A Designing Town
General Motors was seeking offbeat thinkers for its new design studio for tomorrow’s cars and found them in North Hollywood, and GM was not alone in looking to Southern California. Attracted by a wealth of creative talent, almost all major car manufacturers, foreign and domestic, have opened shops in the area, making Los Angeles America’s industrial design mecca.
It comes as no surprise that the key to the success of the design industry in Los Angeles is education. The area has dozens of schools teaching design for everything from clothing and furniture to toys and satellites, with highly reputable design departments at UCLA, USC and other universities and colleges. The crown jewel of the educational structure is Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. Frank Saucedo, picked to head GM’s new design studio, is a graduate of the Art Center, one of hundreds of alumni in similar positions.
Beyond first-class training, designers are attracted to the L.A. area by the diversity of the population living in a concentrated area and providing a microcosm of the entire country, a youthful culture and other intangibles that count for so much in a creative profession. GM is a good example. After it pulled its design team out of Ventura County in 1996, it was criticized for offering bland models. The company was unable to attract new design and engineering talent to Detroit.
Although dwarfed by high-tech, entertainment, tourism and trade industries, industrial design plays an important economic role here. Precise figures are hard to come by, but the L.A. Economic Development Corp. estimates that, in addition to countless in-house corporate design departments, there are some 120 independent studios employing hundreds of people and generating millions in revenue.
With a nationwide “Los Angeles by Design” campaign to be kicked off later this spring, the L.A. Economic Development Corp. hopes to expand the industry even further and bring in more design business. It also wants to stimulate the teaching of arts at area high schools by offering scholarships to design schools.
Clearly, industrial design is an important element of the city’s economic mosaic. Together with the high-tech and entertainment industries, it fosters the status of Los Angeles as America’s trendsetter.
