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In our current climate, design is no longer seen an afterthought. The popularity of ideation sessions and design sprints, programs like Stanford’s D.School and frameworks like IBM’s Enterprise Design have meant that prioritising ‘design’ is seen as required in order to get a competitive edge.
As Google’s Kate Aronowitz puts it: designers finally have a seat at the table.
It’s a change that’s been incredibly successful. One example: at the end of last year, Airbnb’s share price surged on the day of their IPO, leaving them with a valuation of more than $100bn. Airbnb is a company that is proudly design-led (as opposed to other unicorns that focus foremost on product engineering). They regularly publish detailed articles and videos about their design process.
And other companies are adopting these processes. Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Ikea are all big companies that are increasingly turning to design thinking processes and paradigms to solve problems in…
