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Summary
For the April 29th edition of our Enterprise Experience Community Call (11am ET), we take a “behind the scenes” look at the creation of the our new conference ‘Design at Scale’. This involves roundtable discussion on “scale”, moderated by Kelly Goto, followed by lightning-style peeks into two speakers’ talks: Surya Vanka, founder/chief designer of Authentic Design & formerly UX Director at Microsoft, on his method of “swarms” to foster creativity Wendy Johansson, Global Product Experience Leader, Amazon
Key Insights
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The conference was renamed from Enterprise UX/Experience to Design at Scale to reflect that scaling design challenges exist beyond large companies to any context involving complexity and broad audience reach.
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Scale can mean different things: company size, product/service complexity, or number of users, and solutions must address all these facets.
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Design at Scale focuses on experienced practitioners managing complex projects and scaling efforts rather than beginners in UX or design.
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The conference is structured as one track with three daily themes—Craft at Scale, Tools for Success, and People & Change Management—allowing attendees to access all sessions without competing tracks.
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Surya Banka advocates harnessing the untapped creative capital within organizations through swarm creativity models, empowering more people beyond the core design team.
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Digital whiteboards and collaborative tools are crucial enablers for scalable, distributed design work but require structure to avoid superficial progress.
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There is a tension between moving fast in hyper-competitive environments and going deeper in design quality; scalable creativity methods can help reconcile these forces.
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Wendy Johansson emphasizes that design education must evolve from proving value to embedding design thinking as a broadly accessible mindset across organizations, using cohort-based learning models.
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Design literacy, mastery, and fluency are distinct levels; education and design work must address these differences to avoid diluting the profession or confusing practitioners.
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Expanding design participation beyond formally trained designers is essential for scaling design impact; breaking down gatekeeping enables organizations to grow design capability effectively.
Notable Quotes
"When we started, Enterprise was important to acknowledge because UX was more focused on startups and enterprise was considered unsexy."
"Scale can happen at different levels – company size, product complexity, or audience size – making it a fascinating problem."
"The challenge is how do you go faster and go deeper at the same time? Those are contradictory forces."
"Most Enterprises miss the huge reservoir of creative capital sitting unused in their organizations."
"Design swarms allow organizations to unleash creativity without compromising quality at large scale."
"Digital whiteboards are a huge game changer because stickies don’t fall off the wall and can be acted on collaboratively."
"Putting colorful things on a surface doesn’t add value unless there’s structure, intentionality, and purpose behind it."
"If you’re human, you’re creative. We need to empower colleagues across functions, not just designers."
"Design education has moved from just proving we matter, to showing business value, to teaching design thinking widely."
"Design is a highly specialized discipline, but design thinking is more accessible and can be taught through boot camps and engagements."
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