Carole Bilson, IDSA
President
Design Management Institute
Carole Bilson, IDSA, is president of the Design Management Institute and has served on both the Advisory Council and the current Board of Directors. She has contributed to the quarterly Design Management publication DMI: Review, and participated in FuturED and the Design Value initiatives.
Most recently Bilson was the president of Strategic Change & Innovation, providing organizations with a roadmap to build innovation capacity, achieve operational excellence and increase value. She also served as vice president, global design and usability & technology support operations at Pitney Bowes—overseeing an award-winning team of visual and industrial designers, engineers, information architects/ human factors engineers and front-end software developers—earning 12 international design Awards and 49 patents.
Bilson has also worked extensively in the non-profit sector. She holds a BFA in industrial design and graphic/visual Design from the University of Michigan and program certifications from Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College and the University of California-Berkeley. She holds patents and is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia worldwide.
The Future of Design Leadership
Clearly we are in a new frontier. Design is so relevant to the core of every business, that there are now new converging interests in design leadership. What is the future of design leadership? By the end of this conference, we will be closer to finding out.
This last session is not a concluding summary of the conference, rather, it’s a fresh perspective as an open dialog with some of the world’s most advanced design leaders including: Carole Bilson, IDSA, president, DMI; Sean Carney, chief design officer, Philips; Dan Harden, IDSA, president/CEO, Whipsaw; Klaus Kaasgaard, VP user experience design, Intuit; Steve Kaneko, FIDSA, partner director of design, Microsoft; Mauro Porcini, IDSA, chief design officer, PepsiCo; Eric Quint, IDSA, chief design officer, 3M; Ernesto Quinteros, IDSA, chief design officer, Johnson & Johnson; and Nasahn Sheppard, IDSA, divisional VP of product design, REI Private Brands.
The panel, led by Thomas Lockwood, PhD, IDSA, will explore alternative futures and address some of the most curious and challenging questions. Who really leads design—designers or business people? As a design leader, what is your greatest challenge? Do design leaders need business degrees, and vice versa? Is design leadership fun? What’s the future for designers in corporate, consultancy and independents? What’s the career path for an industrial designer that wants to stick with designing, or shift into leading?
Who leads experience design—ID, UX or customer service? Do industrial designers need to dive into holistic user experience design? Is design becoming a brand, an experience or a commodity? What are the trends in design leadership, and what are some possible future scenarios? How should an industrial designer prepare for the future?
This is not the end of the conference; it is the beginning of the future.
