Well, not really the Media Commons so much as me, but I did have a badge on with “Nick Smerker – Penn State University” while there this past Thursday.
The AutoWeek Design Forum is an annual event held in Detroit each January that brings together creative folks from within and around the automotive industry. This year was no different, welcoming the head of exterior design from Audi, chief executive of Johnson Controls, art director and director of Cars 2 at Pixar and more into the halls of the College for Creative Studies.
Aside from the obvious benefit to a car geek like myself, was the Design Forum worth the blustery drive across three states for those interested in media? Absolutely. The industry is chock-full of media from digital renderings in product brochures, magazines and websites to delightful animations in Pixar’s creations to the truly futuristic ideas of holographic sales consultations in showrooms and fully modeled concepts in the design rooms.
More than that, being in a room full of – quite literally: you should have seen the breakfast/lunch crowd – creative people at the top of their fields was a breath of fresh air. Even if you took out the car-focus, the Design Forum was a chance to listen to amazingly artistic people talk about nothing but the inspiration behind creativity.