In 2008, while working at IDEO Chicago, I was a part of a design team tasked with imagining what a more versatile and productive pickup truck might look like. Through extensive ethnography we found that a pick-up truck is a paradox.

People buy pick-up trucks for the heroic features that they almost never use, pulling stumps, hauling payloads and traversing mountainous terrain, but they are often let down by the everyday extremes of picking up groceries, transporting children or even trying to work from their vehicle. Then we used the iconic profile of the pick-up truck as a framework to design new solutions to these everyday extremes that people struggled with so much.

Truck as locker.
Truck as office.
Truck as living room.
Truck as uhaul.
Truck as workstation.

We built our solution into a full-scale foam core prototype that rendered these future interactions in a way that Ford Executives could experience without judging them based on arbitrary aesthetics. These prototypes eventually informed the future of the 2021 F-150.