Seth Johnson on Earning the Right to Change Things

About this episode

Seth Johnson discusses the challenges and strategies for making design impactful within large organizations like IBM.

What does it actually take for design to matter inside a massive organization? In this episode, hosts Giulia Donatello and Lee-Sean Huang sit down with Seth Johnson to talk about design at enterprise scale, and what designers get wrong about building influence. Seth Johnson is Design Director at IBM's Chief Data Office, where he leads a team driving AI-first enterprise data transformation. Over a 12-year tenure at IBM, his work has evolved from designing artifacts and experiences toward designing the conditions under which good design can happen at scale. Before IBM, he founded a Minneapolis-based design practice. He has served as president of AIGA Minnesota and as an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design. In This Episode From a used bookshop to IBM . Seth's path to design started at age 12, flipping through Dorfsman & CBS in a used bookshop, and seeing for the first time what design could look like as a system at scale. That same impulse, he says, is what he's still chasing at IBM, just at a different altitude. Design as infrastructure. At IBM's Chief Data Office, Seth's team exists to provide the company with a single, trusted view of how the business is…

People in this episode

Hosts: Giulia Donatello, Lee-Sean Huang

Guest: Seth Johnson

Topics covered

• design influence
• enterprise design
• data transformation
• design systems
• organizational design

Keywords

• design
• IBM
• enterprise
• data
• influence
• AI
• transformation
• AIGA

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IBM, AIGA Minnesota, Parsons School of Design

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