Dennis Sartorello (photo), Ford’s Global Strategic Design chief, has spent the past five years driving a cultural revolution inside the automaker’s design studio. It’s targeted at creating more user-friendly vehicles that better connect emotionally with buyers. Ford is turning its Global Strategic Design Studio into a playground, Sartorello says; he believes that’s the best way to create interiors that meet customers’ quickly-evolving mobility needs.
Speaking at the WardsAuto Interiors Conference in Novi, Michigan, Sartorello said the goal is to stop regarding drivers and passengers as two-dimensional data points and see them more as living beings. To that end, Sartorello and his team have been looking beyond traditional assumptions in interior design to look at how to promote free thinking, experimental play, and better communication with outside world. “We’re doing things that are driving us to be better human-centric designers,” he says.
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 designs that work better for the customer. “We’re not necessarily looking for new features to add, but to create new choreographies with existing elements”, he says.
This reboot on designers’ thinking has them 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; they’re encouraged, Sartorello says, to “break the spaces and redraw on the fly”, adding “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.
