Canadians who have made it as automotive designers have until now had to learn their skills outside the country.
Typically a kid in Canada who wanted to design cars might start off at an industrial design program at a community college in Canada, but from there would have to go to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit or to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., or maybe even the Royal College of Art in London. Each of these would cost the student about $50,000 a year in tuition.
Since 2001, Humber College in Toronto has offered four-year bachelor's degrees in applied technology. The industrial design degree can be taken with an automotive design option in the third and fourth years. The first class of Humber's aspiring automotive designers graduates next year. The design program takes in about 50 new students annually, and the tuition cost is about $5,200 a year.
Ken Cummings is the program manager of industrial design at Humber. He has an honours degree in industrial design from Art Center College of Design and a masters degree in adult education from Central Michigan University.
Cummings started his career in the automotive field with Chrysler Corp., and has worked as a consultant for a variety of clients, including General Motors Corp. and Japanese makers Toyota Corp. and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.
Vaughan: Several universities are graduating automotive engineers, but as far as I know Humber is unique in graduating automotive designers. What's the difference?
Cummings: Designers don't think like engineers. Engineers have a tendency to think a little bit inside the box.
In the next 10 years, we'll have a huge paradigm shift in terms of where transportation and automobiles are going. The solutions we've done in the past, where we tweak things, is not going to work any more. We're going to have to look for whole new ways of doing things, and that's what we're trying to prepare our students to face.
Vaughan: So how do you do that?
Cummings: We look at the whole-car design for one thing, the entire concept.
It takes a blend of design, technology, business and liberal arts studies to understand consumer and corporate needs. So the program develops both creative and business strengths. There's a great deal of marketing in it. There also a great deal of business in it. Students have to take a broad range of humanities subjects as well.
Vaughan: You know the famous design schools that turn out the famous designers today. How does Toronto's Humber compete with them?
Cummings: We have the ability to go from art to part, and that's something that other schools don't have.
Our students do research and studio work using advanced computer workstations, and get hands-on experience in well-equipped labs.
Our students have the passion for automobiles, but they also know the business case. They understand the technology that takes it from a sketch all the way through to moulding.
So they can walk into an engineering department and talk the same language as engineers. No more tossing it over the wall. It shortens those development times. Designers have to have technical savvy.
But speaking of "famous" schools, Humber is included with Art Center College of Design, College for Creative Studies, Coventry University and Hong Kong Polytechnic in an ambitious information technology project that connects the schools with each other and a corporate sponsor -- say Britain's Jaguar Ltd. -- and works in real time on the same design.
This would be a visual teleconference format at first with screen images, then moving to full 3D holographics. The first-stage pilot is scheduled to start next winter between Humber and Coventry, where the hub is located. Humber doesn't have to be in California or Cologne to be on the world circuit.
