This Is A Prototype Doug Powell

Season 2 of This is a Prototype: The Design Leadership Podcast is coming soon! 

The practice and profession of design in scaled companies continues to evolve in unexpected ways, and the role of the design leader in that evolution is more important than ever to the success of our teams and organizations. 

In Season 2 of This is a prototype, host Doug Powell continues to speak to the top design leaders in the industry about their life and career journeys into design. And he broadens the scope to explore cultural intersections in design; how design leaders are driving change in their communities; and how emerging technologies are changing our practices and our teams.

Doug's guests in season 2 will include:
Kaleena Sales
Sadie Red Wing
Kate Aronowitz
Robert Fabricant
Rich Hollant
Bill Grant
Jonathan Hanahan 
...and many more!

My guests for this Season 1 finale episode are Doreen Lorenzo and Mbiyimoh Ghogomu.

Doreen Lorenzo is a pioneering design leader who is the Assistant Dean of the School of Design and Creative Technology at University of Texas, a role she started in 2016. Prior to joining UT, Doreen was the longtime President of Frog Design, one of the largest and most established global design consultancies in the world. Doreen is a columnist for Fast Company where she writes the Designing Women column profiling brilliant women in the design industry.

Mbiyimoh Ghogomu is the co-founder and CEO of Tradeblock, the marketplace for collectible sneakers. Founded in 2019 the company has amassed more than 250,000 users and over a million sneakers available for trade on its digital platform. Tradeblock has raised more than 10 million dollars in VC funding. Mbiyimoh founded the company with childhood friends Tony Malveaux and Darren Smith after starting his career as a content design intern at IBM Design.

This episode was recorded live at the offices of argodesign in Austin, Texas.

Supporting partner for the live event was Pearl, the digital platform for proactive, effective, and inclusive hiring.

My guests in this episode are two legendary design leaders, Ann Willoughby and Mauro Porcini.

Ann Willoughby is an AIGA Medalist who has been a leading voice in design for over five decades. In 1978 she founded Willoughby Design, one of the first woman-owned design firms in the US. In addition to her leadership of this award-winning firm, Ann has been an advocate for countless community organizations and academic programs throughout her career.

Mauro Porcini is the first-ever Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo where he is infusing design thinking into the company’s culture and leading a new approach to innovation by design that is impacting it’s vast portfolio of products and brands. Mauro is also the author of the book The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.

We cover a remarkably wide breadth of topics from the important role leaders play in the building of company culture, to how designers respond to emerging technologies. Ann and Mauro share some delightful and inspiring stories about the people who have shaped their journeys as leaders.

I open the episode with a special bonus segment: A short clip of a conversation I had recently with Professor Omari Souza, founder of the State of Black Design conference, which is happening for the first time ever as a live, in-person event March 15-16 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Executive design recruiter Tom Scott is the founder of Verified, the publisher of the weekly newsletter Verified Insights, and the host of the new podcast, Verified Insider. Tom recently interviewed me for a future episode of Verified Insider, and in this episode I combine my interview of Tom for my podcast, with a preview of his interview of me for his podcast.

Tom and I discuss the reasons design leadership roles are often not set up for success—from inadequate funding and resources, to scoping of the mission, to lack of clarity around what value design can actually bring. Tom explores the critical role recruiters can play in helping companies shape their vision for design leadership.

Rama Gheerawo is the director of the Helen Hamlyn Center for Design at the Royal College of Art in the UK, and the author of a book that should be on all of our reading lists, Creative Leadership, Born from Design. In his book, Rama asks not only whether designers can actually be leaders, but whether we can in fact be better leaders because of our creative capabilities and qualities. If you’ve listened to any previous episodes of this podcast, you know that this is one of the central questions I’ve been asking with all of my guests.

In this episode, Rama and I go deep on the epidemic of impostor syndrome among design leaders, and we explore his framework for creative leadership that’s built on the principles of Empathy, Clarity and Creativity. Rama also shares with us some inspiring world leaders who embody these principles.

“How is design infiltrating business in a new way? How is it reaching every inch of the of the business?"
—Nicole Gull-McElroy

What are the central stories in the design industry today, and how is the business media covering them?

In this POV Edition, I speak with journalist Nicole Gull-McElroy, who reports on the intersection of business and design for Fortune, Fast Company, and Wired, among other publications. Nicole was the lead editor for Fortune’s “By Design” newsletter, and last January she wrote an excellent article for Fast Company examining the effects of designer layoffs in the tech industry, which is one of the tangents we explore together in this wide-ranging conversation.

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Nicole Gull McElroy is a freelance journalist based outside of Philadelphia. Having completed her MS in journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Nicole started her career covering breaking news at various daily newspapers throughout the South and Midwest before taking staff jobs Inc. and Men's Journal magazines. She's written for Fortune, WIRED, and Fast Company, covering the ways business and design intersect, and for a time handled the Business x Design newsletter at Fortune.