SF Virtual Design Conversations: Mobility & Commercial Transportation
About The Event : Mobility & Commercial Transportation
Who ever said B2B has to be boring?! Sign up to hear from experts across commercial mobility industries on how they’ve been able to transform their product offerings into bold and beautiful declarations of innovation and human-centered design. Commercial transportation and heavy-duty mobile equipment makes or breaks so many of our daily experiences in ways we don’t even realize, from how we travel, to how we get our water mains fixed, to getting our landscaping done. The B2B space is also one of the most important proving grounds for cutting-edge great human-centered product and service designs. Sign up to learn more about how you can give an infusion of human emotion and profitable market success to your commercial offering.
Who Should Attend?
- Chief Design Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and any management / leadership who are responsible for commercial mobility development, or who own the strategic design & innovation roadmap for their company.
- Managers of creative teams who want to cultivate the kind of innovation culture that will lead to exciting and sustainable commercial solutions.
- Advanced Design Managers, Connected / IoT Product Owners, DFM Leads
- Industrial Designers, Engineers, UX/UI experts or creatives who want to understand innovation & design better.
Why is this beneficial to you?
- Understand the thinking and process that has lead to some of the greatest innovations in future-forward mobility to date.
- Pick the brains of innovation leaders who have been in the industry long enough to tell the difference between what’s noise and what’s substance.
- Jumpstart your team’s creative thinking by exposing them to the new ideas in this session.
Speakers
Ask a question of our speakers!
We’ll try to tackle it during out time together.
12:00pm EDT
Jeevak Badve
Principal + Director of Strategic Growth
Sundberg-Ferar
Jeevak brings energy, passion & curiosity to his role at Sundberg-Ferar. With his unique blend of education and experience in industrial design, engineering and business, he is a rallying voice for the alignment and optimal inclusion of the end user’s un-met needs, and unspoken wants in the core value proposition of a company’s products & service portfolio to generate sought-after shareholder value. Jeevak has more than 23 years of professional design experience, first in India for 7 years at Tata Motors, and then in the U.S. for 16 years at GM Design and now Sundberg-Ferar. Beyond his role at SF, Jeevak is a board member of many prominent design associations and think tanks including the Michigan Design Council, Aether Design Group, and Detroit Creative Corridor. He also served on IDSA’s International board for 6 years and chaired IDSA’s 2017 flagship International Design Conference: “Design IS Business”. In his copious amounts of spare time, Jeevak can be found indulging his love of kickboxing, and obstacle course running, or photographing birds in obscure parts of the world.
12:00-1:00pm EDT
Thomas Gould
Director, Design & Technology
Adient
Thomas Gould is the Director of Design and Technology for the Adient. He leads the Industrial Design and Craftsmanship team that provides product solutions for the Adient automotive seating business unit for production work as well as the Technology and Innovation team that explores advanced concepts that are tied to relevant consumer and business needs.
He has been with the company since 1989.
Tom earned his degree in product and transportation design from Wayne State University and is a certified professional innovator.
1:00 – 2:00pm EDT
Ben Patel
SVP and CTO
Cooper Tire
Ben Patel was named Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer in November 2019. He is responsible for product planning and development, as well as engineering and technology across all regions. Patel leads a technology organization that includes a global technical center as well as technical centers in Asia, Europe and North America.
Patel joined Cooper from Tenneco, Inc. where he most recently served as Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer. In an earlier role at Tenneco, he served in the Global Clean Air Division as its Vice President, Global Research and Development, and helped create new products for global light and commercial vehicle customers to meet environmental and performance standards. Prior to Tenneco, Patel spent 12 years at General Electric (GE) in technical roles of increasing responsibility including Senior Research Scientist at GE’s Global Research Center within the Polymer and Chemical Technology Laboratory.
Patel earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Ottawa, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University. He holds 24 U.S. patents and has been published in more than a dozen scientific publications. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Lincoln Electric, a leading producer of welding products.
2:00 – 3:00pm EDT
Evan Carpenter-Crawford
Senior Product Designer, HMI Specialist
Sundberg-Ferar
In over 20 years at Sundberg Ferar, Evan has made many contributions to the company’s skill set and portfolio. Evan’s motivation centers on design’s drive to innovate and improve conditions for the end user. Evan began SF’s UI design capability in 1997 and continues to foster its growth and development. He is also an early practitioner of Sundberg Ferar’s Genesis process and has successfully used it to make strategic contributions for many clients. Before joining Sundberg Ferar, Evan ran his own consultancy and worked in the furniture industry. He also has 20 years teaching experience at The College for Creative Studies. Recently he has returned from a hiatus, during which he lead the North American design studio for an automotive tier one company.
3:00 – 4:00pm EDT
Robert Walker
Design Director, D-Ford Global Design Lab
Ford
Robert is an experienced Automotive Design Leader with demonstrated success in the global automotive industry. He’s skilled in Transportation Design, Advanced/Strategic Design, Product and Brand Development, Digital Design (UX/UI), Human-Centered Design Thinking & Strategy, (CX) Customer Experience Design/Strategy and Design Team Development. With both an Industrial Design degree from The College for Creative Studies and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business he has a strong passion for automotive, autonomous future mobility and connected consumer products; especially those that enable and deliver innovative customer & brand experiences. He believes in the transformative power of Design to have a positive impact on the world, and shares this passion as an adjunct professor of Transportation and Future Mobility Design at The College for Creative Studies. He is also member, Board of Directors at (TFA) Teach For America – Detroit.
