S2E12: Dana Arnett + Patrick Palmer

Dana Arnett is a vice chairman and a founding partner of VSA Partners, a branding and marketing company based in Chicago. Patrick Palmer leads the strategy practice at VSA.

When Arnett founded VSA in 1982, his clients provided information about what they thought their customers wanted. For the past five years, VSA has been working to integrate data science into their design-driven work. To facilitate this shift and to avoid what he calls “organ rejection,” Arnett explains VSA has their data scientists and designers sitting together:

You can’t say, This is a department in the basement and we’re going to bring up decks of information. The data science people we brought in needed to learn how the creative and design process worked. There is this forcing function of inclusion…

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