Throughout my career, I’ve designed and collaborated with Ford Motor Company, IDEO CoLab, Lucid Motors, The Art of Living Foundation, LIM Innovations, Fundación Tarahumara José A. Llaguno; currently volunteering at Inneract Project.
I’m currently looking for opportunities in Social Impact Design. If your team strives to work with organizations to help build ethically responsible solutions with communities through design strategy, I’d love to collaborate with you.
An Interaction Designer, Design Researcher, and Strategist.
An Interaction Designer, Design Researcher, and Strategist.
Ford is looking to become a leader in the autonomous mobility sector. For that to happen, it must first become a leader in the workplace experience offered to all its workers. I inspired senior leadership to break out of the box and strategize to became a competitive leader in its future workplace experience.
My Role
As a management-consultant and design strategist to Ford, I influenced and inspired Ford’s leadership to devise and implement strategic decision-making for Ford’s workplace experience of the future.
Conducted generative research (secondary research/tech-scouting, interviews, participatory design) on current and future technology trends.
Used research to create low-high fidelity proofs-of-concept of technologies that could improve Ford’s workplace experience in the now, near and far.
Results
Concepts reached top leadership, including Ford’s CEO and CTO.
Concepts continue to be distributed across Ford and presented as groundwork to inspire disruptive workplace experience initiatives.
As the nature of this work is confidential under NDA, I won’t be able to show any project visuals, specific insights and outcomes, for the time being.
However, I can provide a summary of the work I’ve done. Please reach it if interested in viewing the full case-study.
Initiatives
During my time consulting for Ford, these were some of the research initiatives I led and contributed on:
Health & Wellbeing Tech for Collaboration
How might we use health tracking technology to improve enterprise workers’ work-life experience and the future of collaboration?
I led a qualitative research initiative to define a “now, near and far” perspective for Ford using the health and wellbeing data of its workers.
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Surveyed Ford employees to create a mental model on their health and wellbeing tracking frequencies and preferences
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Used generative research methods, such as interviewing, diary studies and shadowing to uncover workers’ motivations and behaviors
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Synthesized and Analyzed data
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Facilitated generative ideation sprints
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Created low-mid fidelity proof-of-concepts based on enterprise and user value
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Presented research initiative to senior leadership
Digital Twins in the
Workplace
How might we use human digital representations to help enterprise workers accomplish what’s important to them?
I was part of a qualitative research initiative to help define a “now, near and far” perspective on how Ford could benefit from digital human representations.
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Conducted secondary research
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Led participatory design sprint workshops
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Focus group
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Bodystorming
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Rapid prototyped for concept testing
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Synthesized and Analyzed data
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Co-facilitated generative ideation sprints
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Created low fidelity concept storyboards on enterprise and user value
Process
As I was presented with new challenges,
I developed my own research process:
Challenge
As a designer, I was taught to always frame the research question that leads the diverging and converging design process on a specific set of pain-points. As our team had the task to research technology use-cases for 5-10 years in the future, we couldn’t frame our research on current pain points and problems.
Outcome
We kept in mind that the behaviors and pain points towards current technology trends change quickly, so we came up with our own process. We used a variety of generative research methods (including but not limited to understanding today’s pain points) to help us form a hypothesis and perspective on the future.
Learnings
Strategizing and inspiring senior leadership to re-imagine Ford’s future workplace experience came with its unique set of first-time challenges. As researching and designing for the far future comes with a lot of ambiguity, I learned the value of “quick and dirty” research and prototyping to test multiple concepts quickly. Through this I gained experience with fast and flexible iteration.
Furthermore, working in a small 2-person team as the only Interaction Designer, alongside a Design Researcher, was a fun and insightful collaborative experience. It taught me how to be a better team player, as I learned how best to communicate my research, design decisions and iterate given potential business or technical limitations.
