Reimagining the future of IBM Cloud
Design leads
Lisa Kaiser, Sam Winslet, Dylan Dotolo, Stephanie Cree, Gaby Moreno Cesar, Liz Mitchell
Reimagining the Future of IBM Cloud
Spurred by the "What if" project, I planned, organized and led a 4 week workshop where 20 volunteer designers dedicated time away from their regular responsibilities to re-design the Cloud platform from the ground up to be the most modern and innovative platform users have seen. Unconstrained by design systems, technical limitations and development feasibilities, designers reimagined what could be if our platform was designed for the ideal future of our users. While this workshop explored visual and stylistic changes, designers went even deeper into our user journey and reimagined the way our user might navigate through the platform, the way they might deploy a complete solution with minimal clicks (versus piece together service by service), the way they can collaborate with their own team, with IBM support, and with the user interface itself. We found designers flourished when free to design without traditional constraints.
26
Designers
5
Teams
4
Weeks
Participating designers remarked, “I’m so happy and proud — it’s probably the most memorable thing I achieved”. Even more, the designs produced from this event are now integrated in the new IBM Cloud UI and live in product. Encouraged and supported by leadership across the organization, these designs are now redefining the IBM design system.
“We need continued exploration and prototyping like this, where the team explored not only new patterns for solving identified problems but also how to express color, motion, and Carbon [IBM Design System] DNA further. I’m a big fan of product teams spinning up these focused, short term efforts, that yield actionable results.”
Mike Abbink, IBM Executive Creative Director
First iterations of new style guides derived from workshop
