It’s 1961, 11-year-old Ed Welburn sits in his bedroom surrounded by car posters and scattered pieces of model kits. Instructions for the kits overflow a trashcan in the corner. Ed’s a creative kid from outside of Philly with a love for designing model cars. He’s writing a letter to a General Motors exec, it says, “I hope to work there someday, how do I do that?” The exec writes back, “Keep sketching and get yourself to Howard University.”
Now in 2016, Ed’s retiring from Head of Design at GM after more than 4 decades there. The years at Howard’s School of Fine Arts helped improve Ed’s art chops, but more than that, he says they taught him the power of collaboration.
At GM, Ed turned a 10-studio design team into a single, global unit. He brought in the engineers, the marketers and the fabricators to the design process. Creatives and engineers don’t have a reputation for working well together, but Ed found that design served as a shared language.
His record is more than enough evidence to support his claim – he’s retiring as the highest ranked black man in the auto industry’s history and is credited for bringing beauty back to GM design.
His legacy, though, will be the time he spent outside of work helping students overcome cultural and economic barriers to pursuing design. His latest pupil is a kid from Flint, MI whose drawing chops earned him a college summer internship while he was still in high school.
Now Ed and the kid’s community in Flint are making sure he has the support he needs when he starts design school this year.
Ed is more than his prestigious career. He’s living proof that diversity in thought and experience is key to innovation. That #allofus can go further and be stronger when we work together.
