Through the Eyes of an Architect

An Interview with Phil Freelon

Three years after opening, tickets to the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture are still almost impossible to reserve.

Photo courtesy of NC State University

Interviewed by Amanda Hawkins, Edited by Eva Hill and Susan Janowsky

Phil Freelon was the lead designer of the newest Smithsonian Institute, and was also the Design Director of the North Carolina practice of Perkins and Will. He was an advocate for inclusion on both sides of design, the designers and the end-users, and always strived to provide beautiful public spaces that anyone can access. Phil at his core, was an architect.

Phil was diagnosed with ALS in 2016, and passed away in July of 2019 at the age of 66. In November 2018, Amanda Hawkins, Exhibitions Manager for CoDesign Foundation, spoke with Phil about his achievements and career path, as well as what he’d learned about diversity and inclusion over the years he’d spent working in architecture.

Photo by Noah Willman

Phil’s portfolio includes the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Historic Emancipation Park in Houston, multiple library projects for the D.C. Public Library System, and the Durham County Human Services Complex. He was considered the leading designer of African American museums and designed both the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia and the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. In 2011, he was appointed by former U.S. President Barack Obama to the National Commission of Fine Arts. Alongside his significant achievements in architecture, Phil was also an educator who taught professional practice courses at various universities, an avid photographer, and the co-founder of the Phil Freelon Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which offers financial assistance for students of color.

Amanda Hawkins: Could you tell me a little about growing up in Philadelphia?

Phil Freelon: My family was very much into education and the arts, so I had great exposure to museums and music, theater, and literature. My mother was an English major and taught elementary school. My father was a sales executive for a national company. My grandfather, Allan Freelon Sr., was a painter in the Harlem Renaissance. From a young age I would enjoy drawing and sketching and sculpting and painting, and I was encouraged by my parents because they saw interest and some talent there. Architecture seemed to be a really nice combination of the things I was interested in: the drawing, the three dimensionality of it, the creativity, but also the technical side.

There are only 100 accredited schools of architecture in North America. I was accepted to Penn State University and Hampton University, the two places I’d applied to. I knew something about Hampton because people from my church had attended. And it was a historically black accredited architecture school. In the late 60s and early 70s, I was interested in getting back into the Black experience because the high school I went to was mostly white. It was fine, I did well there, but I wanted to be around the Black experience, and [Hampton] was a good school with an architecture program. I accepted the offer to go there and had a great couple years there. One of my mentors, John Spencer, head of the department of architecture, he advised me to move on, which was a generous thing to do, to help his best student move on and up academically. He advised me to check out NC State and UVA, and so that’s what I did.

I was invited to come down to Raleigh to meet with the dean at NC State by virtue of Mr. Spencer’s connections. I was a little apprehensive about going further south as a Philadelphia boy; it seemed like the Deep South to me, but I found the people were friendly. It was a different era back then. It seems to me that the majority of institutions were seeking out African Americans; they were proud to bring people in. Nowadays there’s a stigma attached to affirmative action when that happens. Back then, it was exciting that there was a black guy coming to NC State when there weren’t many there.

I did very well there, I received the top design award in architecture when I graduated. And I went on to MIT for my master’s degree. My time in Raleigh made an impression on me; I liked the area and it seemed like I was poised for growth and one of my professors introduced me to a firm in Durham where he was a design consultant. So in the summers of ‘74 and ‘75, I worked in Durham and established some relationships that later in my career, after grad school, I followed up on.

Curious about other leaders in creative careers? Want to learn more about race, gender, sexual orientation, and more intersecting with design? Visit We Design: People. Practice. Progress.

AH: While you were at NC State, were you trying to make an impact with your design? What were your goals?

PF: Not yet, I think. I was just trying to absorb all that I could. At that stage you don’t know enough to be able to pick a career path that’s specific within architecture. I didn’t start my firm until 14 years after MIT. It’s quite a career path, just getting certified and licensed and gaining enough experience to the point where the client will say, I trust you with this multimillion dollar building I want designed. People want to know that you’ve done it before and that you have some kind of track record.

When I started the Freelon Group, I wrote a business plan and I had a vision and a mission and that had to do with doing certain types of buildings and not doing other types of buildings. It’s helpful to have some guiding principles so I could explain to people who might want to work with me, this is what we’ll do together, and this is what we won’t do. For me, that was working on schools, higher education projects, cultural centers, community centers, museums and libraries, and having a clear vision of not doing things like prisons, shopping centers, or casinos. If it doesn’t have a positive impact on the community, I wasn’t interested in building it. I learned early on if you say yes to the wrong things, when the right things come along you may not be at the capacity or able to do it. We’ve been able to stick to principles established early on that have served us well.

AH: What else motivated you to work on cultural and civic projects?

PF: I was drawn to the projects that I could feel proud of after I was done. A lot of those happened to be in the public sector, they weren’t corporate headquarters and things like that. I’d be happy to do those, but not as my main focus. The other reason that the public sector has been good for us is the clients. They’re often a school board or city council or governor or mayor and the people that work in those environments tend to be rather diverse so we were able to distinguish our firm just by virtue of how we looked. One might say, well, being a black architect when 2% of all licensed architects in the country are African American, that’s tough. Well, I say that’s the distinction that we bring in a homogeneous profession. I’m just an optimist – I’m a glass half full kind of guy. I always thought that we could compete with mainstream firms because I was able to compete at NC State and MIT and I knew I was as good as any of the folks in these places.

AH: Having diversity of your staff worked to your benefit in this sector. Were there any challenges that having a diverse team presented?

PF: Yes, I mean, architecture being dominated by males, there’s the good-old-boys system, to use a cliché, and I’m not part of that, so that’s been a challenge, but complaining about it is not productive, and so you just do the best you can and compete hard, and I’ve always felt that people will not let prejudice get in the way of business decisions or they won’t be in business very long. So while it’s true that there’s discrimination and inequity across the board in this country, if I thought that was going to stop me at every instance I wouldn’t have gone into this profession. I believe that clients – governments, school systems, whoever the client may be – will recognize excellence and talent in a business environment, even if personally they may have some misgivings or hold certain stereotypes. Folks won’t let that get in the way of good business, because people that think the other way don’t get very far, and that belief has kept me motivated. I take pleasure in bursting the stereotypical bubble.

AH: Can you tell me more about the merger with Perkins and Will?

PF: One of the issues we’d been running into in recent years was that we were kind of in a no-man’s- land of size, where we were 60 people, which around here is considered a large firm, but on an international basis it’s considered a small firm, so we were kind of in-between, sizewise. We were doing work all over the country, so we weren’t really able to compete locally with the smaller firms. Clients felt like we were more focused on a national market. But then competing nationally, against firms like Perkins and Will, which is 2500 people, we found it hard to compete in that middle ground.

The other aspect of our practice that was challenging was that in cities that we were working in, we partnered with a local firm, which is not unusual. That was risky because you really don’t know what it’s like to work in partnership with another firm until you’re in it, and in each case, we’d try to figure that out ahead of time, but sometimes it was hit or miss. Perkins and Will had an office in every major city in the U.S. except for Philadelphia, so it was like having a built-in partner that you already knew shared the same values and principles. It’s unusual for a big firm, but Perkins and Will is one of the few large firms that values design and puts it first and foremost. So that was attractive to us, to say, if we’re doing work in Austin or we’re doing work in Seattle or something, we don’t have to set out who would be the perfect partner, we have built-in partners all over the country and internationally – they have offices in Sao Paulo, London, Shanghai, Dubai – and so that was attractive.

The third thing was that Perkins and Will actually had expertise in an area that we were dabbling in, that we weren’t able to show a strong portfolio for, and that’s healthcare. We had expertise that Perkins and Will was thin 16 on (that would be the museums, libraries, and cultural-focused projects). I became the design director and managing director of the firm’s Charlotte studio and its Morrisville office, which moved into my studio in Durham under my leadership. So it was a good situation for them and for me, and for my leadership crew, who are now shareholders. All the principals in my firm were made principals at Perkins and Will. It was one of my stipulations, and now they have opportunities, national and international, that I couldn’t give them at the Freelon Group. It was a great relationship and merger.

AH: What has been the most fulfilling thing for you since then, and how has your role changed?

PF: I assumed some firm wide responsibilities coming in through Perkins and Will. I’m on the board of directors for the entire firm, so that was a new and exciting and challenging role for me. The board meets quarterly in a different Perkins and Will studio, so I’ve been getting around the country and meeting new colleagues and peers, and participating in firm-wide decisions, both domestically and internationally.

I also serve on the research board. Perkins and Will has a research staff of about 20 individuals who are doing a number of different initiatives that feed into the design work that we do, so that’s been a new and exciting role for me. I’m also on the design board, which is separate from the overall board. There are a number of responsibilities, including internal design reviews of all the offices. We conduct a survey of every office’s design work throughout the year, and we get together in January and it’s almost like a design report card, office by office. We give feedback, and if we see that there are struggles or issues or challenges, we can offer guidance from a corporate level. We also sponsor an internal design competition where younger people from around the firm worldwide get to participate in a hypothetical design problem, and then it’s juried by outside professionals.

There’s a number of things associated with the design board that are focused on making sure that Perkins and Will remains at the forefront of design excellence. There’s also a peer-review process that we have, where a handful of us from the design board might visit a studio for a couple days during critical stages of design to help give guidance and feedback from the most experienced and accomplished designers in the firm, and I’m part of that. I’ve been to design review sessions to offer that kind of high-level guidance for important design projects that are just starting.

AH: What has it been like to bring education and mentorship into your work inside and outside the office?

PF: The architecture profession is not very diverse: about 2% of licensed architects in this country are African American, and that hasn’t changed in the past 30 or 40 years since I was in school, so it’s been a challenge and a concern of mine, and of the entire profession. This issue is not going to be solved or addressed by just waiting for something to happen, so it takes initiative and taking steps to increase awareness. My feeling is that if more young people were exposed to architecture and knew about it, then they’d be more inclined to pursue it as a career, so with that in mind I try very hard to make what I do visible beyond just the architectural community.

I’ve also, with Perkins and Will, sponsored the Phil Freelon Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which is targeted toward students of color who may need financial assistance. Because it’s not just about awareness, even once you get into school: staying there and excelling and being able to afford highlevel education is important as well. I’ve been teaching off and on in the university setting, first at NC State, then at MIT. For the past decade I’ve been teaching a professional practice course, and in doing so, mentoring students that we see coming though at the graduate level.

Photo by Katina Parker

AH: These days, how do you spend your time outside of work?

PF: I enjoy photography. To me, it’s an extension of the design work that I do. In photography you start with everything, you look around and there are millions of choices about what you see and how you want to record it photographically, so it’s working backwards from everything and choosing something very narrow, a slice of time, a moment, and a view, a perspective that only you bring – what does your mind’s eye see? – and capturing that.

For me, it’s kind of architecture in reverse, making choices about how you interpret the environment and what you want to share about that in a photographic image. The other thing about photography, for me, is that it’s something I can do by myself. It’s a solitary activity, it’s quiet, it’s a way to retreat into something else that’s related design-wise, because there’s composition and beauty and life and shadow, and the subjects I choose are primarily architecture and landscapes.

AH: What do you love the most about your career in architecture?

PF: I would just say that working in the public realm has been very satisfying to me. Doing so, I feel like we’ve been able to provide beautiful public spaces that anybody can access, so there’s not this exclusive thing where architects get these huge budgets to do these fancy museums or residences or corporate headquarters, and who gets to go there? Only the privileged.

One of the drivers in my career has been providing beauty and inspiring architecture for anybody. The bus station we did in Durham is a beautiful place, and the average person wouldn’t think that it’d be worth that kind of effort, but every day people go there and can enjoy an architectural experience. It may be not at the top of their mind, but they know it’s a pleasant place to be. So that has been a driver for me: what can I do, what can our firm do, to bring design excellence to everybody, not just a privileged few who can afford to hire architects and build monuments to their ego? I’d rather do something that everyone can enjoy.

Read more about Phil’s legacy here.

What’s the best technology in today’s workplace? Design.

There’s a common thread circulating in the mainstream media today warning of the perils of open office – the lack of privacy, the increase in distraction, the tightness of space.

Virtual reality rooms give Microsoft employees and the public the chance to navigate other universes while keeping both feet on the ground.

By Meredith McCarthy, Sasaki; Photos by John Horner

The New York Times even wrote a satirical piece describing where a person should go to cry in an open office environment (spoiler alert: their recommendation is the restroom). Comedy aside, this growing criticism is tainting the idea of a real estate strategy that is both efficient for space, and vital for innovation.

You’ll find no argument from us that a completely open office is indeed bad for business. A sea of workstations will never inspire big thinking. However, there is something to be said about removing some walls. Breaking down barriers, sitting amongst your colleagues, hearing the evolution of a conversation turning into an idea, and then joining that discussion to help move that idea forward, are all benefits of an open office environment. What’s missing from all those “open-office-is-hell” concepts is the closed office; the spaces where those conversations can go to be loud and boisterous and passionate, without being disruptive. Instead, what’s being included in those concepts is the promise of “technology” at every turn, lauded as the silver bullet to innovation and collaboration.

Often times, when we say technology, we’re referring to some kind of electronics – audio-visual capabilities, fast Wi-Fi, VPN for remote workers, and touch-screen monitors, laptops, and handheld devices. All of these things are presented as vital lifelines to our productivity and our creativity, but they are not the answer to our questions. They are simply a vehicle for the human brain to push and test ideas faster, to separate the successes from the failures in less time, and to help us move forward with only our best thoughts. And if we’re unable to generate that initial concept to spring us from the starting line, no amount of electronic technology is ever going to help us reach the finish. So, then, what is the best technology in the workplace? Design.

Microsoft’s team rooms house 15-20 employees and are filled with whiteboards and moveable furniture to ensure teams have  everything they need to succeed in an open  office setting

Design As Technology

Nowhere in the definition of technology is there any mention of a computer, or a screen, or a device. It is simply stating that applying knowledge to a situation, practically, is what we use to advance our ideas in our specific industries. As designers, we know there are numerous forms of technology being used throughout businesses, with varying levels of success. We’ve seen the desks that move up and down based on our sitting or standing preferences. We use the cameras in all our devices to encourage more face to face interaction, even if we’re thousands of miles apart. And we do our work along the invisible networks that allow us to connect to a home base no matter where we are in the world.

However, we also know the quickest way to get an idea out of your head is to say it aloud or write it down, and that the most interactions in an office happen in the kitchen. We are well aware that collaboration is a great tool for starting ideas, but focused work is really where those ideas grow wings and soar. So, when we talk about technology, we should look no further than the practical application of a designer’s expertise of how space impacts interactions in order to truly understand what it means to be innovative.

Immediately adjacent to the team rooms are open and enclosed collaboration rooms, allowing innovation to continue.

Let’s take the Microsoft New England Research & Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge as an example. Microsoft is known as a technology company. They are at the cutting edge of their field, making major strides in computer science that impact all of our lives on a daily basis. But they’re trying to move beyond that image of flashy technology and into a world filled with creativity and exploration. That’s hard to do when you’re in a workplace with only private offices. The company needed that ignition, a little spark that starts the flame that turns into a burning inferno of innovation, and they found it in a new workplace without a single private office. There were, of course, concerns with going from an enclosed office to an open workstation. But the gains of eliminating those four walls far outweighed the losses.

The new NERD Center design brings all the individual workspaces to the perimeter of the floor plate and encloses them in team work rooms that hold a maximum of 15 to 20 people; they’re large enough to house project teams, but small enough to contain noise and eliminate distraction. These work rooms are divided by moveable walls to allow small groups occupying one room to expand into an adjacent room if their project team needs to grow. The fancy technology in all of these work rooms? Simple desks on casters that allow teams to reconfigure their spaces however they see fit, and whiteboards on those moveable walls to encourage brainstorming and problem solving in real time. By creating rooms large enough to support a project team, those employees can be assured that the conversations they overhear on a daily basis are absolutely relevant to their every day work. More importantly, they’re also guaranteed not to be distracted by other teams and their discussions or work styles. In this model, the open office has become the open team room, where noise is controlled yet productive.

There are times when noise becomes a detractor from the focused environment of any room. Two people having a discussion at a desk is manageable, but more than that can become a commotion that often rises in volume proportional to the rise in passion and excitement around the idea being discussed. However, that excitement is exactly what a team should want to sustain as they add minds to the evolution of an idea that will soon become a solution. Enter, the collaboration ribbon.

Designing in Blue

How IBM Adopted Design at Scale

I’m sitting in a conference room in IBM’s office in Cambridge, MA, on a video call with my team. We’re doing a playback, that’s what we call a collaborative user experience review, with IBM’s Head of Strategy, our Chief Digital Officer, and two senior managers with hugely important missions for our company.

By Charlie Hill, IBM Fellow; Photos and renderings from IBM

I’m stepping through some low-fidelity wireframes, our first take on a new platform we’re developing. It’s early days and we’ve barely started the design work. I ask them to focus their feedback on the basic user flows, and not to pay too much attention to the UI details yet. The playback goes well, but that’s not to say they love everything we showed them. Our head of strategy has questions about a class of users we haven’t included in this work, and our Chief Digital Officer tells us we left out a critical idea about community engagement. So, we have lots more work to do – and that’s the point. When we hold playbacks like this, whether within our team, with stakeholders, or with our target users, it helps everyone focus on the quality of the user experience that we will bring to market. It helps us as a team learn faster and execute better.

Design Gap

IBM is one of the largest technology services companies in the world, and one of the largest software vendors. Even if you never see an IBM logo, you can be sure that many of the services you use every day run on IBM platforms and technologies. Back in the 1960s, IBM developed a pioneering corporate design program based on the principle that, as IBM CEO Thomas Watson Jr. said in 1973, “good design is good business.”

However, decades later, a substantial “design gap” had emerged at IBM. A few years ago, playbacks such as the one I described would not have happened. Back then, in many teams, user experience took a back seat to almost everything else. Aside from a few pockets of design, many teams lacked even a single dedicated designer. Rather than consider user outcomes, many business leaders tracked their teams’ progress using project management charts and feature lists. This design gap posed a serious problem as teams increasingly looked to cloud and mobile technologies to better solve our clients’ problems. By establishing a more direct and even intimate connection with users, these technologies make it possible to create more engaging and “frictionless” user experiences. As a result, design takes on an increasing role in delivering successful outcomes.

Today, as a result of a program we call IBM Design, things are very different. Playbacks are a routine part of how teams work and how managers interact with their teams. Most teams are appropriately staffed with highly skilled, formally trained designers who work alongside product leaders and engineers. As teams measure their progress, they pay close and continuous attention to user experience. We’re well on our way to closing the design gap that we saw when we started.

Big Blue, Big Change

How does one even begin to change a company with many different business units, hundreds of thousands of employees, and operations in more than 170 countries? I’m part of a team that first came together in the second half of 2012 and took on the mission to establish a sustainable culture of design at IBM. Some of the key ideas behind IBM’s design program were there from the beginning, but changing the culture and behaviors of such a large organization required more than a blueprint. When we launched our program in January 2013, we didn’t know what was possible or what tactics would work. In fact, although we believed strongly that design was essential to IBM’s future, we were unsure whether changing a company with the size, complexity, and global footprint of IBM was even possible.

The journey started for me in early 2012 when I met Phil Gilbert, two years after his company, Lombardi Software had been acquired by IBM. I am a designer by trade, and I previously designed a number of collaboration tools. Since joining IBM, Phil had great success simplifying another part of our software business, and the idea had emerged that he might be able to bring his approach to the larger organization. I met Phil when we were both asked to talk with the executives running IBM’s software business about how to improve the design of our products. At that meeting, I immediately recognized that Phil was a rare executive who not only understood design deeply, but, even more importantly, was also an exceptional leader. I told him as much as we left the meeting, and I added that if he could win backing for a new design initiative, he could count on me to help him make it happen. I told him that even if we didn’t agree on every detail, his leadership would make all the difference, and I would give him my full support.

At that same meeting, Phil had already identified a very basic problem, the lack of designers on many teams. He proposed that, as a rule of thumb, every product team should have, on average, one designer for every eight developers writing code. Having previously been the sole designer on a high-performing team of about eight developers, this made sense to me. In fact, it felt like a minimum benchmark. This target skills ratio proved to be a powerful organizing idea. It made the scale of the problem immediately clear: it was obvious that it would take several years to fill the gap. At the same time, it allowed an incremental approach where we could focus initially on getting a few teams enabled with the right skills. If that worked, we could scale up to more teams over time. The ability to articulate a view of the overall target state, combined with a focus on delivering meaningful outcomes right from the start, framed our initial approach.

Within a few months, I found myself reporting to Phil, leading part of a small team funded to hire more than a hundred designers in the first year. But, we knew that hiring designers would only get us so far. We wanted to integrate them with existing teams, rather than create some sort of “innovation lab” off on the side that might do fabulous things but would leave the existing culture largely untouched, if not downright alienated. As we thought about bringing the most creative and effective designers we could find onto these existing teams, we knew there was another big challenge ahead of us. Unless those teams embraced design, the designers would be left on the sidelines, and would probably quit. Our program would fizzle before it got off the ground. We needed not only to bring in designers, but also transform the values, mental models, and practices of our development teams so that they would fully embrace design and take on faster, more creative ways of framing and solving problems.

Design Thinking at Scale

To do this, we decided to bring design thinking into IBM – a set of practices that had emerged over a couple of decades and were already popular in design agencies and academia. However, those practices were very focused on small teams, and largely untested in large software development organizations. Based on Phil’s previous experiences leading large teams, we created a new framework that we now call Enterprise Design Thinking. Our framework promotes design thinking, but introduces three “Key Practices” that help teams apply design thinking in a more scalable way: Playbacks; Sponsor Users (users we recruit to participate in the design process); and Hills (a way of defining project milestones in terms of user outcomes).

IBM Design

Things are very different now from when we started. I have the privilege to work with exceptional designers every day, ranging from talented and ambitious early-career professionals to seasoned senior designers and executives. They are at work all over our large company, and they represent many disciplines such as design research and service design, visual design and typography, user experience design, content design, accessibility, and front- end development. We work together to define the leadership qualities and skills we most value, and make joint decisions about senior appointments. When we combine our diverse disciplines and experiences, it makes us all smarter and enriches our culture.

At the project level, we’ve moved on from the Hallmark Program. Every business unit now has a design management structure, typically headed by a VP or director of design who is allied with a senior business unit executive. Our designers sit within the business units under these leaders. As a result, design is now largely embedded and empowered within the business units, our corporate brand and marketing organization, and our client services teams.

The studios that we built around the world provide great collaborative spaces for our designers and multidisciplinary teams, but, more importantly, they also enable our teams to engage customers and stakeholders in active work sessions, helping to develop ideas and make shared decisions faster than ever.

The language of playbacks, hills and sponsor users has spread across the company, too. Our immersive bootcamps successfully brought Enterprise Design Thinking to hundreds of teams. Many of the people who came through our bootcamps have moved on to new projects, spreading their practices as they go, far beyond our program’s direct reach. The bootcamps have now largely been replaced by a digital platform that has the capacity to bring Enterprise Design Thinking to an even larger audience. It has already reached hundreds of thousands of IBMers as well as thousands of college students and IBM clients.

As another sign of the evolution of our program, we recently released one of the most comprehensive design systems in the world. The IBM Design Language articulates a philosophy and a set of elements that designers can use in any number of disciplines such as brand, software product design, and digital content. The goal is to make it easy for designers working within and across these disciplines to achieve “unity, not uniformity”, in the words of Eliot Noyes who did extraordinary design work for IBM in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Progress & Impact

We have been very fortunate that our CEO Ginni Rometty gave her full support to our team, seeing our work as contributing to her ongoing transformation of the company. It was also a good move to focus on a well-defined capability gap – design skills – giving us both a long-term objective and a model for incremental progress.

Even as we engaged initially on a small scale, Phil always challenged us to think in terms of how we would scale up. Initially I found that hard. I was often tempted to tailor solutions to the specific situations we encountered. To be able to scale, you have to do the opposite. You have standardize how you execute so that what you do is repeatable and can be delivered on a large scale by a few dedicated people. This is a key element of a program focused on the whole company, rather than, say, a shared service for design or an innovation lab.

Agility was another essential ingredient. For the first few years we saw ourselves as a startup inside IBM, and we strove for the same agility that a startup thrives on. Beyond the real-time hands-on engagement and trouble-shooting that implies, we were willing to reorganize ourselves at least once a year, sometimes quite radically.

When we started, we said we’d know we were done if we could walk away and it would run itself. We used to call ourselves IBM Design, but we decided recently that name should be the moniker for all aspects of design across the whole company. We now call our team the Design Program Office, and it’s smaller than it was at the peak of our efforts to change the company. Wherever possible, the program office takes a back seat to the business units. Of course, nothing is perfect and it still feels too early to declare victory. We’re on a journey of continuous learning and improvement, and we will continue to make adjustments and look for further innovations in the future. What’s exciting is that we no longer have to do that ourselves. The seeds of further innovation are now firmly planted in our business, at the team level, and increasingly in our leadership culture.

This distributed design capability is reflected in the business outcomes we are seeing. Teams across the company are now able to bring new and improved products to market much faster than they could previously, a critical success factor in a rapidly changing market. IBM is also now widely recognized as a leader in design and design thinking at scale, and IBM Services teams are using this expertise to help clients address challenges and opportunities in their own businesses. Perhaps most importantly, our leadership culture has shifted enough that design is now considered an essential ingredient of any new initiative, and senior leaders now pay as close attention to measures of user success as they do to financial and market metrics.

My own job has changed numerous times over the past few years, from helping to develop our design thinking framework, to coaching teams, to helping define our technical career path for designers, to bringing new tools to our teams. Along the way I kept my hand in a couple of strategic design projects. Today, I still report to Phil but I’m on loan to the business nearly full-time these days. This is, to be honest, a relief. When I first went to work with Phil, my previous manager sent me an email reading “Congratulations – you’re now overhead!” I’m a product designer at heart, and I’m back working to translate our strategy into compelling products and experiences. But as I work with my new team on these projects, I know that a new platform is up and running and at our disposal. It’s a platform of design, designers, and of design thinking culture; a platform that helps us all focus on solving our users’ problems better than ever before.