Jae Park: Designing a new generation of vehicles at Ford, and why friction matters in the creative process

0:01As a designer or as a human, what happened to the art of approaching a blank canvas? How fast do you want things to come to you? Like there's something good about the slowness of things. Right now, I feel like everything we talk about is fast, speed, velocity. It's almost like microwaving your way into production. And I'm like, okay, maybe you can do it with ads, but is that how you really want to live? Like, I don't know. I don't know. As designers and creatives, many of us spent years of our careers looking at blank canvases and attempting to find the best place to start solving the problems in front of us.

0:38Now that AI can churn out designs and imagery, not to mention writing, video, and even music in seconds, what are we losing from the friction that's being removed from the creative process? Our guest today, Jay Park, VP of Digital Product Design at Ford's Electric Vehicle Digital Design Division, posed this question to us. Jay previously led design teams at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, companies that epitomize the move fast and break things mentality of Silicon Valley. But he questions whether our obsession with speed is actually how we want to live. We talk with Jay about the valley between disruptions, why Ford's pivot to affordable EVs matters for American manufacturing, how Gen.A.I.

1:20will reshape our expectations of vehicles, and why the Socratic method might be more important than any design tool in the age of AI. Jay also discusses what might be his most complex challenge yet, helping a 120-year-old automotive icon compete in an era where, as he puts it, the phone and the car are becoming the same thing, at least in rapidly evolving markets like China. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft.

1:59improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

2:22We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

2:33And now, back to the show.

2:40Jay Park, welcome to Design Better. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Jay, you're doing really interesting work, and you have been doing some fascinating work throughout your career. But where you are right now, you're at Ford. You're working specifically on electric vehicles, So F-150, Mach-E, all of those different vehicles as well. Including other propulsions too, by the way. Which makes it really fascinating and complicated. Yeah. We want to talk about all of that stuff, but maybe we could just talk a little bit about your experience in general. Because you have a unique perspective that you spent such a long period of time working at Microsoft and Amazon working on the Echo Show, which is a ubiquitous product.

3:24You spent a couple years working at Google in a very important leadership role. And now you're at Ford. And they're some of the most influential companies in the world. How are problems solved differently across these different companies and cultures? Because culturally, people are going to look at things differently. Between Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and now Ford, what's the difference between the problem-solving approach? With the exception of Amazon, Microsoft was software, although the fun part was we did work with the partners on what the hardware should be. That's the whole PC industry, and then you see that played out on the Windows phone, for example.

4:04I think Amazon, we had first row seed at defining the hardware in-house while trying to connect the software to enable the service. I think the first kind of company that was trying to bridge all that together, you hear about Apple doing really well on services now, through their software and hardware. So having a first row seat to that was very enlightening. Google was definitely more software. We had some hardware components for like meeting speakers and stuff like that. But we primarily stayed at, you know, billions of users, even like a 0.5 % negative impact. There's millions of people. It's a different experience working at Ford.

4:42It's primarily a body company, right? You're building physical bodies. And then the big shift is adding the mind, the idea of having service. So having these three things connect is sort of where most products are going. Talk maybe a little bit about the Ford's design legacy. I mean, certainly the cars themselves have an aesthetic design legacy. But in more modern years, IDOs worked with Ford in the 1990s. We talked to Sandy Frischi, who ran their innovation lab for a while. So this idea of design and innovation is not new to Ford. and it's something they seem to invest in quite a bit. Could you talk to us about that?

5:18I think there's a lot of great movement in design, of course, in Ford. I think Ford is trying to find its footing on what it is to be a product company from a manufacturing company. And you start with the body again, aesthetics. And then at some point, you have to start doing product design and you have to know what are the big bets and what do the customers want. So I think all of the human-centered investment that went in was very helpful. At some point, though, it also made sense that, hey, you need to have experts who can work side by side with engineering to actually build something. So that takes a different kind of expertise.

5:56So I think the last two and a half years, almost three years I've been here, what I've been tasked to do is make digital product design appear to the physical design. And typically an OEM's digital team is under a studio. In our company, my team used to be called Digital Asset Delivery Team. Very production-heavy, service-oriented. And so part of my charter was to come in and build out that team of experts. And we like to call it as expert-leading experts model. And then so you work inside-out rather than outside-in. So that's been the biggest shift in how we work. Tell us more about that, just the integration of software into cars.

6:39I mean, there are some car companies where that is so inherent in their philosophy and their strategy, really. And that Ford is an expert in making cars. They are the ones who innovated the production process. But integrating in a legacy company like this that's been around for so long, integrating new technology, in some sense, it's a challenge. You know, like it's a challenge to try to bring that into the entire experience. How do you think about that and how does the leadership at Ford think about that integration? In auto industry, when I arrived, there was three big disruptions. People like to think about electrification, which is a big one.

7:23Then there is autonomous driving, different levels of it. And then there's digitization, which is a broad term. But that's really important because that's the bridge to the interface. And then, you know, we talk about binding that to service. But now thinking about AI more holistically is becoming that next big thing that has to bind all of these together. So for Ford, even before I got here, they went through a huge disruption to adopt touch interface a while back. And those are some of our existing vehicles. It runs on a software called Sync 4. And, you know, it's kind of, to be honest, dated.

8:02But that was a huge shift for Ford, right? to take that risk many years ago. And now we are starting to invest a lot more in embedded experiences. So last year we shipped five programs that uses Google's AAOS, including their services. And we have a good tailwind on those products this year. And we're working through the next two generations of products where we invest even more on our embedded experiences. So it's early days, but we're definitely investing there quite a bit. So should we read this as the strategy of let's shift the responsibility of software over to our phones instead of the car?

8:44Is Ford's strategy that we need to bring more of that in-house? So for example, if you go to China, they have fundamentally changed how a car is made. They sort of jumped over a couple of generations and went straight to using EV vehicle as a clean canvas. They're building in more like a product. And if you're a phone manufacturer, the phone and the car is the same thing. It just simply blends. So they're ahead in some ways on the customer experience. And we have different opportunities and some headwinds. We don't own the phone OSs, but we do think there's definitely a big theme around how does phone and the vehicle interact together.

9:29And it doesn't always have to be that it's the same OS, but like imagine your phone when you're away from the car, you can still have your car in your pocket. And there's quite a bit of work you can do to make that experience really great. And you've seen some of other manufacturers do this, especially EV companies, but that's just the beginning of surfaces that we can bring a lot of cool experiences. Tell us a little bit more about Aaron and I. I think we're in the same boat, not having experienced EVs in China. So when you say the car and the phone are the same thing, they essentially have control over the design of both these systems so they can integrate them?

10:05Yes. So like Xiaomi and Huawei, they are phone manufacturer. There's a book that you all should read if you haven't. It's called Apple in China. And it talks about tech transfer. They also mentioned Tesla there as well. So what we've done is created a knowledge base for the Chinese to pick up how to build complicated, sophisticated products. And they've used that as a flywheel to create their own. So there are a number of steps ahead of what most people don't even know is happening. Like Hawaii has a foldable phone. That thing's pretty amazing. I think there's a video of Jensen Huang out there playing with him going, oh my gosh, this thing is crazy.

10:50Like, I haven't even seen anything like this. So not only are they good at manufacturing at cost, but they're also being creative. They've had 10-year runway on that on phones. They leveraged it to the EV when Tesla came in. So they have a strong runway of creating software-to-define vehicle. They took more of a first principles approach. They built the EV more like a product, right? Versus having to deal with, oh my gosh, I have to manage all these modules. We've entered in and out. We have to spec them. It takes a year and a half to get all those parts back. So we integrate and chip. They don't think that way.

11:27They can have a very clean architecture, build it almost like a computer on wheels. There's a couple of layers that is a little bit more complicated than a phone. Like, you know, you need to have a driving powertrain, manage the power, all that stuff. But fundamentally, it works like a phone on wheels. And they approach the product experience from that perspective. And then they add things like how would you control actuators and motor sensors and actuators to have what we call third space. I mean, you go there in a standard EV SUV, will fall out of your way, give you a zero gravity experience, screens everywhere.

12:07I mean, it's pretty magical. It really will blow you away in their approach to what a car is. And I think there's quite a bit of opportunity. Of course, we're Ford in how we reimagine that as well. That's fascinating. I mean, this is ultimately what Apple, they dealt with before the iPhone. They experimented with creating software for someone else's device, bumped into a lot of limitations and decided it's inevitable we have to have full vertical integration where we're controlling all of those things. For U.S. and the West, having displaced how you manufacture is a disadvantage. Talk more about that.

12:45Say more about what the disadvantage is. I mean, Ford has all of the manufacturing and is making some pretty incredible changes in expanding and modernizing the manufacturing process in the U.S. Absolutely. So, you know, as you can tell, like we have majority of our vehicles that are manufactured here. So that's a great thing. I would say the Achilles heel is supply chain, like the ingredients. Name a big tech company that's creating modern devices, glasses, speakers, you know, name them. And then if you listen to Mary Meeker, the person, she forecasts the future a lot. In her last AI report, she mentioned, we're going to have trajectories like billions of smart intelligent devices.

13:31Most of them are going to be manufactured in China, especially the supply chain of ingredients. I think that's a disadvantage as we think about how you compete when there's a shift of going from sort of a globalistic distribution of supply and building things to more regional. And I think that's going to create tensions. And I think that's happening naturally because as products get smarter, the moment you have cameras and you have sovereign cloud processing it, you're going to have issues, whether it's a car or a small device, especially if another country is trying to sell that into the U.S.

14:12And you're seeing some of that play out already. So I think those are the challenges you have. The real topic really, I think to me is, it is relevant to design field and design leaders, is I believe in this new era of AI, the way we have to think about the new opportunities is how the digital experience lives on a specific vessel, whether it's digital or physical, because the input method drives the new paradigms. And right now, there's a bit of a displacement of the input method that we're applying. We're using the old ones, but the capability of the thing we're trying to leverage, the AI, is completely different.

14:57So then you have to think about the vessel and the input. And so the vessel, you have to talk about where is it going to be made. The broad picture is like you want to have total control over everything you build, and you can't just be responsible for the digital portion and say you're okay. You're not okay because if you think about what a modern industrial court is, is there's two factories that's happening, that's being built. One is the AI factory. We're aware of that one because there's a lot of press on that. I think we're over-indexed on that. The other one is intelligent product factories, things that can build intelligent products, including cars.

15:35That one's really important because that's where you're going to get a lot of parts, compute, sensors, other supplies that comes together, whether it's an EV or a robot. It's the same kind of architecture in a way. You want to get really fit at that so that you can bring the cost on and have ownership of the supply, right? Especially when we go regional from global. And then it's power. What's going to power those factories? That's how I see it. Two big factories, energy power and supply chain. And if you look at U.S. right now, you know, you're starting to hear news about, oh, this company is now investing and bringing the chips back here and billions of dollars.

16:19But it's sort of scattered. The bigger news is we're all building these AI factories, which is great. But if you look at those big seven companies, they're spending 50, 60 billion dollars annual to invest. If you think from a sovereign point of view, you might be overspending. Do you need six times that much spend when China probably is going to spend one or two times that? That's like 300, 400 billion dollar difference. And where are they putting that money? The intelligent product factories. They're going to go from 2 terawatt to 3 terawatt to 8 terawatt by 2040. Terawatt's about 750 million homes that you can power.

16:58U.S. is going from like 2 to 3 terawatt. So we don't compete it even at the power level. Those super clusters that you see being built, they run on about one to two gigawatt power, which is like one or two nuclear reactors. So there's a lot of stuff going on that people are not aware of. But I think if you have so much redundancy building that power network, I don't think it's very efficient versus putting some of that investment and policy into building intelligent product factors, including EVs. China has also demonstrated that they can develop very efficient models like DeepSeek without, you know, the huge investment and the types of infrastructure that we have here, too.

17:38Yeah, you know, you have to read between the lines there, but clearly, talent-wise, capability, they are as smart or smarter. The best thing about design sometimes is, right, like constraints. You find innovations when you have constraints. So, like, one thing DeepSeek did was they notched their compute from an 8-bit to 4-bit and just got an exponential efficiency. It's just like, if you didn't have to do that, why would you, right? I mean, humans just show ingenuity all the time. It's crazy. I heard a stat recently that AI spending, investment in AI has surpassed consumer spending in the U.S.

18:15contributing to GDP growth. That's just like an insane amount of investment in AI. And that's my point. It's a little bit over-indexed on building these hyperscalers. Let's shift gears a little bit and maybe talk about electric cars. Ford has taken a really interesting approach to EVs. The F-150 Lightning in particular, I think there was risk and a lot of investment. And I see a lot of them on the road. I have friends who own them and they love them. But we're also seeing that the adoption rate has slowed and not been quite as intense as we expected. And there's been a lot of change politically in the United States.

18:55just kind of general cultural shift as well. What's the state of EVs in the U.S. and maybe globally, if you have that perspective? It's what we call the early majority blues. There's an early adopter leading indicator in excitement. And then there's what I call the early majority blues. And it comes in a few factors. One is average electric vehicles still tend to be expensive. Getting that battery cost is a difference. Getting that range is important. And some of this is due to, again, how we get our parts, right? So that's why we did a hard pivot about a year ago. You know, we loaded a whole bunch of EV that were highly priced and potentially harder on how we earn revenue off of that, net revenue, and seeing how the environment is changing.

19:48We pivoted away. We unloaded them and instead changed that strategy to load more affordable EV platform from ground up. So that's where we focused our attention to, seeing where China was going. So we wanted to make sure we were fit and competing against an affordable EV. And we tweaked our battery technology at the same time to something that is less dense, less flammable. it means it might not have as much range, but you can design that into the aerodynamics of the car to make sure you get the right range. So we've been very smart in my mind about pivoting. And then because we have multi-propulsion portfolio, we also are turning a lot more of P-head hybrids around because even those big trucks, they love having power on board.

20:36We serve a lot of essential workers who do a lot of building and fixing and moving. So they need the range, but they also don't mind getting that extra efficiency in cities and urban areas, but also to power their work, which is something that they really love about Lightning, of course, right? Yeah. You get like a 220, you get bi-directional charging for your house. It's an amazing vehicle, like what it can do. Yeah. And so I think that shift is good for us. There's an analogy I like to give. So, So, you know, in strategy, people have to draw S-curves. An S-curve, you know, you look at the climb.

21:13You're kind of blind to how short it is or how long it'll last. And then, you know, you can draw a double S-curve to show disruption. But then it's hard to understand the disruption. Like, I've done this over the time where I draw these things, and then I realize I'm not really helping understand that disruption, the intersection of those two S-curves. What most humans do is they look at, I've heard this term before, it's not mine, local to global maximum. Think of it as two hills. You're on a small hill, you see a bigger hill. Of course, that's where you want to go. And it's a very first-person perspective.

21:47But in reality, when you turn it around into a third-person view, you see the small hill, and then you see a big valley. And then you get to the top of the hill. And so EV journey is just that. We're going through that valley, but in our mind, we have made the right strategic call to unload some of the EVs that we didn't think were going to be profitable and really double down on affordability that we think would be a better fit for a customer and making sure technology, the way we manufacture things, the battery we use is super efficient to give us that right viability, if you will. And then, you know, we're not talking about other OEMs, but you'll notice that some of the OEMs, they've already loaded their plan with some of these EVs that they can't unwind.

22:35That's not a good place to be. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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