African American Designer Shines at Toyota
January 21, 2016
Rob McConnell, the manager for body engineering at the Toyota Technical Center, said that he often draws inspiration from the fashion industry. “A little secret, hopefully no one is recording, but me and my wife sit and watch ‘Project Runway,’” McConnell told a small group of Black journalists at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. “Yeah, I’ll admit it.” McConnell said that, in a lot of ways, fashion designers are engineers. “It’s all connected. You gotta pull from a lot of different places to get your inspiration, your ideas,” he said. “You gotta come up with something new.