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, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.