Sandy Fershee, Lab Director, D-Ford Detroit
At Ford, we drive human progress through the freedom of movement. But now we face increasingly new challenges to this freedom.
Connectivity, automation, electrification, AI, the sharing economy — these profound waves of change are all converging upon us right now, and not just in transportation.
For 116 years, Ford’s purpose has always been grounded with the idea that everything we design and create — from products to services to experiences — will always be to drive human progress. Being human is part of our history, and that will never change.
What will change is how we scale the approaches we’ll use to better understand people and our world, coming up with new, more meaningful ways of solving their problems, and getting those solutions into the hands as fast as possible.
Solving these complex challenges of today and tomorrow, requires different capabilities to those Ford has today and a different way of working. We’re moving from skill teams to multidisciplinary teams and from depth of craft to breadth of experience. Most importantly, we’re adopting human-centered design, or design thinking, as a core capability at Ford to advance our future.
With that, we are proud to announce D-Ford, Ford Motor Company’s new human-centered design group. D-Ford is built out of the best and brightest ideas, teams and capabilities that have been unfolding inside Ford.
Our call to action at D-Ford is: “We drive human progress through empathy, creativity and design.” And a key part of our mission is to help everyone at Ford learn and adopt new tools to make us better at how we think and what we do.
Essential to this is that we’ll be working in close partnerships throughout the entire company to expand from ongoing experimenting and learning to helping everyone at Ford learn these methods and tools — and push the edges of what’s possible in all that we do to create what’s next.
We’re organized in four D-Ford labs around the world — Detroit, London, Palo Alto and Shanghai — and our overall priorities will focus on three main areas:
1. Help teams across Ford in building empathy for customers of today and tomorrow.
2. Determine opportunities and inform the development of winning strategies using human-centered design methodologies.
3. Build confidence and optionality in business decisions through early and rapid trial and error.
Our newly formed D-Ford labs are part of a larger foundation Ford is building to change the way we work in an effort to understand and satisfy the customer better than anyone else — to become a truly customer-centric company:
• We’ve implemented the new Enterprise Product Line Management (EPLM) structure, which manages product lines as end-to-end businesses and leverages Ford’s human-centered design, advanced product marketing and strategy to create breakthrough products and experiences that customers love and can’t live without.
• Last year, Ford created its dedicated customer experience team, which has been focusing on improving key aspects of direct customer interactions with Ford, all throughout their ownership experience.
While we are formally launching D-Ford as an organization today, we’ve been hard at work on numerous projects using Human-Centered Design methodologies and mindsets, with the ultimate goal of not only driving business profitability, but also imagining, designing and creating new solutions with the human at the center of everything we do.
What an exciting time to be at such an iconic company — we‘re very proud to be spearheading this new era of Ford and helping define the freedom of movement for the next 100 years.
You can follow our journey at www.d.ford.com.