Expanding a vehicle program’s experience design and prototyping.
My most recent major project has been in support of a major ongoing vehicle program at Ford, as the lead design prototyping support for experience strategy development, as part of the large human-centered design strategy team on this program.
My role required maintaining close coordination with project leadership to identify prototype needs, and to communicate the timing and resource implications of different experiential prototype requests.
I designed the architecture of the full-size prototypes for the program’s second major research event, and led the subsequent build-out.
To do so, I broke down the build into manageable chunks of the overall whole architecture, distributed them across the team, and coordinated the team designers and prototypers to manifest the experience prototypes within a tight one-and-a-half-week timeframe.
I contributed my skills in Python, Arduino, Unity C#, physical integration, and mechatronics, providing guidance to team members as needed.
For the next major milestone review, I spearheaded the prototyping work for a key experience, aided by a couple team members. This was particularly rewarding, as it built upon a concept from my previous electric vehicle projects.
This experiential prototype was fairly complicated, requiring electronics, embedded code, and interface code. I designed the prototype architecture, handled a significant portion of the wiring, used Figma to edit and export UI assets, and developed the entire live-updating control interface using C# in Unity. While I was working on those components, I coordinated with my teammates taking on the Raspberry Pi Python embedded development and wiring integration.
I presented this prototype and its experiential implications to the leadership, including the chief program engineer and chief design officer. I recorded the presentation, and edited it into a short video, easily distributed to other program personnel so they could implement the experience with a thorough understanding of its key elements.
I next led development of an updated, full-scale experiential prototype for the program designed for high modularity, and encompassing all vehicle experiences.
The human-centered design project team had established the key experience areas and requirements for the program, but lacked sufficient content to form a physical perspective for the prototype. To address this, I organized and led a series of 10 workshops over two weeks, with documentation support from the team.
I led the compilation the insights gathered from these workshops into a major deliverable: a solid perspective on content to include in the program and, therefore, on the full-scale prototype.
For this updated property, we successfully collaborated with new internal design partners to build it from the ground-up. I led prototype operations on the ground at the first research event using this property, and, with modularity built-in, we’re continuously updating this prototype as the program develops.