IADT Staff + Students win prestigious Industry Awards for IBM Design Collaboration.
'Project K' a collaborative design and research project between IBM Design (Austin), IBM Studios (Dublin) and staff and students from the Departments of Psychology & Technology and Art & Design received national industry recognition over the recent weeks when the project was cited as integral to IBMs success in winning the best Multinational Corporate initiative at the IBEC/ISA awards ceremony. Further recognition was received by IADT's Faculty of Film Art and Creative Technologies team on Thursday last when it secured the overall prize for best Design Education and Industry project at the IDI awards in Dublin's Marker Hotel.
IBM Design (Austin, TX) is the lead studio charged with the global implementation, development and strategy for Design Policy, Practice and Thinking within IBM. In developing and consolidating a professional and educational partnership IBM asked a multidisciplinary team of staff and students from IADT to tackle the “problem” that many users of IBM Design Thinking cannot form a resilient mental model of the framework, necessary to implement and practice 'Design Thinking' at a global or enterprise level. The complexity, substance and demands of implementing the Design Thinking framework pose many difficulties. The simple ambition of implementing “Design Thinking at Scale” alone can be overwhelming. Added to this the varied roles, disciplines, experts and products that this needs to work for means that communicating the value of the Design Framework to all (400,000+) IBM employees is a significant strategic an operational challenge.
The opportunity to work on a global design challenge that will ultimately raise design standards, design practices and enhance design research is atypical of most if not all undergraduate programmes of study. In recognising the stellar multi-disciplinary credentials of IADT students IBM were confident that the IADT team could make a significant contribution to this ongoing challenge and programme of activity centred in Austin. Tasked to deliver a more effective, engaging and scalable articulation of IBM design thinking to drive comprehension of the Framework to product, managers designers and engineers, the IADT team had the unique opportunity to become fully immersed in the Design Culture at IBM. This deep and unprecedented insight provided the team with new tools, ways of thinking and strategies that allowed us to resolve the challenge. Using the core tools and vocabularies of communication designers they reconceived the Framework for universal use at a global scale.