A female edge for the future of car design

She is not the first Hongkonger to become an internationally recognised car designer, but Chelsia Lau may be the only local woman in a senior position in the male-dominated global car industry.

Raised in a small village on Lantau, and a graduate of a local design institute, Lau, the chief designer of Ford's strategic concepts group, was seen as the odd one out when she joined Ford as a junior designer in the early 1990s.

"I could feel the eyes on me, the scepticism," she says. "Women were rare in this field back then, and Asian women even rarer. But when you work hard, act humble and show what you are capable of after some projects, then, little by little, people realise you are not someone who is fooling around.

"When I was small, I was taught to be reserved and not to stare people in the eyes during a conversation, but that didn't seem to work in the United States. Such behaviour only gave people the impression that you had no confidence or ideas."

A car designer needs to be able to defend his design before dozens of engineers, suppliers and budget controllers, and Lau learned to become a warrior who knew how to fight to keep the parts of a design that mattered and also when to make compromises when some ideas were simply too expensive or impractical to put into shape.

"Designers and engineers may have clashes, but if you win their support, they are your best friends," Lau says.