Megan Neese | Senior Manager, Nissan Future Lab, President of the American Society of Industrial Designers.

Ms. Megan Neese holds a bachelor's degree in industrial design from Carnegie Mellon University and a master's degree in product development from the Comprehensive Innovation Institute. She has held design strategy positions at BMW Group Designworks USA, Samsung Design America and Nissan North America. Over the past 10 years, she has helped two startups establish design research and strategic functions, and led innovation programs for customers such as John Deere, LG Electronics, Navistar and Direct TV. At the same time, she is also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Industrial Designers (IDSA) and has served as the IDSA chairman since 2016. She has extensive design management experience.

Speech video

Content overview

Ms. Megan Neese's experience is very rich. In her speech, she introduced her work in the future laboratory of Nissan Alliance. Nissan itself is a large organization, but Ms. Megan Neese ’s team is composed of only 5 people, representing 6 different disciplines, such as market research, urban planning, and organizational transformation. There are team members in Japan, France, and the United States, with four different time zones and four different languages. Although it is a small team, it is an international team.

Ms. Megan Neese explained a macro trend in her speech. In the past, OEMs only produced products, but now they have changed. Everyone expects that the product should be smart. For example, this product needs to be connected to other products. The product information should be available. Tracked.

The mode of travel has changed dramatically in the past years. Like unmanned driving, in the future everyone will feel that the time and money spent on travel should be shorter and shorter. The intersection between them is that the travel system and the city system cross, and a good example is the parking lot. This parking lot may be in a dark place in Los Angeles. Another example is that our future cars are getting smaller and smaller, and more people like to ride electric cars or bicycles. Then the structure of the entire city will change. This is the connection between the travel industry and urban planning. We can help the entire system to better plan future city buildings and explore what kind of layout can better adapt to changes in travel.

We collaborated with a company in San Francisco. They have an electric car with two positions. We made a project. In this project, we hope to ride this car in San Francisco without wearing a helmet. We want to try this. Is this solution feasible? We also want to test some of the problems in this city through this prototype, so we cooperated with the city government, because the biggest problem facing the San Francisco city government is parking, such cars can alleviate parking problems, because they are very Small, you can park in the gaps of many cars, the test contains different parts, and even this car service can test other problems of city parking and the deficiencies in mobile services.

Another project can also be said to be a very early prototype concept, that is, car sharing, people can share cars with each other, but there is a problem is how do we change cars in the parking lot? Because there is not enough electronic product support, we built a text message system that can send a text message saying that the car is ready, you can drive away, and then we can see the content of the information they sent, such as the car is here, or the fuel tank is Full and so on.

In short, there are four things that can be done. The first is the concept of time. Timeliness is very important. If the time is wrong, it is not that the product is bad, but the timing is wrong. Secondly, we must have enough time to do consumer testing and iteration, we need to give consumers a few weeks to let them know more about the product. In addition, we will spend money for consumers to give us feedback, consumers need to really spend money to buy this product, rather than free for them to use, if you let consumers spend money to participate, what he buys and gives The feedback will be more real. Finally, partners are needed. They are stakeholders from other systems who can provide support and help for the project and help us better understand the situation in different fields.