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Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio

November 22, 2016

S1E6: Douglas Powell

Douglas Powell is a Distinguished Designer at IBM who directs a global effort to bring human-centered design to a company with 360,000 employees in 170 countries.

How does visualizing ideas makes a difference for IBM?

We’ve got teams of dozens, often times hundreds of people. So these really wildly diverse teams. Lots of native languages spoken, lots of cultural backgrounds, lots of professional areas of expertise and points of view. Asking people to draw a picture of their idea neutralizes all of those language and cultural barriers.

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A big thanks to our launch sponsor, IBM.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey. jessicahelfand.com

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