Tom Matano
Executive Director of Industrial Design

Tom Matano has thirty years of experience in the automotive design industry. Prior to joining Mazda, he held design positions at General Motors, Volvo, and BMW. In 1983, he became a Chief Designer at Mazda North America. He later became Vice President of the Design Division and Executive Vice President of Western Operations for Mazda R&D North America, and Executive Designer & Director of Mazda's North American Operations.

From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Matano worked with Mazda in Japan as an executive designer in the Global Advance Studio and eventually became the General Manager of Mazda Design. Mr. Matano managed the chief designers group that created Mazda's entire line of car designs, as well as the European and North American studios. His accomplishments at Mazda include the MX 5, the RX 7, the 929 Miata "M-Coupe" concept car, the Miata "M-Speedster" concept car, and many other projects by the design teams he managed and created. Mr. Matano is a committed educator, and uses his immense knowledge and experience to enhance the Industrial Design program at the Academy of Art University.

Hideki Masuda
Associate Director

Hideki Masuda received a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art from Bard College in Annandale, New York, and a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial design/transportation design from the Art Center College of Design. While he was a student at the Art Center, Mr. Masuda designed, engineered, and built a full-scale running prototype vehicle. In 1998, he joined the Academy of Art University as an instructor in the School of Industrial Design. In addition to playing his role as an instructor, Mr. Masuda has contributed to developing the Industrial Design program. He currently teaches both transportation design classes and computer courses at the Academy.

Paul A. Wilczynski
IDS 3D Manager

Paul studied industrial design at the University of Illinois and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked in staff and consultant designer capacities, and served a full apprenticeship as a precision product modelmaker and finisher. He designed his own car at age eighteen while still in college, and formed a company that built over fifty examples. He has created several Top Ten Toys, and his toy designs have won a number of awards from parents' groups. A vehicle that he designed and built won the Nissan Biennial Design Competition in 1990.

His career comprises hundreds of projects in the design and fabrication of toys, medical devices, power tools, recreational vehicles, automobiles and automobile accessories, computer peripherals, electronics, trade show and point-of-purchase displays, home furnishings, and consumer goods.

Tisha Johnson
Full-Time Instructor

Tisha Johnson is a transportation design instructor at Art Center College of Design. Tisha is also a strategic designer and the founder of Trendviz Studio. Trendviz uses a narrative design process in order to communicate advanced developments in the areas of culture, technologies, and materials.

Prior to founding Trendviz Studio, Tisha Johnson designed automotive interiors for Volvo Car Corporation. She was responsible for the award winning interior design of the Volvo 3CC electric sports car; developed in Southern California. Throughout her career, Tisha has collaborated with industry leaders to develop both pre-production and long term strategic concepts.

Henning Knoepfle
Full-Time Instructor

Henning earned his MFA in Industrial Design from the University of Applied Science and Arts in Hannover, Germany, interned with Mercedes Benz, and has earned the GM Excellence Award.

He has over ten years of experience in automotive and industrial design. Starting his career in Germany, he worked for an independent design studio creating an office table system while still attending the university.

At IVM-Automotive, Henning collaborated closely with many manufacturers, including Opel where he developed the concept for the Frogster and other advanced designs such as the Opel Astra. In addition to that, he managed several show cars and advanced development projects like the Opel Speedster.

For GM, Henning planned and managed the GMX project, eventually resulting in the Chevrolet Cobalt. After moving to the United States, Henning started working for Mitsubishi Motors, one of his former clients, quickly achieving a position as manager and leading the design and modeling team until the studio closure.

Henning has been teaching at the Academy since Fall 2002.

Shiz Kobara
Full-Time Instructor

A native of San Francisco, Shiz Kobara discovered at an early age his talent and love for drawing. As a kid, he drew on any surface in his parents' house including walls, furniture, and on the back of his grade school homework and test papers.

Shiz earned his B.S. Industrial Design degree from San Jose State University in 1981 and went to work for Hewlett Packard for 26 years as an industrial designer and later as a user experience designer. He designed the first commercially viable visually 3-D user interface adopted by the Open Software Foundation in 1988 called OSF Motif user interface. Shiz then wrote a book on the principles of visual design in 1990 called "Visual Design with OSF Motif" to aid engineers and designers to design easy to use user interfaces using the OSF Motif widgets for Unix systems.

Shiz rose to the position of HP Corporate Global Industrial Design manager in 2000 managing the corporate industrial design team and implemented a new industrial design language internally called "Design for Brand" for all HP products worldwide. The DFB language was widely adopted by all HP consumer, business, and enterprise product businesses, which resulted in the current designs of HP products today enabling HP to become a design leader.

Shiz retired from HP in 2007 and served briefly as senior user experience design manager for Intuit before founding his own strategic design firm Kobara Design, LLC in 2008. He lives in the SF peninsula with his wife and daughter and loves spending time with his family, skiing, struggling with learning his guitar, building and restoring his sports and muscle cars, and remodeling his home in his spare time.

Jim Shook
Full-Time Instructor

Jim Shook earned his BSID from Industrial Design at San Jose State University, and worked as a graduate student at Wayne State University and Cal Tech.

He has vast experience in Industrial Design including automotive design for General Motors, mass transit design for Bombardier, industrial and consumer products for FMC corp, and technology products for Tandem Computers (now HP).

He has been an IDSA leader as Western District Vice President and on the board of directors. Design teams led by Jim have received 35 international design awards including the IDEA gold, Hannover Fair Gute Industrieform gold, and the Japanese best foreign product design award.

He has been teaching since 1981 at Stanford University, San Jose State and Academy of Art University. He is the principle of Shook Design (a full service Industrial Design Firm), which was established in 1998.

For San Francisco Bay Area residents his most significant contribution is the design of the new Cal Train (Baby Bullet) and Altamont Commuter Express train (ACE) as well as the San Jose Light Rail Vehicles.

Nichole Towler
Full-Time Instructor

For the past three years, Nichole has been employed at NewDealDesign, one of the top award-winning design firms in the US. This year the company received 4 IDEA awards, the design awards sponsored by IDSA and Business Week.

Her favorite project in her career is the FitBit, a high tech pedometer designed by Nichole and her colleagues. They have received multiple awards, the most recent being ID Magazine's 2009 Design Review. They also were runner up when they first launched FitBit at TechCrunch50 in September 2008. This award helped set them in the spotlight of developers and investors and aided in the company receiving two million dollars in investment funding.

Nichole feels that it has been a great experience to build a start-up by positioning their product in the appropriate market, creating the Industrial Design, Interaction Design and assisting in the development of their web interaction and packaging.

Previous to NewDealDesign, she worked for a company called DesignAffairs. A former Academy student, Nichole also interned at Williams-Sonoma.