Mackenzie King, IDSA
Director of Design Research and Insight Translation
Lextant
Mackenzie King, IDSA’s ability to engage customers to drive innovation spans fields from healthcare to education to transportation. She’s helped leading companies listen to and integrate customers’ voices to fuel the innovation process.
She led physicians to design smart devices that integrate into hospital informatics, and worked with students to co-create a New York City arts high school. Working with Millennials, King developed a forecast for mobility solutions.
King is director of design research and insight translation at Lextant. Her clients have included Best Buy, Nissan, P&G and PepsiCo. She holds a BID from Pratt Institute and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
Knowledge Makes Things Happen
To make things happen, designers must have various knowledge bases—of materials, manufacturing processes and even more importantly, of their users. Aside from discovering the obvious issues, how does one gather a more holistic understanding of the product-user relationship to innovate beyond incremental fixes?
These kinds of insights have the ability to drive significant improvements of products, interfaces, and systems. Even on occasion this knowledge built from information provided by users can revolutionize industries.
These innovation techniques will be brought to life through a presentation of co-creation environments, qualitative research methodologies and personal experiences—as Lauren Purkhiser, IDSA, and Mackenzie King, IDSA, of Lextant push designers to question the research they are using and the problems they are solving—while framing the relevancy of true insights that act as a guiding light for designers who are out to disrupt, revitalize and revolutionize industries.
