New York Times interviews Jim Wicks, Design Chief at Motorola Mobility

Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired in May, recently released new smartphones and reintroduced itself as the “New Motorola.” But what does that even mean? One thing is for sure: Motorola is not the same company that it was when it was riding the huge success of the first Razr in 2004.

In an interview, Jim Wicks, senior vice president for consumer experience design at Motorola Mobility, who has been with the company for 11 years, talked about the company’s design strategy and how it will change going forward.

“We established [our] design organization about 11 years ago. The whole point was to build one centralized design organization in the business, one that was very holistic in nature, that covered both the physical and digital disciplines of design of product.

For the physical design, we have within our groups industrial designers, surface engineers, advanced mechanical engineers, material scientists and trends forecasters. On the digital side we have user experience designers. Additionally we would have design researchers, and there are people who are engaged in ethnographic studies on automobiles and homes. They track how people use technology and identify some of the needs that are unmet at this stage.

That’s what our design group is, and we’re located in Chicago, California and Korea.”