Dennis Sartorello, the chief designer-Global Strategic Design, who has spent the past five years driving a cultural revolution inside the design studio, targeted at creating more user-friendly vehicles that better connect emotionally with buyers.
Ford is turning its Global Strategic Design studio into a playground, says Chief Designer Dennis Sartorello, who believes that’s the best way to create interiors that meet customers’ quickly evolving mobility needs.
| Ford Chief design Dennis Sartorello |
Speaking here at the WardsAuto Interiors Conference, Sartorello says the goal is to stop viewing drivers and passengers as two-dimensional data points and see them more as living. To achieve that, Sartorello and his team have been tearing up the playbook on interior design to foster a new environment inside the studio that promotes free thinking, experimental play, better communication with outside world.
“We’re doing things that are driving us to be better human-centric designers,”
The team is encouraged to find inspiration from interactions throughout their daily lives and share those impressions with others when they enter the studio. “There are no filters; look for clues everywhere,” Sartorello says.
The goal isn’t to discover the next innovation, he suggests, but to develop holistic designs that work better for the customer. “We’re not necessarily looking for new features to add,” he says.
The rethink of processes has designers creating more immersive three-dimensional prototypes and computer-generated, virtual-reality-type drawings.
Designers are getting out in the field to see how consumers act in Ford vehicles or to test concepts themselves, encouraged to “break the spaces and redraw on the fly,” Sartorello says. “We watch what people do and then work backward.”
Ford also is bringing customers into the studio, observing them as they play with vehicle simulators and react to futuristic concepts and sketches.
