What is the state of the design field in 2023?
The Challenge
To investigate the current state of design in large organizations in 2023 by interviewing 29 design industry leaders.
The Solution
A report titled “Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI” which summarizes the five urgent challenges facing organizations today and how design can help address each challenge.
The Impact
Design leaders, academics and practitioners have contemporary, research-backed strategies they can use to activate design’s full potential in the age of AI.
Time: 15 weeks, Spring 2023
Sector: Corporate
Sponsors: Institute of Design + Salesforce
My role: Design researcher
Services:
Research planning
Secondary research
1:1 executive interviews
Analysis + synthesis
Storytelling + presenting
What makes this project unique?
The opportunity to interview design leaders at many of world’s top companies and develop a report that has implications for the design field as a whole.
1. Challenge
Project origins In 2020, corporate design leaders partnered with the Institute of Design to explore the future of design. Their research findings were published in the Lead with Purpose report, which highlighted the six key skills designers will need to have in the future, as well as what roles designers are expected to play in organizations. The goals of this report were to both inform the wider design community about future trends and to activate the potential of design within organizations.
Project goal Three years later, our team embarked on the next phase of this work. Our goal was to understand how the potential of design within corporate organizations might be further activated, with a particular eye toward factors impacting the design talent pipeline into these organizations. To do this, we conducted secondary research to understand the current design training landscape and primary research with corporate design leaders.
2. Research + Insights
29 interviews
My role:
Lead interviewer on 5 interviews with leaders at IDEO, IBM, Facebook and two independent consultancies
Notetaker for 3 interviews
Coded 8 interviews
Synthesized data from all 28 interviews
18 companies
1 final report
The final report is here.
After the semester ended, my teammates Sanya Shah and Janhavi Singh worked with ID Professor Mark Jones to refine the initial findings and compile them into a report.
We held a workshop with design leaders from around the country to get feedback on the initial findings (1 of 3).
Testing out a new framework to illustrate our findings (2 of 3).
Discussing our research findings in preparation for our final presentation (3 of 3).
Team
Team: Emery Donovan, Sandhini Ghodeshwar, Steven Hunsicker, Janhavi Singh + Sanya Shah
Advisors: Mark Jones + Teddy Zmrhal