As 2022 comes to a close and 2023 has almost completed loading, I’d like to reflect on the year.

Many people have a tradition of sending letters or emails outlining what they and their family have accomplished in the year. I’d like to depart from that tradition and instead focus this blog post on the people, largely professionally, who made a significant difference in my life this year and thank them for doing so.

I’m so fortunate to work with so many amazing people in my job at IBM and also in my various other interest areas, including the Future of Design Education, McMaster University, and the vegan non-profit VegTO. While I would love to thank everyone individually, there are just too many of you so instead I’ll acknowledge the people who were particularly extra special to me this year.

IBM

Katrina Alcorn

I’d like to begin with my work colleagues at IBM, starting with our awesome GM of Design, Katrina Alcorn. This was Katrina’s first full year of heading up design for the company and what an amazing year she and we have had. For the first four months of the year, I was responsible for IBM’s design leadership, education, culture, and eminence. Katrina keynoted the IBM Leadership Summit that my team and I hosted. She kicked off the event with an inspiring keynote, detailing the organization’s strategic intent of driving pervasive excellence in design through a laser focus on customer insights, cross-discipline teaming, and intentional continuous learning. These are the core themes of the next chapter of IBM Design that we executed the remainder of the year.

She also announced around that time that she would be creating a new position at IBM and seeking to hire a Vice President of Client Insights to drive the first pillar of the new strategy. After having the executive recruiters launch an internal and external search for the candidate to fill this position, Katrina asked me to apply. I did what is called a “panel presentation” to Katrina and a group of peers in March. I didn’t think more about it because I knew that an extensive multi-month executive search was being carried out.

I was naturally blown away when Katrina offered me the role in April, with a May 1st start date. I immediately accepted the job offer but I did make one condition, that Lauren Swanson move with me to the new organization. I look forward to every one of my weekly one-on-one meetings with Katrina and to our deep and authentic collaborations.

Lauren Swanson

I’d been a director for the past ten years in the Design Program Office up until that point, mostly activating each of the divisions of the company with Enterprise Design Thinking and, most recently, having a small team responsible for IBM’s design leadership, education, culture, and eminence.

Lauren Swanson was on that team and was responsible for our Design Principal (DP) and Distinguished Designer (DD) programs, working with the Design Leadership Board (DLB). The two of us significantly redesigned the overall DP program, creating three sub-boards which were closer to the divisions’ staff and also substantially enhancing the nomination form and process. We were also partners in running the Design Executive Team (DET), made up of the company’s design executives, and responsible for the profession of design, adding four new sub-disciplines this year, and hosting the design leadership community calls every other month.

Lauren Swanson

Strategy, Comms, & Impact

I was so pleased that Lauren agreed to move to the new organization with me and to take on a new role as my Chief of Staff. We immediately got to work to learn more about the new organization’s staff by doing a listening tour. We visited our teams in Austin, San Jose, and Toronto and also connected remotely to each of the other global teams in their time zone. I shared information about my background in research and my vision for research at IBM during these sessions with the staff and Lauren facilitated workshops asking questions like, “what’s the first thing you would change if you were VP of Client Insights for a day?”, “If you found a magic lamp, what would your ONE wish be that would improve your job?”, and “What do you do that provides the greatest value to IBM and what do you do that provides the least value?”

Lauren and I synthesized the results of these workshopping sessions and came up with three categories of actions to address the issues raised. They were Integration, Management, and Practices. We then created the Client Insights Team (CIT), made up of global cross-company experts in each area. These sub-teams have been working on the challenges and making progress on them. Lauren heads up one of the sub-teams.

Lauren served as my Chief of Staff when we were getting started in the organization but subsequently took on a new and expanded role working with me on strategy, comms, and impact. She is indispensable to our organization and to me.

Renee Albert

Renee Albert, who was on my team at the beginning of the year, worked with Lauren on the IBM Design Leadership Summit and made significant contributions including serving as the engaging, talented, and professional MC for the event. We also collaborated on IBM Design’s external eminence and internal education. I was sad to not be working as closely with Renee in my new role but I’m so pleased that she is now Head of Education within our Design Program Office, continuing the work we started together on the Client-Driven Executive course initiative.

I’d like to acknowledge the others who made the IBM Design Leadership Summit a huge success: The Summit co-chairs, Kim Bartkowski, Sadek Bazaraa, Olivia Davis, Ryan Mellody, Oduor, Erick (Eno), Scott Robinson, and Dan Silveira and the other members Summit Team, of David Vox Avila and Gord Davison, in addition to Lauren and Renee.

Felix Portnoy

Another major event that we ran this year was the second annual IBM Spark Design Festival. I had the honor of providing executive sponsorship and guidance for the event the last two years working with the awesome Felix Portnoy, who conceptualized and founded Spark. Among other influences, he was a participant in the Covid 19 Design Challenge that I arranged in 2020, together with the World Design Organization, Design for America, and some 100 IBM designers and researchers. He wanted to capture the collaboration, connectedness, skill building, and overall common purpose attributes of the Covid 19 Design Challenge inside IBM with all of our 3,000 designers and researchers.

Felix and his amazing group of volunteer leaders outdid themselves this year by making the conference truly hybrid with remote global sessions as well as local ones in Germany, India, and the US. They also made other major enhancements that were greatly appreciated by our IBM design and research staff and leadership. Felix’s energy and passion and that of his volunteer leaders is palatable and infectious. Felix has passed the baton, as good leaders do, to his co-leader this year, Jon Temple, to take over the Spark festival next year. I’m so looking forward to it.

When I took on the new VP role, I was thrilled to be heading up a team of amazing researchers. However, I had a big challenge to address, the fact that the organization had lost three up-line Program Directors, one first-line Program Director, and one Band 9 manager. That meant that the organization had no second line managers, no third-line manager, and lacking two first-line managers. I had to get creative in filling those positions with no ability to hire and to make other changes to optimize the organization.

Liz Pratt

I made two moves inside the organization, the first being the promotion of first-line manager Liz Pratt to a second-line Program Director manager position. I’d like to thank her for taking on the additional responsibility and leading several of my new initiative projects.

Malc Couldwell

The second internal move involved promoting a highly talented individual contributor, Malc Couldwell, to a first-line manager role leading the team that he was already a member in. I very much appreciate Malc’s willingness to make that move into management.

Gord Davison

Gord Davison has been with me for some years leading my Toronto design studio but I was delighted that he agreed to take on the additional role of handling research and design for IBM’s startup incubators, within which we create new products.

Andrea Barbarin

However, that left some open positions that I couldn’t fill from within my team. One of those was a first-line manager role for my client insights and enablement department. This role required just the right candidate given the unique and important responsibilities that department has.

That right candidate ended up being Andrea Barbarin, a deep expert in quant and qual analysis and having a great handle on the bigger picture view of research at IBM. I was absolutely thrilled when she accepted the role. I so enjoy my partnership with Andrea to build a central client insights hub that integrates, synthesizes, and visualizes insights from across all IBM client touch-points.

Ashwini Kamath

Research Design Principal is a technical appointment made by the Design Leadership Board and GM Katrina Alcorn. It involves being nominated, having to submit a very detailed nomination form and portfolio, and going through a rigorous review process. I was delighted that Ashwini Kamath received this appointment this year on my team. She now joins our other amazing Research Design Principals at IBM, Joan Haggarty, Eleanor Bartosh, Ellen Kolstø, Jennifer Hatfield, Sarah Miller, Felix Portnoy, Kirsten Brunner MacDonald, Brenton Elmore, and Herman Colquhoun.

Joan Haggarty

I’ve known Joan for years and deeply respected her talent, skills, and perspective. I’m now so appreciative that she now reports to me and we’re able to do work together on innovative new initiatives.

John Bailey

The toughest position to fill on my management team was that of the third-line manager responsible for the IBM Software and Public Cloud research teams. I was absolutely delighted that a colleague that I had worked with at IBM some years ago, John Bailey, expressed interest in joining my organization. He had left IBM for some 10 years, leading design and research teams at other companies, before coming back 4 years ago. He and I are so aligned on all the important things so he’s now my Head of IBM Software and Public Cloud Research.

Marianne Flahaut

I thought I’d completed building out my new management team when I had the chance bring Marianne Flahaut to my organization. I jumped at the chance. She had been heading up our Sponsor User Program and Portal for some years in another business unit. We have multiple different user engagement programs and tools at IBM but Marianne now has the exciting mission to integrate them all together with her team that she is now managing.

Ellen Kolstø

Last but not least, I was very recently able to appoint Ellen Kolstø to the position of Director of Strategic UX Research. Ellen was a Research Design Principal working with our IBM Fellow, Charlie Hill, on strategic design projects. While she continues to have responsibility for those projects, she is now responsible for defining the innovative strategies, approaches, and methods to understand prospective new logo clients while still maintaining a focus on existing clients. This an exciting new role that Ellen is perfect for and I’m already enjoying our collaborations in this new space.

Leadership Teams

I’ve mentioned only a few of my IBM colleagues and staff thus far, mostly leaders whom I recruited to the organization or promoted into new roles and I am eternally grateful for their decision to join my team and/or take on new responsibilities.

However, I feel honored every day to work with my colleagues from across the company whether on my Research Leadership Team (RLT), my direct report leadership team, or any one of the amazing individual contributor researchers at IBM. I consider myself extremely lucky to get to hang out with these amazing people every day.

Future of Design Education

Don Norman

Three years ago, I headed up IBM’s Global Design Academic Programs which involved working with the top design schools and universities around the world. One of those schools was the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The then head of that school was Don Norman. I had worked with Don some years ago when we were both keynote speakers at a design conference in Nanjing, China. One of his seminal books, User Centered Systems Design, had also inspired me to create IBM User-Centered Design in the early 1990s. His other books were similarly inspirational to me.

He and I collaborated on a capstone project at UCSD that had multidisciplinary students working on ways to improve the lives of people with Parkinson’s. After the students had left the building one particular day, Don and I started a discussion about the state of design education, pointing out its various shortcomings. We discussed the need to design a new future of design education. We decided to take that on together and we founded the Future of Design Education initiative. Over a dinner in Toronto a few weeks later, we selected the steering committee for the initiative, made up of academics and practitioners. We worked with the steering committee members to create a mission, a set of key topics areas to address, and formed working groups to address them.

Meredith Davis

To oversee, guide, and support the overall effort, we reached out to one of the steering committee members, Meredith Davis, to join us on a three-person executive committee. Meredith was the perfect choice as an eminent design educator, accomplished author, and professional who is passionate about improving design education.

Meredith was instrumental in coming up with various materials like the Big Ideas structure for formulating the curricular guidance that the working groups used to focus and document their work.

Meredith Davis

Professor Emerita of Graphic & Experience Design

Don, Meredith, and I met weekly for 1 1/2 to 2 hours and met with the Steering Committee every few months. I thoroughly enjoyed our collaborations.

When we decided to wrap up the project this year and get the curricular recommendations published, it was Meredith who offered to handle that final stage serving as the special issue editor for the She Ji journal.

Don and I continued to meet weekly to write a final future-looking, big-picture article and Meredith and I continued to collaborate on the publication.

Meredith is a force of nature when it comes to working with the authors and getting their work into shape for publication, even if it means that she does a lot of the writing herself. She’s absolutely amazing.

I had a professionally stimulating time writing the article with Don with our many wide-ranging discussions. The two of us also got to know each other really well. It turns out that we have many similar perspectives on life.

FDE Steering Committee

I loved my interactions with the members of the Steering Committee and the working group leaders too, together as well as in the multiple one-on-one interactions I’ve had with them. I now have so many new and fascinating professional friends and colleagues that I continue to be in contact with, doing guest lectures for their classes, mentoring their students, speaking at the conferences they host, etc.

Check out more about the project on our website, which, by the way, was designed and built by a group of volunteers from IBM, which I’m incredibly grateful for (their names are listed on the website).

The journal article manuscripts will all soon all be submitted to the journal, will go through peer review by the journal, and the special issue is expected to be published in the first half of next year.

McMaster

Michael Hartmann

In a press interview some eight years ago, I was quoted as referring to IBM Design’s three-month bootcamps for all new hires as “the missing semester of university”. I had calls from and worked with numerous universities globally during that time focused on new curricular programs. Those collaborations required travel. I was therefore particularly fascinated to get a lunch invitation at an exclusive club from McMaster University, which is local to me.

I had lunch with and was in turn recruited by the Dean of the Business School, Len Waverman and the Associate Dean, Michael Hartmann. I was asked whether I could come up with design inspired creative problem-solving curricula for business and medical students. I said that I would give it a go.

After the appropriate committees reviewed my credentials, I was appointed to the position of Industry Professor. I’m so thankful to Len and Michael for giving me this opportunity and to Michael for our continued partnership in teaching cohort after cohort, including four programs this year.

Michael Hartmann

Professor & Director
Directors College
EMBA in Digital Transformation,
Health Leadership Academy

I created curricula for and taught in several programs, a pan-university design program, an EMBA one, a Directors College program, a Health Leadership Academy, and most recently a Health Governance one.

I’ve always enjoyed teaching and find it a great way to integrate and synthesize my own perspectives in order to teach them and to be challenged to broaden my thinking too in working with talented, experienced, and super smart students. I’m thankful to Michael and McMaster University for continuing to give me the opportunity to work with amazing groups of students.

VegTO

I adopted an ethical vegetarian lifestyle 40 years ago and a vegan one for the past 8 years. I use my social media accounts to inspire others to transition to veganism for ethical, environmental, and health reasons, and I support those who have already have done so. My family and I also created a website during a Christmas vacation together to capture and share key information.

Nital Jethalal

Last year I joined the board of directors of what was then called the Toronto Vegetarian Association as their Vice President. I worked closely with the President Nital Jethalal, Executive Director Kimberly D’Oliveira, and the rest of the board and staff.

Kimberly D’Oliveira

I feel honored to work with Nital and Kimberly and we’ve accomplished so much together. We launched a poll of food choices and awareness with Angus Reid Institute and presented the results in a Webinar. The results of the poll and numerous other research studies inspired our name change to VegTO. We also created a new web presence for the organization with features like “vegan near me” with lists of local restaurants and services, and we’re about to launch a vegan social network. Check out our website for these and other initiatives.

Family

Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank my entire family, Noah, Rowan, Emma, Elliot, Xeena, and my wife, Erin, for another amazing year together. I love them dearly. We’re a close-knit family and enjoy taking vacations together.

This pic is of our vacation to Tuscany, Italy to be part of niece Jessica’s amazing wedding. Jessica’s father, my brother Harrie, is another person I so value, having come to this country together as immigrants with our parents and having stayed close all through those years.

It was an outstanding year. I love my job and the colleagues I get to hang out with everyday. I’m also so thankful to have had a chance to work with non-IBM colleagues on my passion projects.

And I’m writing this with my family all around me during our Christmas vacation at a cottage in Northern Ontario, with family members having traveled from New York, Vancouver, and Toronto during an amazing winter storm.

Life is good, and I’m grateful for that every day. Now it’s time to put my computer away, enjoy the vacation with my family, and then launch into the almost completely loaded year of 2023. Let’s make it the best year yet!