Julia is founder of Beardwood&Co and a passionate advocate for brand creation and transformation, generating powerful and positive impact for businesses and the communities they serve.
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24/03/2025
A look inside The Future of…Design
The Future of… conference took place in Chicago this month and asked the question ‘Is design dead?’
The answer from design leaders was an emphatic NO. But, in a tumultuous world, design is at an inflection point.
Here’s what I heard about what design leaders need to KEEP doing, STOP doing, and START doing to create the future of design.
Keep:
1. Putting the value of design on a stage, ensuring it’s seen as a strategic force to drive the business forward.
2. Focusing on improved efficiency and effectiveness.
3. Nurturing a strong design culture – ensuring we’re doing the right things with the best talent, and processes aren’t getting in the way.
4. Being tightly integrated with cross-functional business and agency partners for deep understanding, collaboration and agility.
5. Staying human-centered, putting customers and human language first.
6. Synthesizing emerging insights to solve complex problems, create clear frameworks, and put new and innovative ideas forward.
7. Building trust through diplomacy and politics to move design forward.
8. Ensuring the entire end-to-end customer journey creates the brand.
9. Infusing design with AI, as a tool in service to humanity.
Stop:
1. Being a victim, complaining; lacking empathy for business leaders.
2. Tearing each other down instead of lifting each other up.
3. Giving no/little feedback, or failing to give feedback in an empowering way.
4. Using dated terminology that diminishes the value of design.
5. Trying to do too much with fewer people – a recipe for mediocrity.
Start:
1. Recharting the mandate for design in your organisation to reflect the need today.
2. Being a constructive change agent within your organisation, expert at bringing people with you.
3. Pausing to think beyond daily demands – you’ve got to collect the dots to connect the dots.
4. Being involved in building the business strategy, speaking the language of business with expert fluency.
5. Defining skill sets for the future of design and training for them.
6. Building clear metrics into every brief to reinforce the value design will bring.
7. Having and reporting qualitative and quantitative ways to measure design impact.
8. Rewarding people for winning behaviors, those that will help the organisation achieve its growth strategy.
9. Choosing where to put our time and energy – where can we bring an elite level of excellence? Where can we be world-class? Where are we not really qualified?
The Future Of… conference
was created to inspire conversation and dialogue on the present path and trajectory of design. Where are we now? How did we get here? What might we learn with, and from others? What might we do together to reshape The Future Of… Design.
Speakers at the conference included the DBA’s Chief Executive, Deborah Dawton, GE Healthcare’s Chuck Jones, 3M’s Brian Rice, Whirlpool’s Ken Musgrave, Newell’s Kris Malkoski, and current and former heads of Design from Verizon, PepsiCo, Duracell, J.M. Smucker, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Burger King, McKinsey, BP, and more.
The conference took place in Chicago, USA on 12 and 13 March 2025 and was hosted by David Butler, Fred Richards and DBA Board Director, John Gleason.
If you’d like to hear more takeaways from The Future of… conference, you can hear DBA CEO, Deborah Dawton share her thoughts.
And if you have a Fast Company account, you can login and read 10 insights from The Future of… conference as shared by Mark Wilson.
Reinforce the value design brings
The DBA champions the role of effective design in the creation of business growth.
If you want to convincingly demonstrate and prove the effectiveness and impact of the design work you and your team produce, the unique accreditation of winning a DBA Design Effectiveness Award gives you the ability to do this.
Download an Entry Pack and enter by 5pm BST Monday 14 July 2025.