Electronics & Electrical Technical Marketing for North America at Covestro
John Skabardonis, PhD, DTM, A/IDSA, heads Electronics & Electrical Technical Marketing for North America at Covestro. He has been a supporter of IDSA and the Society's conferences, especially the International Design Conference, for years.
“I am intensely curious and embrace lifelong learning,” John tells us. Trained as a biologist and a chemist, he discovered after graduate school how much he also enjoyed marketing, and eventually design. “Even though I have not been trained in Design,” he notes, “I have been getting my ID-fix since I joined IDSA around 20 years ago and have been advocating for Design at Covestro globally.”
A little over a year ago, John pivoted from a Healthcare focus to the Electronics & Electrical market, focusing on electronics integration application. He sees a tremendous amount of design potential in this arena; and as a self-described “incurable gearhead,” anything in the mobility space grabs his attention.
John is excited to see Covestro taking major strides toward Circularity by embracing Circular Economy and Circular Design principles, citing his colleague Yvonne Qian’s IDC 2021 presentation and the just announced Covestro Circular Economy program at the University of Pittsburgh.
He also points to a focus on Aesthetics & CMF Trends over the past few years, and the resulting development of
award-winning Covestro toolkits incorporating novel and whimsical form factors. Covestro’s 2022-2023 CMF trend reports will be unveiled soon.
What’s next? According to John, “We are hard at work finalizing a very cool demonstrator, which will be revealed at CES (Jan. 5-8, 2022). I can’t say much more about it at this point; however I can provide a tiny hint that it involves electronics integration, and I have a feeling it will generate a significant degree of excitement in the ID community.”
