San Francisco Design Week x IBM
Engaging the IBM designers and the larger San Francisco design community in the return to office era
While the rest of San Francisco was returning to business as usual, the IBM design studio culture had not yet recovered from the impacts of the pandemic.
Engage SF-based IBM designers and put IBM back on the map in the SF design community.
✅ Build a community of 40+ SF-based designers internal to IBM
✅ Organized and facilitated yearly SF Design Weeks events (2023 & 2024) with over 70+ designs from across 40+ different companies/schools all over the world
SFDW 2023
The design challenge
Design the worst way for someone to buy groceries. The user must be able to reach the goal of purchasing groceries, however, it must be in the most frustrating way possible.
This challenge was an exercise in design thinking and combating ‘solutionizing.’ For design practitioners, it is easy to fall into the trap of jumping to ‘solutions’ without really taking the time to empathize with users and understand their real problems and needs. Instead of asking “what is the perfect design solution”, we challenged participants to consider what the worst possible design would be. By letting go of the need for perfection early on in the design process, participants made space for “bad ideas” and failure but also empathy and innovation.
“We sought to counteract our ‘risk-averse design reflexes’ by flipping the design process on its head...In return, we experienced first-hand the innovation, cleverness, and fun that can happen when we lay down our workplace pretenses, welcome the “absurd”, and allow for unbridled creative expression.”
Read about the event on the IBM Design blog
SFDW 2024
Design challenge incorporating IBM’s desing principles for Generative AI