John Youger

Partner, PINE | Strategy & Design John Youger has taught Industrial Design Studio, Design Methodologies, and Advanced Consumer Insights & Synthesis since 2013. John has 25+ years of experience in the industry prior to teaching at CCAD. During that time, John has worked at Fitch, Lextant, Resource, WD Partners and as an Independent Consultant. Currently, he is also a Partner at PINE | Strategy & Design. John’s professional experience areas include product development, brand strategy, shopper insights, packaging and consumer goods, retail design and customer experience. He has worked with several Fortune 100 clients, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Home Depot. John’s key insight and strategy specialties include co-creation methodologies, ethnography, design thinking, and customer experience. He was the recipient of the 2017 Teaching Excellence Award at CCAD and has a BA in Industrial Design from The Ohio State University.

Activities for John

Speaker | Design Research Deep Dive | 2023

Starting With the Goal in Mind

The goal of “good research” is to help inform and guide design and business decisions. However, often the design briefs from clients can lead design teams and their methodologies astray, leading to underwhelming and uninformative design findings and recommendations.

The goal of this session is to provide the audience with a new framework to anticipate what might be needed at the end of the project to better prepare for the beginning of the project. By better anticipating the needs of the various stakeholders at the “end” of the research, teams can best prepare the appropriate methodologies, design strategies and recommendations.

The audience will learn…

  1. The audience will learn a new framework to help guide and shape how they think about the “output” of their research. The framework will assist in ideating better questions that ultimately help to shape better design research methodologies.
  2. During the session participants will be shown a quick case study that illustrates the application of this framework on a project and how it impacted the outcome of the research.
  3. Participants will also be given an opportunity to work together through an example project brief to utilize the framework and build better questions and methodologies together.
  4. Participants will walk away with a new way to think about the outcome of their design research.