trendsetter

DRIVING FORCE
While most boys enjoy playing with cars, David Rojas’ love of drawing them eventually drove him to help design GM’s latest toy, the HUMMER HX.

By Conrad Dahlson

David Rojas has been drawing since childhood. His mother is an architect, and he’s been at it since he could barely see over her work table. Cars always fueled his interest. Besides drawing them, he loved taking them apart.
His boyhood passion led him to what many car enthusiasts would consider a dream job. But it took training to get there.
Rojas attended The Art Institute of Philadelphia, where he earned an associate’s degree in industrial design and technology. After graduating, he went to work as a designer and sculptor for RJ Studios, a subsidiary of Mattel, the toy company. But after two years there, he still had cars on his mind, so he headed to the birthplace fof the automobile, Detroit. There, he attended the College for Creative Studies, graduating with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in transportation design. While in school, Rojas served internships with Daihatsu Motor Company in Osaka, Japan, Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Converse shoe company.
All paved the way for his next challenge.
When he graduated in 2005, Rojas joined GM Design as a creative designer in the HUMMER studio. His first assignment: design a small, more efficient HUMMER. He was one of three designers on the project, and they were given free range with no rules or restrictions. The other two designers, Min Young Kang and Robert Jablonski, had been his classmates at the College for Creative Studies.
While many cars on the road are designed with baby boomers in mind, the HUMMER update was to be geared toward Generation Y.
Rojas, 31, took the wheel in designing the vehicle’s exterior. “I went about the project as something I would buy,” he explains. And that meant flexibility and personalization in the design. “For me, more options, that’s what Gen Y is.... The option to change configurations... a blank canvas—how you want your vehicle to portray what you do and what you want it to do.”
Unveiled in January at the 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, the updated two-door, four-seater HX is smaller than the H3, the smallest HUMMER currently on the market.
The excitement Rojas experienced in taking cars apart as a child may have inspired the HX’s transformable prototype. It is an open air, off-road vehicle with a convertible body that comes with removable parts—the roof panels, fender flares and doors can all come off, depending on the driver’s style and preference. “You have more of the environment coming into the vehicle, more open air,” Rojas explains.
The entire process—from concept to actual vehicle—took two years. The first three months were devoted to sketching and development, then scale modeling, before going full-scale. That meant translating 2-D and 3-D models, tweaking dimensions and then refining them in clay design. Then came presenting the design to GM management.
“This project offered me the biggest challenge I’ve had... I gave my take on what the evolution should be, and didn’t know if it would be received or dismissed.” It was accepted, and the three designers were given the green light to transform the model and create a full-sized concept.
Environmentally-conscious Generation Y will appreciate that the HX is bio-fuel friendly—it can run on E85 ethanol, as well as unleaded regular. Perhaps the biggest attribute indicating this vehicle is meant for demanding, young, tech-savvy drivers is that it has no radio. Instead, the console houses a dock where MP3 players, iPods or iPhones can be plugged into a USB connector to play music, audible through integrated speakers inside.
For now, the HX is still a concept vehicle. There is speculation the concept might be the foundation for the future HUMMER H4.
The opportunity to design it is not lost on Rojas, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States when he was 7 years old. “It’s crazy I came out of school working on something this big. I’m honored and proud.”

DOSSIER

Name: David G. Rojas
Position: Creative Designer
Company: GM Design/HUMMER Studio
Specialty: Exterior Auto Design
Previous Position: Designer/Sculptor, RJ Studios, a Mattel subsidiary
Internships: Daihatsu (Osaka, Japan), Ford (Detroit, Michigan), Converse
Hometown: Born in Lima, Peru; raised in Philadelphia, PA
Family Single
Education: The Art Institute of Philadelphia (Industrial Design and Technology Associate Degree); College for Creative Studies, Detroit (B.F.A., Transportation Design)
Tip: “I love coming to work; it’s fun!”

trendsetter

A CAPITAL IDEA
Carmen Ortiz-McGhee works to provide minority-owned businesses better access to growth capital.

By Millie Acebal Rousseau

Even before she entered the job market, Carmen Ortiz-McGhee knew well the potential of the Hispanic business community.
In her first job as a jack of all trades at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, she got to see it first-hand. She was gratified to witness the wide range of industries in which Hispanics were making their mark.
But she also realized the Hispanic entrepreneurs’ chance of realizing their true potential was booby-trapped by the lack of access to equity funding, lack of training on how to leverage capital markets, and lack of support networks. Helping correct that equation became Ortiz-McGhee’s mission.
With a widening network of influential connections, she served for a time as interim executive director of the New America Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to developing economic, political and human capital.
“It was an amazing experience,” says Ortiz-McGhee, who says the job allowed her to work with “the crème de la crème of the Latino business community. They didn’t forget where they came from and wanted to change the community from the top down.”
It was a perfect fit that only got better when in 2003 New America Alliance partnered with The Marathon Club, founded the year before by the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC).
“The Marathon Club was established to bring the best and the brightest minds together to create an environment of enhanced wealth creation for people of color,” Ortiz-McGhee explains.
The Marathon Club focuses on increasing the availability of private equity capital for enterprises that have significant minority ownership and management participation. In support of this, The Marathon Club provides education, professional development and networking opportunities. “The TMC mission is a beautiful thing,” says Ortiz-McGhee, who became president in November 2007.
Through regular rounds of networking forums, “We create a robust environment” that brings together businesses, capital, and experienced operating executives that help to power up minority-owned businesses. The goal is to assist businesses by promoting the creation of more minority-owned private equity funds and ensuring a deep pool of operating expertise.
That’s where the Executive Leadership Council comes in, an aggregate of top executives from Fortune 500 companies— “an unheard of level of intellectual capital,” Ortiz-McGhee says. Their assistance is key in turning the so-called Emerging Domestic Markets, or EDMs, from a promise of gold into a goldmine itself. EDMs are minority and inner-city markets that are generally woefully underserved despite an amazing growth potential.
With assistance from the Marathon Club, the deals don’t stop, from technology, retail, manufacturing and business services to broadcasting, education, and healthcare. There are opportunities of all kinds.
And while much has been done to build Hispanic success stories, but there’s a long way to go, Ortiz-McGhee says. “It’s not a sprint,” she says. “It’s a marathon.”