The corporate love affair with design is over. Design thinking doesn't work. Design strategy has failed to get innovation to market. So the conversation goes. Large-scale layoffs have hit design practitioners across industries, particularly in tech, affecting some seasoned and brilliant design executives, including some of the folks we talked to for ID’s 2024 report, Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI: Design Leads Organizations Through Five Urgent Challenges. Have efficiency and conventional business processes won? Has design failed, even at our most forward-thinking organizations? Four design leaders discuss design in the age of AI, the challenges organizations face today, the fallout, and what design must do next.
Participants
Katrina Alcorn, Managing Director, North America, Design & Digital Products, Accenture Song
Kevin Bethune, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Dreams - Design + Life
Robert Fabricant, Co-Founder and Partner, Dalberg Design
Mark Jones, Associate Professor of User Research and Service Design, Institute of Design
About ID's 2024 Report,Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI: Design Leads Organizations Through Five Urgent Challenges
This report draws on research conducted in 2023 by the Institute of Design. We sought to understand the state of design today in large, design-mature organizations. We interviewed 29 design leaders about the state of design in their organizations and the challenges that designers are best suited to address. Design leaders at such organizations as Meta, JP Morgan Chase, Ford, and IDEO responded.
We asked what’s going well, what difficulties they face, and where they see the most opportunity for design in the future. Similar to our “Lead with Purpose” research from 2020, we heard that while design has matured at the implementation level, even design-mature organizations struggle to leverage design at its highest potential when shaping strategy.
Since we conducted our interviews, the mood about the state of design has deteriorated. There has been a lot of talk of late that the corporate love affair with design is over—people arguing that design thinking doesn't work and that design strategy has failed to get innovation to market. Large-scale layoffs have hit design practitioners across industries, particularly in tech, affecting some seasoned and brilliant design executives—including some of the folks we talked to for this research.
About the Institute of Design (ID)
At the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, we look at the world in new ways to create the change we hope to see in it. Since our founding by Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy in 1937, we’ve continually turned design into a powerful tool anyone can use to transform the systems that shape our lives—from cities, education, and finance to food, healthcare, and technology.
We’re the only US design school devoted completely to graduate students, and the first to offer a PhD. By uniting science and rigor with creativity and rapid iteration, we’re recognized around the globe as pioneers in human-centered design, systems design, and other methods that apply design to the real world.
It’s through these unique approaches that students, communities, and corporations learn to observe the systems they’re surrounded by—and envision the new worlds they can build from them. Here, learners and leaders discover what design makes possible. How it enables us to adapt with the speed, scale, and complexity of life. To anticipate change and the impact of our actions. And, most importantly, to imagine—then create—brighter futures for us all. Learn more about ID at id.iit.edu.
