Advancing design practice with XR, AI, and video.
A simple test scene made in ShapesXR of a truck launching a boat, a screenshot of a video I produced showing cardboard prototyping techniques, and an AI generated image of an inside joke.
A major part of my role at Ford as a Senior Design Prototyper has been to advance our prototyping arsenal to make our practice of human-centered design better. While I’ve been leading design strategy for vehicle programs as well as major prototyping projects, I’ve spent the remainder of my time mentoring team members on prototyping techniques for their projects, and identifying new or better methods to express user experiences. I’d like to briefly discuss how I’m bringing three of these techniques into design practice at Ford.
XR technology has been progressing right along with the uses for it that I’ve helped our team develop. VR has been especially useful for years for our team to express scenarios in development and research in which the environmental context is important or affects an experience, or to get a spatial sense of objects without having to build them physically.
For example: a screenshot from a simple test Unity scene I put together of my house and garage. Models made in Autodesk Fusion, textured with Adobe Photoshop and Blender, and imported into Unity with SteamVR libraries.
Gravity Sketch is one tool that has been increasing in use at Ford across design practice for these static, spacial applications. For uses outside of those, however, it has been more difficult to make XR easy for team members to use, since depicting interactions has required more in-depth development in Unity to implement.
For this reason, I have been advocating for ShapesXR, which is much better focused on experience design where Gravity Sketch is more physical design oriented. ShapesXR is set up so that collaboratively storyboarding experiences can be done directly in XR in the application, and presented, which would allow any designer or team to create experience wireframes that could be used directly in design research and presentations, saving much development time for many applications. I’ve been working on satisfying the requirements to bring the tool into Ford Design’s security environment.
AI tools have been advancing very quickly. Large language models, for example, have shown potential in helping to ideate approaches to delivering a given experience to customers.
For UX design purposes, AI image generation has, in my opinion, shown the most potential for helping expedite the early design process. Sketching out ideas for novel user experiences can be a bottleneck, and workshop ideation sessions can be lackluster when the output is all words, and no sketches or images.
Since Stable Diffusion, SDXL, and further advancements are open-source, they’ve been a great starting point for augmenting the process of sketching experiences. I’m currently working on collecting imagery and using Ford’s compute resources to train LoRA models to use with SDXL to refine the fidelity of the outputs’ understanding of vehicle attributes.
I’ve been consistently surprised by how underutilized video has been in design practice, at least at Ford. The lift from doing a presentation, be it of prototypes or of design strategy, to making that presentation into a video, is surprisingly light. With a video, it’s possible to refine and scale the reach of that presentation substantially, preventing repetitive meetings, and informing more people about design intent than would be possible otherwise.
I’ve used video to great effect at Ford to show experience design intent for given vehicle attributes. These videos have continued to be used over the course of program development to inform downstream engineers of why elements of features are important to the user experience.
The Pro Access Tailgate on the 2024 Ford F-150 is a feature I demonstrated with video and a low-fidelity prototype to inform downstream development of the important attributes of the user experience. For example, a handhold was added to ease ingress based on my preliminary demonstrations. This can be seen in use in this screenshot of the final feature from this clip.
Since my video content has been used to communicate experience design up to and including the board of directors, I’ve had success encouraging team members to leverage video to help them communicate their designs. With a basic primer on framing shots, presenting, and Adobe Premiere, it’s been enough to help more designs move along into implementation.