Faces of GM

GM and Car Design News Contest Discovers Student Design Talent

January 17, 2012 at 5:31 pm

The search for talent is an ongoing quest for every organization. While top schools are always a great source of talent, some of the most promising employees are found in the most unlikely places. Case in point: Who would have guessed that an assistant examiner in the Swiss patent office by the name of Albert Einstein was doing work that would lead to a Nobel Prize in physics? With this in mind, GM Design teamed with Car Design News for the Interactive Design Competition to identify the best design students from around the country.

“It’s incredibly important to find the best talent and it’s hard to find. There are design schools all throughout the country… all throughout the world,” said Dave Lyon, GM executive director of interior design. “Part of the reason we like this contest is we’re able to reach schools – in some cases – we never even heard of.”

The competition kicked off in the spring of 2011, and more than 300 design students from across the U.S. and Canada submitted entries. They were challenged to design both an interior and an exterior for one of GM’s four brands: Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac. During the next several months, GM designers mentored students, helping them improve their designs on a dedicated website.

Earlier this month at the North American International Auto Show, winners were announced, and some of the victors came from unexpected places. Vitaliy Pankov from Gulf Coast State College in Florida won for his interior design for Cadillac. As he announced Vitaliy’s name, Lyon noted, “I have never heard of your school.” But going forward, thanks to this competition, Gulf Coast State College will be a more familiar name in GM Design circles.

Vitaliy said winning this competition is the culmination of a life-long dream for him. “This was a great opportunity for me. I was always kind of afraid that the (lack of high-profile) education might be stopping me from getting there. The feedback from the judges helped me, and I learned a lot from that.”

The competition organizers weren’t the only ones surprised by who won. Shane Harbour lives in Milwaukee and is a student at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He brought his camera to the award ceremony to get pictures of the winning design students. When he was announced as a winner for his exterior design for a compact GMC pickup truck, he said, “I ended up being a winner myself, and I almost dropped my camera.”

A full list of the winners, their schools and a look at some of the winning designs is available on the Car Design News website. Each winner received a paid internship at GM’s design studios in Warren, Mich. and an Apple iPad 2.

For students looking for more information about GM Design, check out their Facebook page.

Dave Lyon announced at the awards ceremony that the Interactive Design Competition was so successful, it will be a part of GM Design’s recruiting process again in 2012.

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