Think people.

Embrace culture.

Compel clients.

Seduce business.

How can designers go from producing marketing collateral to having a real stake in business planning? What kinds of conversation should we have with clients in order to focus on problem solving rather than design per se? 

Join Mat Hunter, head of consumer experience design at IDEO, to find out how design thinking is persuading business to take design more seriously.

“Design can be all but inexplicable to business,” says Mat, “and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But designers need to recognise what it is that business finds compelling about design thinking. Manage that duality and you’ll hook your client.”

IDEO’s pre-eminence is built on the idea of human centricity – clients and designers sharing a passion for consumers rather than statistics. The agency, which numbers the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Iceland (the country) among its clients, is a fixture in lists of the world’s most innovative companies.

Size, Mat says, doesn’t matter. It’s all about framing good questions – what are your values and where does the opportunity lie – in order to design positive outcomes for people and organisations.

Come and find out why designers need to mix with non-designers to achieve the right skills outlook, why business is turned on by a cultural or ‘ethnographic’ approach that targets real people right now, and why designers remain ideally placed to help clients rise to future challenges.

“The key thing is to be able to reframe the problem in order to find the possibility. So creative imaginations have a head start – that’s exactly what they’re good at.”