...What if
Design team
Lisa Kaiser, Sam Winslet, Adam Lankford, Bill Grady, Dylan Dotolo, Erica Cameron
Typical design work is prioritized based on user feedback, where designers identify key issues brought up by users, offer a solution, and build it within 6 months. This brings up an important question – if we are only designing for what our product will look like 6 months from now, how will we ever design for the future? What if instead of focusing on the pain points of yesterday, we designed for what our users will need 3 years from now? My team and I asked our employees this simple question and to envision where it might take IBM in 3 years time. With 250 employees participating and over 100 ideas sourced, we had the fuel we needed to drive innovation to pull together 120 product designers for a one day design jam to form 21 teams and conceptualize over 60 innovative ideas.
250
IBMers
100
Ideas
21
Teams
12
Themes
“This program is proving results now. We brought together innovators from designers to architects, to developers to our business folks. People could see how one sentence they put in on a Slack channel turned into this snowball of different ideas, and they could see their ideas going live in products.”
IBM Design Manager
These ideas were presented globally across the company and all the way up to VPs. From there, our working group identified 12 emerging themes that could help bring our product to the future, bring our users something they have never seen before. The What if Program introduced a new way of thinking, planning, and predicting the future to anticipate our users needs before they become a pain point.
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This is more than ideas for product innovation, this is a new way of working. The What if project encouraged collaboration between disciplines across the design industry that broke down typical barriers, encouraging design feedback from developers, architects, and design leaders alike. The success from this original workshop has shown that the excercises are repeatable and will yield real business results. This program gives every member or our organization an equal opportunity and weight to be heard and seen, no matter their status or experience. Innovation must start from the root of our designs and within our own work structure itself to produce truly extraordinary ideas.
