Designdrives

In EP52 we have the chance to learn from Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, a Director of User Experience at Google.

With Elizabeth we chat about the intersection of design and psychology as well as her approach on influencing product strategy from a User Research perspective. During the last years Elizabeth had the chance to work on many of Google’s well known software tools like Flutter, Material Design and recently Google’s new OS system called Fuchsia.

During the episode we jump into:

✅ how to she set’s up to UX research projects at Google

✅ how interviewing people outside of your user group can foster innovation

✅ the biggest mistakes digital products teams and startups make in their product design, strategy and research

✅ how to do user research on AI projects

✅ what excites her about the future of tools and software platforms when it comes to user research

✅ tactics to create more empathy in your larger product team (e.g. workshop method called “wearing hats"

✅ how to control the customer experience with cognitive science and visual design

Thanks a lot for your time and for learning Elizabeth!

“Design is about raising ambitions.”

In this episode, I chat with Clive Grinyer, Head of Service Design at Royal College of Arts in London.

In the episode we talk about:

- his experience to work with legendary designers like Bill Moggridge (IDEO Co-Founder) and Jony Ive (Former VP of Design Apple).

- how he implemented service design and user-centric processes leading global design teams and projects

- how you communicate the impact of design investments within a company and set KPIs

- why it's more important than ever to focus on the MVE (Minimal Viable Experience)

- how he is using his skills to create a path for designers to be effective

- why it's better to be a great designer first before moving into design leadership and management, it’s not something you can learn in school

- how you set up KPI and business goals for service design outcomes and why you should align on them early in the process

- how do you methods like “design intervention” and design vision to ensure the success of a service design project

About the guest:

Prof. Clive Grinyer is Head of Service Design at the Royal College of Art.

Clive is an acknowledged expert in service design, design thinking and digital and technology innovation who has led award-winning design teams for companies around the globe.

Clive started in design consultancy Ideo in London and San Francisco before co-founding design company Tangerine with Martin Darbyshire and future Apple design chief and RCA Chancellor Jony Ive. He went onto build and lead design teams for Orange, Samsung and Cisco and was Director of Service Design at Barclays.

In 2018 Clive was named in Creative Review's Top 50 as 'a passionate advocate for the transformational potential of design for some three decades.

In EP51 we interviewed Afshin Mehin who is the founder of Card79 about brain-machine interfaces and the future of multi-modal interaction design.

He and his team recently had the chance to work on the Neuralink robot and beyond that experimented in many internal projects on the future of thought-based interfaces.

During the episode we jump into:

how to BCI (brain-machine-interfaces) work

what value do these interfaces provide

how do interactions with such interfaces work and why multi-modality is key

the evolution and future of interaction design

how to navigate the value of design in the fields of advanced technologies, science, and research

challenges when designing though-based interfaces

Thanks a lot for your time and learning Afshin!

About Afshin Mehin:

Afshin Mehin is the founder of Card79, a creative studio based in San Francisco and Vancouver specializing in giving form to the future.

Consistently blurring the boundaries between our digital and physical lives, he’s worked for client’s ranging from small startups such as Neuralink and Noon Home to large Companies such as Amazon, Lululemon and Ford.

Prior to setting up Card79, Afshin worked in San Francisco and London for design studios such as Whipsaw, IDEO, BarberOsgerby, and Terence Conran.

In episode 50 I had the absolute pleasure to learn from Gavin Ivester, VP of Design of Bang & Olufsen.

Gavin made experiences working at Apple, Nike, Puma and even gained experience working as a design consultant.

During the episode we talk about to:

how to lead design teams and projects at Apple, B&O, Nike, Puma and others

how design drives brand and brand drives design

why brand transformation starts at the product brief

why you can’t disconnect brand values and product design

how he helped to simplify the user experience by collaboration of UX/UI teams and Industrial Design

Why design requires optimism

About Gavin Ivester:

Gavin Ivester is a hybrid product and brand leader with roots in Silicon Valley industrial design and extensive European lifestyle and tech experience. He specializes in driving profitable, responsible growth through the power of design and brand.

Gavin recently exited the role of VP Design at Bang & Olufsen after wrapping up his efforts on an aggressive product portfolio upgrade. Coupled with new strategy, the company has returned to profitable growth.

As Senior VP/General Manager of PUMA’s global Footwear division, he drove growth of over 400% to €2billion, and led PUMA’s watches and eyewear product lines.

Gavin designed the first-ever PowerBook at Apple, headed Nike’s Global Footwear Design team, served as Gibson Guitar’s Chief Creative Officer, and lead a turnaround of Under Armour’s Footwear division.

As an entrepreneur and consultant, Gavin has advised on brand and growth strategy for Grammy-nominated music artists and companies in healthcare, banking, beverages, digital media, sports fashion.

In episode 49 I had the absolute pleasure to learn from Spencer Nugent.

Spencer is well known in the Industrial Design community for his tremendous community content and sketching tutorials with his blog Sketch-A-Day. In the past, he worked at ASTRO Studios, Vivint Smart Home, and others. Currently, he is also an educator at Offsite, an education platform by Advanced Design.

With Spencer we dive into:

The importance of visualization for the design process

how to stay motivated in creating community content

How to drive business impact as a designer through visualization

how sketching and dodging helps to align within a design process and helps you to “prototype” ideas

the importance of visual thinking

Diversity in design: what designers should do to tangle problems around inclusion and diversity

Why it is critical to developing more diverse role models in the design community

More about Spencer:

Spencer Nugent is the founder of Sketch-A-Day, has been engaged in providing free, high-quality online design sketching tutorials and on-site sketch workshops since 2008. He has created an extensive online network and following within the Industrial Design community and continues to connect with students and design professionals via his online websites.

His experience includes working at General Motors in Warren, Michigan, San Francisco-based design firm Astro Studios, heading up his own design consultancy, Studio T minus where he worked with several clients primarily in the consumer electronics and apparel industries. Spencer has worked with brands such as Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, BodyGlove, Adidas, Verifone, Kyocera Altec Lansing, Hasbro, Dell, Tupperware, and Motorola. Further, Spencer has been involved in managing the design for Vivint Smart Home.

Most recently he started his business with 50/50 CreativeLabs as well as teaching at Offsite.

In episode 48 I had the absolute pleasure to catch up and learn from Phil Balagtas.

Phil Balagtasis an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco,CA. He is also the founder ofThe Design Futures Initiative(DFI) that focuses on speculative design.

An educator and futurist.

His Design Futures events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies. Speculative Futures are a new field and his initiatives enable people around the world to access frameworks, methods, and knowledge to apply it and use it to solve major global challenges.

Speculative futures can drive strategic business visions.

During the episode, Phil shares inspiring learnings about how speculative futures can be used to make strategic business decisions. By understanding preferred, probable, and potential futures businesses can understand the long-term consequences of a market and designers support in aggregating knowledge from experts into a visualized and tangible future story that helps everyone to make the right decisions and be aware of consequences.

Public policies and ethics around technology.

Further, Speculative Design can be used to make people aware of how frameworks and innovations around data, technology, privacy, business models, and design concepts will lead to certain behavior and societal outcomes. This can be used to raise awareness and act early for policymakers and technology regulators to create the right frameworks that balance the needs of humans and businesses.

About Phil Balagtas:

Phil has been a Visual & UX Designer since 2001 and has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He is currently an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco, CA. He is also the founder of The Design Futures Initiative (DFI), a nonprofit that organizes the internationalSpeculative Futuresmeetups andPRIMERconferences in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers, futurists, and strategists from all over the world to teach and speak about designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.

Phil is also an avid public speaker—he has presented and taught workshops around the world on various topics including Design Facilitation, Digital Transformation, and Speculative Design. Delivering powerful statements around the importance of design and strategy to shape the future of society and businesses, he shares an amalgamation of experience from working across sectors and focuses on how to empower designers for social impact.

More about Phil:

Phil currently contributes to a small chapter of a book coming out later this year led by Gem Bartond called: Experimental Realism

He runs a frequent Twitch show called ztopia.show about speculative futures.

Books Phil recommends:

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

How to Future by Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby

Future Scouting by Damien Lutz

Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby

Extrapolation Factory Operator's Manual by Elliott Montgomery & Chris Woebken

Discursive Design by Bruce Tharp

Homo Deus, Sapiens, & 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

The Signals are Talking by Amy Webb

In episode 47 I had the absolute pleasure to catch up and learn again from Bilgi Karan.

Bilgi Karan is UX Manager at Inter IKEA Group - working on Smart Home experiences.

Hybrid design approach.

Bilgi has a strong background in designing hybrid experiences, uniting interaction and industrial design aspects, Before his role at IKEA, he worked as a Principal UX Designer at Above in Sweden, at TEAGUE in Seattle and Sony in Sweden, and graduated from Umea Institute of Design in Sweden.

UX Strategy informs Industrial Design Strategy.

During the episode, we explore the intersection of Interaction and Industrial Design: why you need to think about future digital interactions to inform strategic industrial design.

Further, we touch on what design areas are key contributors in designing connected smart home experiences and what excites him about the space.

Habits vs “Newness”

One of the key challenges when designing anything innovative is how to drive user adoption and create nudges to create a positive human behaviour change? In the episode we touch on strategies designers can apply to understand the border between these two aspects - and it starts and end with user research.

Tech-driven vs User-driven.

Bilgi had the chance to work with many Advanced Technology teams during his career. In the episode, he describes how he tries to approach tech innovation with a “human” perspective and why we should be careful to task designers to “find applications for technology innovations”.

Happy to share that episode 46 is out! 🎙

This time we had the great opportunity to speak to Kevin Bethune - Founder & Chief Creative Officer at dreams • design + life Chair of the Design Management Institute Board of Directors, and Author at the The MIT Press - as he is writing a book on the intersection of design and business.

Kevin started as a designer at Nike and later on worked as a VP of Strategic Design at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Digital Ventures. Further Kevin gave a TEDx talk on the “4 superpowers of design” which we can highly recommend.

With Kevin, we chat on the intersection of business and design.

How can design drive business impact?

Why designers should think beyond human-centered design?

Why "business language and communications" skills are key to build strong partnerships to push an idea forward?

Why designers should think more about ethics, sustainability, diversity and inclusion? And how to approach it?

Kevin explains and gives insights into how designers can shape businesses - especially in uncertain times like these.

Thanks a ton for the time Kevin - it was great learning from you!

Enjoy the episode! And happy eastern!

A good manager needs to identify the levels of wants & needs - this can be done through behavioural planning.

In episode 45 I chat with Matt Wallaert on driving behaviour outcomes. Matt is the author of “Start at the end” and former director of Microsoft Ventures. Formerly he was also Chief Behavioural Officer at Clover Health.

Matt and me meet in 2018 as we were both speakers at a Conference called “IT Arena”. It was great to reconnect!

In the episode we learn from his experiences of driving behaviour outcomes. We touch on:

-> Matt Wallaert’s journey on the intersection of behavioural science and product development.

-> Why Behaviour design requires a holistic approach.

-> Why everyone is shaping user behaviour outcomes in different ways.

-> Why you need to align on “success factors” before any design process.

-> How do design for a behaviour outcome and consider long term consequences.

-> Why behaviour science can be used to increase business and product success

Enjoy the episode!

Check out more about Matt’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Start-End-Products-Create-Change/dp/0525534423

“Tension doesn’t have to be a bad thing… Tension can actually be healthy…” — Mark Abraham

In episode 44 I chat with Marc Abraham about innovating in product strategy and product development by balancing different tensions and how they could even create a better outcome in the end.

Marc is Head of Product for Engagement at ASOS in London and Cu-Curator of Mind The Product, where he is working with organisers of ProductTank events in over 25 countries to ensure we deliver the highest quality events for our global community of product people.

He also wrote a book called “Managing Product = Managing Tension”. In the episode he shares his product management process, the role of design for product success, best practises in the collaboration of Product Managers & Designers and how the tension in a team and different stakeholders can drive innovation and product success - when managed well.

Enjoy the episode!