Platform Tradeoffs, Customization, and Design Divergence

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As designers and creatives, many of us spent years of our career looking at blank canvases and attempting to find the best place to start solving the problems in front of us. Now 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 is being removed from the creative process?

Our guest today, Jae Park, VP of Digital Product Design at Ford's Electric Vehicle Digital Design division, posed this question to us. Jae 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 Jae about the "valley" between disruptions, why Ford's pivot to affordable EVs matters for American manufacturing, how Gen Alpha will reshape our expectations of vehicles, and why the Socratic method might be more important than any design tool in the age of AI.

Jae 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.

Bio

Jae Park is a design leader with a track record of building teams and driving innovation at the intersection of business, technology, and human needs. At Ford’s EVDD group, he leads cross-functional designers shaping the company’s digital product strategy to make mobility a fundamental right while advancing sustainability. His career includes inspiring new ways of working at Google, creating the award-winning Metro design system at Microsoft, and leading the invention of Amazon’s Echo Show, which defined a new multimodal product category.

Guided by a belief that innovation begins with people, Jae’s leadership style emphasizes curiosity, collaboration, and empowerment. He nurtures diverse teams of designers and technologists, ensuring they have the perspective and support to create products that serve humanity and improve the world at scale.

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