Every designer dreams of having the freedom to fashion designs without having to think of so many factors such as economics, etc. This year, Mazda was able to pave the way for designers to do this with a contest tagged as the Mazda Design Challenge. The said contest is made possible with a partnership with Facebook, an online social networking giant. Participants of the Mazda Design Challenge get to pass their vision of how the 2018 Mazda 3 should or would look like. Every entry must come with a description of the design that won’t be less than 150 words. Aside from the description, participants may also include an illustration of their design but this is not a requirement.

There are many who joined the said contest and after so much deliberation and thinking, the engineers of Mazda and members of Facebook have agreed to declare Mallory McMorrow as the winner. McMorrow lives on the South Bend, IN. This lucky winner has already been paired with one of the top Mazda designer who is Jacques Flynn. Together, they drafted the ideas to reality and came up with an actual sketch of it. The design resembles the Mazda Ryuga concept in more ways than one. McMorrow’s 2018 vision of the Mazda 3 merges the recent Mazda styling cues with her own. When asked on it, Mallory says that her vision is a meeting between sports car qualities and everyday use, which is, in her belief what a Mazda vehicle of the future must be. In her words, “I was thrilled when I opened up the images of the final renderings. I’m proud to say that the end design was still definitely my car and I can’t wait to see it come to fruition on the show floor.”

As this competition is able to prove its success, Mazda has decided to take it a step further by having a prototype of McMorrow’s winning design and have it on display at the Los Angeles Auto Show. For the span of ten days, McMorrow will work with Franz von Holzhausen, the director of design at the Mazda North American Operations. Holzhausen’s team is the one tasked to put McMorrow’s design in tangible form. The sculpture of the vehicle will be available for viewing starting Nov. 24.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Mazda news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.