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ERIKA HALL
Co-founder, Mule Design Studio
she/they
45-MINUTE TALK
The business model is the grid
Maybe at some point you were told that good design is better for business. And yet, somehow, while there are more professional designers than ever and more billionaires than ever, more workers are getting further exploited or just plain fired each day and digital systems are collapsing into a toxic mess while consuming massive amounts of resources.
Every designed system and digital artifact is embedded within an underlying business model that defines how organizations understand, create, and extract value. Unfortunately, this is a dynamic few designers are prepared to grapple with, let alone influence. The myths of Modernism, the commodification of Design Thinking, and a decade of cheap money sustained the illusion that design was a force for good, without regard to surrounding structural factors.
The good news is that everything we design, including the way we do business, can be designed differently.
MORE About thIS speaker
Erika is the co-founder and director of strategy at Mule. She has advocated for the importance of evidence-based design and clear language since the late 20th century.
Erika is the author of Just Enough Research and Conversational Design. Erika works to help organizations and individual practitioners apply critical thinking and humanist values to meaningful problems.
Her current project is helping designers better understand the businesses they work within from a systems perspective.
Previous talks include Beyond Measure and Designing for the Triple Storyline.