Archived Sessions

6 Principles for Working Differently | Martha Cotton

Cotton will speak about the role design can/should play in business, specifically focusing on the growing trend of organizational culture shift. Following a demand for new ways of working and problem solving, businesses and business school curricula are embracing a set of corporate values and "ways of working" that have their origins in design. This is more than design thinking—this is corporate behavior change—moving from thinking to doing.

Bringing Design Thinking To Investing | Scott Welz

The financial services sector is highly regulated and mature—not characteristics that easily lend themselves to a design-thinking approach.  Scott Welz's session will explore how a human-centered design approach is being used to re-imagine the investing experience at Wells Fargo Advisors, including the factors that led to this approach, the obstacles that have arisen and the impact we aspire to achieve with our clients.

Celebrating Constraints | Neeti Kailas

Design thinking is being embraced by corporations and social organizations alike, in a search for new ways of working. Neeti Kailas will speak about the role designers can play in innovation, satisfying constraints and in spaces that are unobvious.

Design and Color Trends for Woodgrains, Current and Future | Mark Smith

Mark Smith, of Schattdecor, will be discussing his collection of woodgrain trend colors which he has titled “The Raw Essentials.” Colors found in nature provide a simple aesthetic that seem to be a fundamental part of design these days. His palette of colors takes inspiration from the inherent colors of nature—stones, grains, succulents, eggs, etc. These natural elements provide a very trendworthy color palette for woodgrains. Smith will also discuss current woodgrain design and décor trends and where he sees these trends heading in the next 5 to 10 years.

Design from Day One | Zoë Scharf

How a print designer and a finance guy started a consumer product company. Zoë Scharf shares her journey as co-founder and creative director of greetabl.

Design in the Economy of Choice | Patrick Whitney

20th century organizations were driven by the forces of an economy of scale as businesses with the largest and most efficient capabilities for production and delivery won the largest markets.  Extensive distribution channels and multi-channel media networks, leaders in companies and academia created frameworks to help predict their future. As consumers filled their lives with products unimagined by previous generations, companies created ways to make their industrial age systems create more variety, causing SKU pollution that make complex companies, confused consumers and a strained planet.

Patrick Whitney, Dean of the IIT Institute of Design will present examples of frameworks and methods that fit the economy of choice in which we now live.

Design Led Innovation in Vehicle Design | Chip Thole

Chip Thole will take a look at the intersection theme framework as it applies to the world of car design via some past and present examples at General Motors.  

Innovation at Anheuser-Busch | Pat McGauley

Pat McGauley, Anheuser-Busch’s VP of Innovation, has developed over 130 new products over the last 10 years and launched such block buster innovations as: Budweiser Select, Bud Light Lime, Bud Light Platinum, Shock Top and most recently Bud Light Lime Rita's. McGauley will share with us how they are building a billion dollar Lime-a-Rita brand and the lessons learned along the way. 

It’s Not a New Venture, It’s an Ad’Venture! | Bryce Rutter

Designers have fantasized about doing for ourselves what we do for our clients—designing products that make money.  In 2007, Bryce Rutter started a new grill company that grew to $13 million in gross revenues by 2013, shipping to six countries with two dedicated manufacturing facilities.

But it wasn’t easy. Rutter’s entrepreneurial adventure put everything he owned at risk and taught him how to sleep with one eye open. Now, he will share five critical success factors to growing a multi-million dollar business and lifelong lessons on investing in start-ups.

Metronome: A Case Study in Trust as Product, Platform and Process | Dan Reus

The collision of mobile technology, healthcare and big data presents huge opportunities and challenges for those wanting to develop products and services to help us live better and rein in costs. With no shortage of needs and proposed solutions, Dan Reus will lead an exploration of how trust among stakeholders emerged as the critical attribute needed in the space, and how a product can be developed to deliver.

Social Impact Design: A Personal Discovery of Human-centered Design’s Role in Social Change | Michael Brennan

Michael Brennan will share his journey as a CEO to embrace human-centered design as a way to tackle the messy social issues facing society and in his hometown of Detroit. Brennan believes most of the caring systems that address social issues are conducted through an industrial model and often have institutional interest at the center.

Brennan has learned design is foundational to creating enduring solutions and the biggest design project at hand is how we design our lives as leaders.

Three Fundamental Frameworks for Design Innovation

Stephen Wurth kicks off the Midwest District Design Conference with an overview of the fundamental frameworks that he leverages personally in his day-to-day practice, including the INTERSECTION Venn diagram and his interpretation of this model that will aim to provoke more expansive thinking during the design innovation process.

Working at the intersection of Beauty, Ingenuity and Charisma | Mark Dziersk

Dziersk explores the three lenses that LUNAR applies to create superlative outcomes in product design and development. These three create the foundation of LUNAR's design philosophy and intersect with the human values, business viability and technological feasibility pillars that underscore the thematic content of the conference.

This presentation will draw from LUNAR's 30-year history as well as recent client and venture work, and take a closer look at how business, emotional and functional outcomes in perfect balance can create outstanding products—good for people and good for business.

You Cannot Design What You Cannot Measure | Surya Vanka

Design has become synonymous with innovation. Corporations are betting on design leaders to show a path through unprecedented technological upheaval, heightened global competitiveness and radical business disruption. Professionals from other disciplines are augmenting their business and engineering backgrounds with a design-thinking mindset to become the new breed of corporate design leaders. To thrive and lead, designers, too, must supplement their own design skill sets with data-driven approaches, particularly of the metrics that matter. They must know the why, what, when and how to measure, and use that insight to manage change and drive design decisions. Surya Vanka, 2015 IDSA International Conference chair, will describe a robust and tested framework for measuring product, process and people capability.