#42 | Scott Nazarian | Driving capabilities and integrations of design

Designdrives

"How do you democratise not only access to technology, but also pay attention to the diversity and richness that is important for technology to adopt or adapt, rather, to different parts of the world where it’s going to be used, and designers can effectively impact that situation as well."

- Scott on the importance of user experience in creating access to technology.

In episode 43, we chat with Scott Nazarian, Design Director at groundstate. Scott spent his formative years in design at frog, working his way up to Executive Creative Director at the design agency. He most recently was the Experience Design Director at McKinsey, leading teams in building design capabilities within enterprise-level scale companies.

Scott discusses his work as a designer in corporate organisations like Microsoft and McKinsey, especially touching on what makes working at McKinsey – a consultancy – so unique, compared with his work at frog – an innovation design firm.

We look at his views on how the designer brings value to the table, within large-scale organisations, as well as how designers can drive impact and bring change to organisations that are stagnant and slow changing.

Looking ahead into the future, Scott discusses his views on how design practices will change in the next five or so years. Placing his bets behind machine learning and AI development, Scott argues that designers are the key to humanising these new intelligences, because of their role in human-centered research and human-centered design.

About Interaction 20:

Interaction 20 is the annual Interaction Design conference organized by IxDA - the largest community dedicated to interaction design - and in 2020 hosted by the IxDA Milan & Turin local group. Interaction Week 2020 brought together the brightest minds in design, as well as science, philosophy, psychology and business.

Interaction 2021 will happen fully online. You can get more details here: https://interaction21.ixda.org