Principal Product Strategist, Skookum
Lee Fain has over fifteen years of design and innovation experience including 3M Design Lab, Electrolux Group Design, Idea Couture and Cognizant Interactive. Fain is passionate about design’s ability to enhance the customer experience, business-to-business collaborations, and an innovative corporate culture within large complex organizations.
Fain’s Design Thinking and management strategies are published in the Columbia University Press, the Design Management Institute (DMI) and MISC Magazine. Much of his work evangelizes the importance of connecting the ideal customer experience to positive results for businesses through cross-functional collaboration, innovation incubator models, and strategic alignment of key performance indicators.
Fain received a Master of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Bachelor of Arts from Campbell University. He is a Senior Design Strategist and Co-Head Design Strategy with Idea Couture, a global strategic innovation and experience design firm within Cognizant Interactive.
Statement of Candidacy
The business of design needs designers to influence business. All passionate industrial designers and designers alike strive towards keeping design as competitive strategy within their respected brands and firms. It is critical to focus on the end user experience (designing from insight), but also design solutions that create sustainable business models. Staying relevant through good design practices by leading all design touchpoints with an acute financial savviness should be incorporated into our lexicon as designers. This is especially true for industrial designers, strategic designers, design strategists, design managers and executive leaders of in-house design departments or consulting firms.
Overseeing the strategic nature of IDSA’s investments and profitability will be designed with our primary audience in mind, our members. The ROI and ROE (Return on the Experience) will be very self-evident from our wonderful student chapter representations in education to professional networking that give all of our members a competitive edge. Identifying strategic investment opportunities from design theory to design tools that enhances membership experience is our primary focus. We must stay in lockstep with current market, industry, technology and social trends that constantly push our own development of innovation designs.
Investment without strategy is meaningless. Design without a proper business model is vain. Supporting IDSA through the lens of strategic investments and sound financial planning is critical to our growth and relevance as an organization. This can only happen through innovative access to information, meaningful design community engagement, enhanced education, and advocating design’s ability to create a self-evident business result.
We will build the business of design together by growing IDSA’s strategic investments.
Provoking the Designer Within
This talk explores a designer’s approach to breaking away from the traditional use of design and exploring the use of design as a customer engagement strategy. It includes guidelines and examples for engaging your target customer, whether it is an internal corporate audience or an external client, using “design provocation.”
