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Design at Scale: Behind the Scenes
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 name change to Design at Scale reflects the prevalence of enterprise-level design challenges beyond large companies to any organization facing complexity and scale.
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Enterprise design challenges include not just company size but also complexity of products, services, and audience scale, which can affect any organization.
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The conference is targeted primarily at experienced individual contributors and managers handling large or growing design teams in complex environments.
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Design at Scale uses a single track with three thematic days—craft, tools, and people—allowing attendees to engage with all sessions without conflict.
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Surya Ivanka emphasized harnessing the 'creative capital' in organizations through swarm behaviors and design thinking to simultaneously accelerate speed and deepen quality.
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Digital whiteboards and shared visual collaboration tools are important enablers of distributed, synchronous, and asynchronous swarm creativity.
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Wendy Johansson highlighted the challenge that designers often lose empathy and audience focus outside of design tools, causing friction with cross-functional partners like engineers.
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A major enterprise design education approach involves combining top-down leadership with bottoms-up community learning such as cohort-based training to build scalability and maturity.
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There is a tension between urgent shipping demands and the need for team development, education, and quality that must be managed carefully in growth-stage design organizations.
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The expanding definition of 'designer' and design thinking introduces inclusion and gatekeeping challenges; broadening access without diluting mastery is a key concern.
Notable Quotes
"When we started the word Enterprise was important because UX was mostly in startups and enterprise was considered unsexy."
"Almost every kind of UX is happening in settings that have big challenges of scale and complexity that you see in enterprises."
"You can be a small company providing solutions for thousands of users or large companies—it’s about scale in different dimensions."
"The conference is for mature, experienced designers and managers who connect the dots across complexity and scale."
"There is a tension between moving faster and going deeper, and the way through is tapping into the huge reservoir of creative capital in organizations."
"Design swarms let you unleash creativity without compromising quality at large scale by adopting new organizational mindsets and behaviors."
"Shared digital whiteboards are a game changer because stickies don’t fall off the wall and they enable collaborative design thinking remotely."
"Designers lose all their grace in thinking about their audience when they step out of design tools and try to communicate with engineers."
"The challenge with design education is building a cohort that grows from literacy to mastery while empowering cross-functional creativity."
"Design thinking is accessible and teachable quickly, but mastering design as a craft is a multi-year journey."
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