Designing At Scale Webinar with Doug Powell: Event Recap

Companies are transforming into design-driven organizations. They invest in amazing innovation centers and have top design agencies come in to consult them. But the businesses that are seeing the best results are the ones that truly embrace design across the entire organization -- at all levels and for all departments.

IBM is one of those companies.

They're turning all employees into design thinkers. With a staff of nearly 400,000, that’s no easy task.

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Design education is a key pillar of the IBM Design strategy. They also know they have to scale their design practices, tools and techniques to reach IBM-ers around the world.

This is where MURAL comes in.

IBM is using our visual workspace to guide their design practice and address some of the logistical challenges of scaling design.

Just ask Doug Powell - he knows. He’s the head of the design education program. And his teams have been using MURAL effectively to accelerate a growing culture of design thinking.

We were fortunate to be able to host him in a live webinar. In the webinar, he laid out IBM’s approach and discussed where MURAL fits in. Below is the recording of the webinar. (NOTE that some of the words are cut off in the presentation due to a poor audio connection.)
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One technique Doug highlighted is "timeboxing." It’s simple: limit each team exercise to 2-5 minutes. You’ll find this brings focus to the group, particularly when working remotely.
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Try it!

RESOURCES

Here are some of the resources Doug pointed to in the webinar

• IBM Design Language

• Design careers at IBM

• IBM Designcamp

If you’d like to see what others are doing with MURAL, check out these articles from our blog:

• “Innovation Knows No Bounds: How Dare to Innovate Stays Connected Over International Waters” -- an interview with Hilary Braseth from Dare To Innovate

• “Lean UX Around The World” -- A summary of a live, remote workshop hosted by Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX, with participants on 3 different continents.

• “The Idea Stack: Expressing Your Product Vision” -- A webinar with Josh Wexler on his use of MURAL as a tool to capture and define an upfront vision

• “MIT Student Turned Global Entrepreneur” -- A look at how Netia McCray and her team at MIT are use MURAL even when they’re together, so that they don’t lose steam while they’re apart.

Finally, here are Doug's slides from his presentation:

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EXAMPLE MURALS

Below are two examples of how IBM uses MURAL from Doug's presentation. The first makes use of the Feedback Grid and prioritization framework, both available from within MURAL.

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The second example shows instructions embedded in a mural for others to follow. In this case, the team was working with empathy maps for key personas.

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