We are in the midst of an unprecedented time in the history of the design profession. Businesses are investing in design at rates never before seen—building sca...
In this episode—the finale of Season 2 of the series—I speak with renowned design leader and author Kevin Bethune.Kevin’s remarkably divergent career spans engineering, business and design over more than 25 years. He’s worked as a nuclear engineer at Westinghouse Nuclear, designed sneakers at Nike, and consulted with global enterprises at BCG. Kevin currently leads Dreams • Design + Life, a think tank that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach.A Board Trustee for ArtCenter College of Design and a Board Director for the Design Management Institute, Kevin is the author of one of my favorite design books, Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, which was published by MIT Press in 2022. Kevin’s next book, Nonlinear: Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction will be published in February of 2025.
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S2•E9 Jenna Date
“We keep thinking that things are supposed to be static, but it’s always changing. It’s about reinvention and seeing the beauty in that.” As we’ve discussed throughout Season 2 of this series, we’re in the midst of a challenging time for the global design industry that is causing many established design leaders to face unexpected change and uncertainty — many for the first time in their career. My guest for this episode, Jenna Date, is a pioneering design practitioner, entrepreneur, educator, consultant and executive design leader. With deep experience leading design and innovation programs in the healthcare industry, Jenna also spent a decade teaching at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. More recently she has relocated to Burlington, Vermont where I met her on a recent visit to that city.Jenna has navigated changing circumstances many times in her long career, and she brings a refreshing candor to our discussion, openly sharing the challenges and joys of professional and personal reinvention. Together we discuss the emotional strain we’re seeing in many of our design leadership peers, the increased need for supportive community connections, and specific tactics for approaching mid-career job searches.
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S2•E8 Richard Hollant
Throughout this season of the series I’ve been speaking with leaders who have used their design superpowers in community and civic leadership roles, and in this episode I continue that thread in my conversation with Richard Hollant.In 1988 Richard founded CO:LAB as a design consultancy with a focus on brand design and product launches. Over time the firm moved from its original home in Boston, to Hartford, Connecticut, and has shifted its focus from brand design to social impact work, engaging with community and cultural organizations in Hartford and across Connecticut. CO:LAB has won awards from PRINT, HOW, and Cause/Effect among others, and Richard has been featured in Business Weekly, Communication Arts, and Fast Company. A longtime leader in AIGA, the professional association for design in the US, Richard was appointed Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Hartford in 2017, and during the Covid pandemic he was tapped by the Mayor of Hartford to lead the strategic reopening of the arts, culture, and recreation throughout that city. In 2019, Richard founded Free Center—a collection of rehabilitated community spaces providing free access to arts, culture, trauma healing, and advocacy programming in forgotten neighborhoods across Connecticut.
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S2•E7 Daniela Marzavan
I caught up with my guest for this episode, Daniela Marzavan, in the middle of an 8 week design road trip she is taking through Europe with her partner and 2 children—she’s calling it the Traveling School of Design Thinking.Based in Portugal, Daniela, is a self-described “pracademic”, fluidly straddling the line between design practice and design education. Daniela is fluent in 7 languages, and puts many of those languages to use in a practice that takes her across Europe and around the world working with universities, startups, scaled enterprises, NGOs, and governments, infusing these organizations with design thinking, innovation, and human-centered ways of working. Daniela is the co-author of the new book Creativity for a Sustainable Future, which seeks to harness the power of creativity as a driving force for positive change in complex environmental, social, and economic problems.We covered a lot of territory in this discussion, and I really enjoyed getting Daniela’s refreshing perspective on the trends she is seeing in the global regions she’s working in—trends that don’t always match what we see in parts of the design industry dominated by North American tech companies.
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S2•E6 Vivek Rao
“I think that this idea of cross-functionality may be a legacy framework.”Throughout this season of the series I’ve been looking at the impact of AI and other emerging technology on the future of design and design leadership, and I’ve been particularly interested in examining this through the lens of some of the top academic design programs in the US. I find that looking at how students are learning design in the classroom can be a great predictor for how they will show up in the workplace in the years ahead, which of course will have a major impact on how our design teams and scaled design programs will operate. My guest for this episode is Vivek Rao, director of the new Masters of Engineering in Design & Technology Innovation program at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. A mechanical engineer by training, Vivek spent his early career at the design and innovation consultancy IDEO. He then did his PhD studies in design, innovation, and emerging technology at the University of California Berkeley, before joining Duke in 2023.We discuss the core idea of cross-functionality—blending design with engineering, business, data, marketing and other disciplines—a quality that Vivek himself embodies, and is instilling in his students.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented time in the history of the design profession. Businesses are investing in design at rates never before seen—building scaled design teams of hundreds and even thousands of designers, and hiring design leaders into executive roles giving them influence and access at the highest levels. As an executive design leader myself, I’m fascinated by the experience of designers moving into these new leadership roles. For most of us this is completely uncharted territory, the jobs are often undefined and there is rarely a roadmap or playbook to help us succeed, so most of us have had to learn on the job.In each episode of This is a Prototype, I invite two design leaders who have traveled very different life and career journeys to share their stories, compare notes, and talk about what it takes to be a leader in this new era of design.
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