Designing Culture
Every design team knows the struggle. You fight for time to do research. You somehow scrape together the resources to hire great team members. You spend time sketching, collaborating, and politicking your way to a good design solution. Yet in the end, the organization or the client keeps making the same old decisions. The user experience is a little better, but isn’t half of what it could be.
Our problem is that we tend to focus on designing artifacts or — at best — good process. But decisions aren’t based on artifacts or process. They’re based on values. The organization’s culture is probably the biggest predictor of whether it can deliver a great experience. The good news is that organizational culture can be designed, too. We just have to understand it as a design medium. Kim will share lessons learned through helping organizations large and small to build their design capabilities and influence their cultures.
About Kim Goodwin
VP of User Experience at PatientsLikeMe
Jared Spool calls her "one of the brightest minds" in UX. Alan Cooper describes her book as "priceless in its wisdom". After 20 years of consulting and in-house work in UX, she's a respected leader in our professional community.
Kim is bestselling author of Designing for the Digital Age. She’s currently serving as VP of User Experience at PatientsLikeMe, where her team designs both a social network and decision-support tools for seriously ill patients, as well as tools for medical researchers to engage with patients and learn from their shared medical data. Kim continues to help other organizations build their internal design capabilities through coaching and organizational change management.
Previously, Kim was VP of Design & General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco. During her 12 years there, she led an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers, as well as the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum.
Kim has led design and research projects in healthcare, aviation, retail, communication, financial services, consumer, enterprise, automotive, IT, and other industries. She speaks and teaches regularly at UX conferences around the world. Kim is based near San Francisco, but she's often found in other time zones — whether she’s herding cats in a conference room, or photographing wildlife in a place with no Internet access whatsover.