Philip Swift

Philip Swift, IDSA | Crown Equipment Corp.

Philip Swift is director of design for North America at Crown Equipment Corp., an international manufacturer of lift trucks.  Crown Design is a multi-disciplinary group that provides a critical strategic catalyst to Crown’s overall product development and innovation activities.  Crown product development is design and engineering intensive by necessity but the line between design and engineering is deliberately blurred.  The result is a deeply integrated design culture whose specialty is innovating in the blur.

Before coming to Crown, Swift held design and innovation management positions at Ciba-Corning Diagnostics, founded the design group at Symbol Technologies Inc. (now Motorola) and developed the Innovation Centers at Sapient. He gets satisfaction today when he sees the Symbol handheld scanners with cashiers everywhere that were designed more than 15 years ago.  He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1983 and is named in a variety of publications, patents and design awards.  Swift lives in Dayton, OH, with his wife and two teenage daughters.  Swift feels his best accomplishment is constantly finagling a way to richly and liberally push the boundaries of design practice.