INTERACTION DESIGN LEAD
Job Description
- Lead multidisciplinary teams through the human-centered design process by inspiring process, and direction of all aspects of project work and deliverables
- Plan and scope projects and teams according to business needs and design opportunities, setting teams up for success with an opinionated view on best practices
- Balance team autonomy and guidance through harmonious collaboration and team engagement
- Conceive, design, develop, test, and launch new products and services, applying systems thinking to information and experience design that engages people in meaningful ways
- Help elicit user pain points and design opportunities during human-centered design research, grounding ideas and actionable concepts in user and business needs, design principles, and technical capabilities
- Apply critical thinking to challenge the status quo and our ways of working, pushing the team and the lab at large on our definition of interaction design excellence
- Guide and support your team in understanding and designing seamlessly integrated product and service experiences through brand, people, space, product and service touchpoints along a service journey for consumer and business applications
- Lead the planning, design and operations of experiments of new products and services at varying levels of fidelity in alignment with learning goals and the confidence levels around problem, solution and form of implementation
- Manage design director support, project budget, and communication with internal stakeholders and external partners
- Support talent growth and craft development of your practice as an interaction design community by exploring emerging tools and processes, hiring great designers and inspiring our philosophy and definition of interaction design as a craft
Your QualificationsBasic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in New Media, HCI, Interaction Design, Service Design or related field, OR High School Diploma or GED and 5+ years’ experience in New Media, HCI, Interaction Design, Service Design or related field
- 5+ years’ interaction design experience across a breadth of digital media
- 2+ years’ experience of leading highly collaborative teams through human-centered design processes
Preferred Qualifications
- Extensive experience with graphic design and digital design and prototyping tools such as Illustrator, Sketch, Figma, HTML/JS/CSS, InVision, Principle, and After Effects
- Experience of designing and facilitating group collaboration workshops
- Experience of teaching design thinking principles, tools and methods in a formal in-person setting
- Experience of working on digital products and services for consumer and business applications
- Experience of developing digital services and bringing products or services to market
- Passionate about automotive and transportation industry
- Strong verbal, written and visual presentation skills
JOINING D-FORD
A Bit About Us
We’re in the midst of the biggest change the automotive industry has ever seen.
Just as cars changed the world over the last century – creating the driver, highways, gas stations, and malls – self-driving cars, electric powertrains, and connected vehicles will radically reshape how we live, work, and play, our cities and society themselves, in the next hundred years.
At D–Ford, you’ll be at the heart of creating that future. You’ll be at the cutting edge of Ford’s most strategically critical work, designing people and society’s needs into the heart of our next generation of products, services and experiences.
You’ll also be designing at scale. Every day, Ford’s vehicles and services support millions of people around the world. So, at D–Ford, we’re not just inventing the future, we’re operationalizing it, to help all those people move through their lives, better.
OUR PURPOSE
We drive human progress through empathy, creativity, and design.
OUR VALUES
We’re Looking For People Who Share This Way Of Being – You Don’t Need To Be Convinced Of It, You Just Get It
Our ways of working are our guiding light, and the conscience for our work, and our people.
- ZOOM OUT We are curious about the world, designing systems and connections that enable people to move more freely.
- AMPLIFY OTHERS’ VOICES We are inspired by the people around us, bringing their unique stories to the forefront of our designs.
- PUSH THE EDGE We provoke new ways of thinking about tomorrow’s toughest design challenges, while grounded in what’s possible.
- GET SCRAPPY We build in the open, rigorously testing, iterating and evolving our ideas with others.
- BRIDGE THE GAP We radically collaborate across teams, geographies, and philosophies, uncovering new insights to tomorrow’s problems.
- WILD CARD Our strength comes from bringing our whole selves to the community—from introspective to playful or quirky. What will you bring?
BRING YOUR T
We don’t hire “Design Thinkers.” We hire T-people. You:
- Have deep expertise in a craft
- Are comfortable working in relatively flat and dynamic teams
- Are passionate to work on ambiguous and complex future challenges
- Have a collaborative and empathetic mindset to solve problems with teams across Ford
Alongside everyone’s role as a designer of world class design content, you will also be expected to contribute to a range of communities to maintain our creative culture. We call these Community Hats.
They can range from stewarding the lab, leading a workshop, mentoring others, contributing to publications, hosting a tour with executives, bringing your maker skills to build prototypes, or leading your craft in a global community of like-minded designers.
These global communities will ensure that we stay connected across the organization, and constantly push the impact of what we do. They can act as additional areas of responsibility, helping to push careers in different directions.
We have five (5) global labs: Palo Alto, Detroit, London, Shanghai and Melbourne.
You’ll be part of a growing organization in the heart of Ford’s Product Development Center to drive innovation from the inside out.
