It's logical that the man responsible for educating the next generation of transportation designers has varied experience in designing, developing, and dreaming up vehicles both mundane and fantastic. Here Stewart Reed stands between two of his designs, the Gearbox utility vehicle and the Meyers Manx SR.

When Bob Lutz wanted to resurrect the Cunningham in his pre-GM days, he turned to Reed to create a new vehicle with overtones of the originals, but a fully modern look and feel. Had it reached production, a convertible would have followed.

So to help students get a broader understanding, Reed and his colleagues have initiated a number of projects ranging from the school's Design Summit to undertaking a design project that involved BMW and its X5 SUV and computational fluid dynamics software vendor Exa Corp. (www.exa.com). This is in addition to continuing to encourage students to intern at both automotive OEMs and smaller companies to gain perspective and professional contacts. "The BMW-Exa project opened their eyes to what is possible as well as to how aerodynamics, like design itself, is shape-related," he says. It also caused a number of the students to question whether all vehicles will look like jelly beans if the design is controlled by aerodynamics. "I told them, 'That's the wrong question,' because the aero engineers aren't there to encumber them with constraints. They are there to help them understand areas of opportunity and what effect different shapes have on aerodynamics." The students remained unconvinced, so Reed asked them to consider the effect aerodynamics have on birds. "From pelicans to hummingbirds," he says, "each is instantly recognizable as a bird, though their details, flight characteristics, sizes, and shapes are quite different." Now they understood.

Despite his position at Art Center, Stewart Reed Design continues to work for clients in and out of the auto industry. Even the studio mascot has to pitch in to meet the demand.

What sits behind that shape, however, is just as important. According to Reed, "We have specific 'vehicle architecture' classes that the students digest in thin slices in the early terms and thick slices in the later terms." This study area includes 3D occupant packaging, regulatory requirements, powertrain organization, vehicle structure and materials, and requires they wrap this together with demand, personality, branding, and the like "so they can see there's more to this job than just sitting there sketching shapes." By following this road map, Reed believes students will begin to understand that organizing the structure leads to great shapes, and this inspiration is not applied but comes from deep inside the individual. To inculcate this process within their consciousness, Reed teaches what he describes as, "a short, free-ranging class on Thursday afternoons where I get together with a group of younger students for two hours and try to stretch their thinking in these directions." One recent class studied how biomimicry encourages the designer to-like Leonardo da Vinci-observe the natural world and seek out answers for man-made products. "We talked about topics like artificial muscle, electro-active polymers, and BMW's GINA concept vehicle among other things," he says with eyes wide and twinkling. "But," he says, "I challenge them to defend their choices by playfully engaging them to think farther." Thus, designers of vehicles with massive C-pillars can't skirt the issue of visibility with vague references to embedded cameras and video screens any more than those whose vehicles have no cutlines can expect not to be asked whether they rely on "molecular zippers" to take their place. Often, however, the exchange goes both ways: "They laugh at my comments," Reed explains, "but I go away and think: 'Molecular zippers? That's probably possible!'"

Architecture's Loss, Transportation's Gain

The path that brought Stewart Reed to Art Center was almost pre-ordained. "I was a 15-year-old in Traverse City, MI, planning for a career in architecture ," he says, when, like the circus, GM came to town to pitch its nationwide Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild design competition. "I entered the Junior Div. for kids under 16, and took second place in Michigan." The next year he placed first in the Senior Div. (for kids 16-20), went to Detroit for a week for the finals-where he met one of his idols, then GM Design chief Bill Mitchell-and won a national scholarship. After high school, Reed enrolled at Art Center College of Design where he met yet another boyhood idol, Strother MacMinn, the person who started the Transportation Dept. at the school. Who better to create a modern interpretation of a high-performance off-roader than the man who, in the form of the Manx SR, put it on-road in the first place? Reed's graduation brought with it a job offer from each of the Big Three, but MacMinn put the 22-year-old novice designer together with Bruce Meyers, creator of the Meyers Manx dune buggy. Though intent on joining a major automaker-his wife, Nancy, had just given birth to their first child-he accepted Meyers' challenge to turn the Manx into a road car over the summer of 1969, and created the Manx SR. The SR pioneered doors that rotate upward around a forward hinge like those on modern Lamborghinis, but Reed pulled their design from one of his 1964 Fisher Body proposals. Years later, while the head of Toyota's Calty Design Research's Newport Beach, CA, headquarters, he modified the idea for the Toyota Sera concept car. Gordon Murray would later tell him the Sera directly influenced his door design choice for the iconic McLaren F1 supercar. When the aerospace market, and California economy, augured in around 1971, Reed packed up the family-and his Manx SR kit-and moved back to Michigan. After working briefly with Dick Teague at American Motors, he accepted an offer from John Herlitz to join Chrysler Advanced Design. During his eight years there he worked with Herlitz, Neil Walling, Art Blakesley, and other notables to explore new concepts and give new designs their basic architecture. "Some of the early investigations into what would later be called 'minivans' took place there," he recounts, before adding: "When Hal Sperlich joined Chrysler a year or two later, he found the assets that made the minivan easy to do." In 1980, it was off to Toyota's Calty Design Research headquarters for a six-year stint and the creation of two Tokyo Motor Show concepts, the aforementioned Sera and the mid-engined FXV. Soon thereafter, Chrysler's design chief Tom Gale recommended Reed to Edgar Prince of Prince Corp. (now a part of Johnson Controls) to create an in-house design function. "I have a love affair with western Michigan," says Reed, "so I returned home." That nine-year odyssey ended with the opening of Stewart Reed Design, where was created the multi-activity Gearbox Concept for Mobility Outfitters, the Cunningham C7 for Bob Lutz, the Ford EX concept, the Nissan Azeal concept, as well as projects for Lockheed. The company still exists, and Reed also sits on the board of light sport aircraft maker Icon Aircraft.-CAS