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Female Designer Has Hand in Audi Brand
May 28 2008 by Kristin Varela
5/28/08
Functional Artist Puts Talent Into Cars
At a recent Girl's Weekend that introduced the 2009 Audi A4 to lifestyle media, I had the exciting opportunity to spend the weekend chatting up Heather Shaw, who is an interior designer for Audi/Volkswagen. As a Gen-Xer with one of the hottest jobs in the automotive industry, Heather is the envy of many.
Heather's parents started her in art classes when she was 6. By her teen years, she was an accomplished artist searching for an outlet for her passion, "functional art." At 19, Heather was ready to go out into the world and purchase her first brand-spanking-new car (at 31, I still haven't done that). The time she put into researching her new purchase led to a fascination with transportation design, drawing a direct line to her profession as an automotive designer (at 19, weren't most of us still stealing the frat boys' boxers?).
After design internships with Kawasaki and Volvo, Heather landed at the Audi/VW Design Center in California. Her passion is sustainable, effective design, using environmental art, technology and organic nature as her inspiration. While Heather doesn't specifically design cars for any one gender, she notes that if vehicle design is good enough for a woman, it's almost always good enough for a man. I can think of entirely too many other circumstances where that's also the case.
"Women bring different experiences to the design process," she said. Well, yeah...
And, she looks good while she does it.