Industrial Design Lead

Ford Motor • Dearborn, MI

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

Join us in shaping the future of Ford Motor Company, as part of a global organization with exceptional colleagues in world-class facilities. As part of Ford Design , 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. This position requires demonstrable expertise in physical product solutions with strong visual design work, design sensibility, and articulate storytelling. As a Lead, you’ll be responsible for leading a design team through the design development process, as well as building relationships with external industrialization partners. You will lead your team through concepting and sketching, designing low to high fidelity design prototypes, leading workshops, and managing asset production through the life cycle of assigned projects, pilots, and research initiatives.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in industrial design, Transportation Design or a related field.
• 5+ years of Industrial Design or Transportation Design studio work experience.
• Senior Designer level experience in a consumer product industry, transportation sector or supplier, design consultancy, or similar field.
• Proficiency with Adobe Creative Suite design tools.
• Proficiency with at least one 3D modeling software application (e.g., Alias AutoStudio, Rhino, or Blender).
• Proficiency in relevant presentation applications (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, or similar).

Nice To Haves

• Exceptional creativity and demonstrated inventiveness towards features and functional solutions.
• Exceptional ability to translate customer and research inputs into relevant, highly desirable, and feasible product solutions.
• Exceptional communication skills through presentation and storytelling.
• Exceptional product design aesthetic sensibilities.
• Exceptional sketching, visualization, modelling, and presentation skills.
• Exceptional 2D application skills (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.).
• Exceptional 3D application skills (e.g., Alias AutoStudio, VRED, Rhino, Maya or Blender).
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects, and a team of people, through the design process in a multidisciplinary team environment.
• Demonstrated ability to build low fidelity prototypes (e.g., hands-on with cardboard, foam core, wood, laser cutting, 3D printing) and understanding of production methods and prototyping processes.
• Demonstrated ability to translate design vision in animated story-form through creative use of digital presentation applications (including AI visualization tools).
• Demonstrated ability to develop design proposals from concept to production.

Responsibilities

• Lead Design Innovation: Design novel and unique experience and physical interaction design solutions to meaningful problems for customers, identifying design opportunities and actionable concepts that align with user and business needs, design principles, and technical capabilities.
• Subject Matter Expertise (SME) in Prototyping & Design Visualization: Serve as the expert on the team for all aspects of prototyping and design visualization methods. You will be an expert in initial rough prototyping ("build to learn") with a primary emphasis on physical enablers, and in iterating design solutions based upon customer, user, and system feedback to meet user expectations and deliver successful outcomes.
• Insight-Driven Design Solutions: Be the expert in creating design solutions that are deeply rooted in customer and user insights, expertly translating these insights into highly desirable and feasible physical product solutions.
• Leadership & Vision: Demonstrate leadership throughout the entire design process from inspiration and research to building prototypes and communicating a clear vision. You will lead a team of designers, be accountable for their goals and objectives, leading them to bring to life integrated digital-physical experiences through brand, products, and services, and inspire project teams to conceive, design, develop, test, and launch impactful new products and services.
• Systems Thinking: Apply systems thinking to physical experience design that seamlessly engages people through touchpoints along a service journey for consumer and business applications.
• Stakeholder Collaboration & Communication: Bring clarity and focus through effective communication of functional needs and aesthetic sensibilities. You will represent our team in an advanced product development environment, building strong relationships with engineering, planning, and research stakeholders.
• Experience Content Strategy & Feasibility: Partner to support the initial design and development of experience concepts. You will design and iterate key program applications of the domain-based Experience Content Strategies, confirming key experiences are feasible within program constraints.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees