third place overall and highest among students in Detroit’s televised “Motor City Masters” design contest.NICK HAGEN/The New York Times News Service
Darby Barber, 25, a 2015 alumna of the College for Creative Studies, knew from an early age that she wanted to be around cars. She got her first vehicle – a truck – when she was 16 and started working on autos in college, helped by a male friend “who taught me it was OK to take things apart – we could always put them back together.”
Ms. Barber’s sketching chops paid off when her exterior drawings won third place overall and highest among students in Detroit’s televised “Motor City Masters” design contest. “It helped me get my job,” she said.
Now an interior designer at Chevrolet, Ms. Barber races a Turbo Miata on weekends and pilots a vintage Volvo 240 in “drift car” events, a motor sport in which drivers deliberately skid through corners, spewing clouds of dust and tire smoke.
“If I hadn’t found this career, I probably would have wound up being a mechanic,” she said. “But if you like art, automotive design is a form of art. I love it.”
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