Business by Design: Using a Designer's Mindset to Innovate & Lead

Business by Design: Using a Designer’s Mindset to Innovate & Lead

Saturday, March 4th, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday, March 5th, 10a.m. to 1 p.m.
 
What makes designers so effective at creative problem solving, opportunity finding and innovation? How can businesspeople, social entrepreneurs, and leaders apply design strategies to their work to make it more integrated and collaborative? What can we learn from traditional design skills such as visualization and storytelling? How can we shift from a 20th century, market-based approach to a more sustainable, human-centered perspective appropriate to this century’s challenges?
 
This 1.5 day workshop will begin to answer these questions by introducing students to a strategic design toolkit and mindset, including: 

• the design thinking cycle of inspiration-interpretation-ideation-implementation

• empathic and ethnographic design research techniques

• the iterative design process: generating, testing, and refining ideas, products, business models, etc. 

• visualization, storytelling and presentation methods to synthesize data and communicate concepts

• how design strategies can augment and complement analytic and quantitative decision making

About the Instructors
 
Denise Ramzy is a designer and educator whose work bridges multiple disciplines within the built environment. A Lecturer in D+EA in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell, her teaching and research are focused on design strategies, sustainability, and the intersection of design and business. Before coming to Cornell, she was an Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design and Interim Director of the Strategic Design Management program at Parsons Paris. For over a decade, Denise has taught design studios, seminars and lecture courses to undergraduate, graduate and adult students at Columbia University, Cornell, New York University, Parsons and Pratt Institute. 
 
Formerly she worked in New York office of the multidisciplinary design consultancy, Pentagram, on design, brand and strategy projects. Previous experience includes project management for a wide range of organizations, from Columbia University on its campus expansion to Tate Modern during its inaugural year.
 
Stefanie Kubanek is a New York and Munich-based designer and design educator whose work is inspired by her native-German roots and cosmopolitan perspective. She completed an apprenticeship in goldsmithing, earned a MA in Industrial Design at London’s Royal College of Art and completed the PLD program at Harvard Business School. Her international perspective led her to senior design roles in studios in New York and London. In 2010 she left her position as an Associate Partner at Pentagram and launched Kubanek Design +. KD+’s core aim is to develop meaningful collaborations with clients who are devoted to the integration of design and business.
 
For more than a decade, Stefanie taught industrial design and design management at Parsons, Pratt Institute and Columbia University. She was a contract professor at the University of Bolzano, Italy and lectured at design schools in China, Sweden, Japan, Germany, England and the Czech Republic. As a design educator, she teaches the core qualities of the design process: collaboration and communication, a capacity for empathy, the importance of research and the integration of different disciplines.

Registration Note
Please note that you must be able to attend both days, in full, in order to register and participate. Day 1 is Saturday, March 4th, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Day 2 is Sunday, March 5th, from 10a.m. to 1 p.m. Meals and snacks will be provided.


Graduation Credit
All Johnson students are eligible to use up to 1.5 credit hours from Leadership Skills Program and/or Managerial Skills Program credits toward the MBA degree credit-hour requirements. This LSP workshop is worth 0.3 LSP credits.