I’m well into my tenure as an Experience Designer (internal role) and Design Strategist (official job title) at EY wavespace, so here comes a quick update on the kind of work we do on my team; many people have asked about this in recent months, and I’ve struggled each time to come up with a pithy answer that fits their context while addressing implicit questions such as ‘what is the value of this work?’ or ‘how does this relate your background and/or interests?’. Find below an attempt to verbalize my thoughts through text.
What wavespace does, in a nutshell…
Collaborative strategy workshops for executives.
Hopefully, the phrase above provides an adequate starting point. If you’re familiar with the term ‘Design Thinking’ or with ‘Design Sprints’ in the tech/ product company context, either would be a decent approximation to get us started, too.
EY wavespace is a strategic design practice, so all of us are labeled Design Strategists within the broader structure of the firm, which consists largely of CPAs & Accountants, Audit Professionals and Consultants. We work closely with EY consulting teams—who bring to the table their domain knowledge as well as their insight into the respective client’s challenges and goals—and our job is to understand how best to use the time allotted for a session so that participants come out of it feeling aligned as a team and well-equipped as individuals to execute on their strategy.
My niche design role at an ‘accounting firm’
In the lead up to a workshop, in addition to planning and co-facilitating, I’m responsible for designing artifacts that enhance the experience and support participants in achieving their shared objective. This aspect of my work feels familiar, given my beginnings in graphic design; for example, when we came up with April Fools’ Fest for Bira91, I worked on event identity and collateral that gave form to Bira’s new ‘Make Play‘ motto. Having drawn this parallel, let me qualify that the pace of work at EY is quicker, and that our engagements (as a practice) with clients here are quite brief. Add to this a healthy dose of event planning and business consulting, et voilà, you have a sketch of my current, somewhat niche, role. You'll find similar niche roles (if not entire orgs similar to wavespace) at Accenture, pwc, Deloitte (as with Greenhouse), Capgemini (as with ASE, which, as I learned from Todd McCullough—a design strategy mentor of mine with decades of experience in this space—has a shared history with EY), and other such firms.
Within the wavespace practice, my role is that of an Experience Designer, where Experience refers to a facilitated collaborative workshop aimed at achieving a specific objective for a client. We also refer to these workshops or experiences as sessions. While details vary widely, a typical workshop will span two days and involve about 40 participants from across the client organization. One role of designers on our teams is to push the envelope on the overall client experience and the unification of session objectives with aesthetic decisions to make sessions impactful and memorable. One of my additional responsibilities at wavespace involves planning and hosting weekly community calls related to design strategy; this gives me both the incentive to stay updated on news in the broader design world and the opportunity to learn from seasoned and talented colleagues across the globe.
Labels labels labels: rambling about jobs and titles
People familiar with the terms ‘experience design’ and ‘design strategy’ might find it odd that a role involves both at once (with the possible exception of designers who are also managers/ leaders/ entrepreneurs). ‘Experience Design’ at wavespace is distinct from ‘UX Design’ in the sense that the typical medium of UX is a digital application or app while our medium is a session; in principle, though, they are very similar. Having worked previously with lengthier processes with longer lasting outputs, I find the more transient medium of person-to-person collaboration fascinating! There are compelling intersections with behavioral design and I'm constantly learning new things in conversations with my colleagues. There are elements of Strategic Communications, Information Design and Interaction/ UX Design from my past work, and I also find the work very closely related with Service Design, although it’s not formally part of the job description. Quite the word salad, but that’s a segue to a whole other discussion about titles and labels in the design industry today.
The recent history of design as a trade points to some clues towards the emergence of niche roles like this; the work I’m describing has, in a rather similar form to now, been around for at least three decades, that I know of; so, by recent, I roughly mean the ‘90s. The advancement of digital tools and a growing recognition of design’s ability to create economic value have, together, contributed to a shift towards the integration of design services; that is, large organizations have moved, from buying design as external services rendered by specialized agencies and firms, to hiring designers and building in-house design departments. This has come with all kinds of side effects, like cultural dissonances due to acquisitions, challenges with measuring design value or optimizing creative work, and narrowly scoped or hyperspecialized designer roles.
Increasingly, a designer’s day-to-day work varies quite a bit based on whom you’re asking, because (especially within large orgs) the role is defined within the specific context of the overall business. This is partly why the terms ‘experience designer’ and ‘design strategist’ can mean very different things at different orgs. I don’t know that this is unique to this moment or this profession, but I do know that designers—in discussions online and, certainly, throughout design school—often contend with this ambiguity as they navigate their careers. Compared to doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects even, our trade has seen little legal or academic formalization and has thus been ripe for this kind of disruption. Commercial artists, printers, sign painters—all kinds of professions paved the way, about a century ago, for what’s now seen as a ‘traditional’ job (graphic design) in this sphere. Since then, as technology and culture have undergone drastic changes, so have design jobs and the skillsets that typically comprise them.
Customary allusion to modernist Indian design history
Although I do use my graphic design skills fairly regularly, they have a more even weighting with planning and communication skills. In fact, I like that the space for creative growth here extends beyond graphic design into creative facilitation and, to some degree, hospitality. There is a quote that connects this ‘generalist designer’ frame with Charles and Ray Eames, who (via the India Report) were pivotal in the formation of NID, where I started formally studying design. The quote, which is attributed to Charles, goes as follows:
The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host, anticipating the needs of his guests.
Of course, the host metaphor fits the wavespace context perfectly, but the Eamesian approach to design—spanning across disciplines and media—is compelling at this point on the timeline when there is much pressure to specialize—there is something evergreen about it, something that resonates with many creative people, because good art (and design too, if you’d believe it) readily transcends labels. Their film, Powers of Ten (embedded below) was discussed during a recent design community call at wavespace, because it gives form to the abstract concept that there are many vantage points from which to look at any situation (a wholly useful concept for everyone).
What I'm learning...
What I’ve discovered so far is that, in the process of designing collaborative strategy workshop, we are helping participants organize thoughts around a big problem they currently have. And it’s not just one person’s (or a few people’s) thoughts; workshops often bring together a few dozen people at various seniority levels representing four to eight functions within the client org—it's not uncommon to hear a variation on the phrase, "most of the people in the room will be meeting in person for the first time"—and part of our job is making sure all participants’ perspectives are considered in the decision making process. Further, wavespace is structured in a unique way so that it can best support the consulting service at EY and the clients that buy it, which allows it to create economic value for the firm, so better understanding the firm and our place in it is definitely part of the job.
A key person in the history of this specific group is Rob Evans, who wrote the book (literally) that informs the way we at EY wavespace design and run workshops; his four-part tome touches on the mindsets needed to effectively deliver this work as well as step-by-step instructions for activities that can be facilitated during a given workshop. In a sense, the book series is a larger, more extensive cousin to a playbook, commissioned by the ID Academy, which I designed with its primary author (and a favorite ID professor), Sari Gluckin, last year. Where ours was a 40-page booklet with activities curated to spur the imagination, Rob has written entire books about the Patterns, Models, Tools, and Cases one might consider, in great detail and with an instructional voice. It's great to find, as I learn more, that this work is teachable—equal parts art and science.
With the way work happens today, large businesses often struggle with undertakings that require concerted efforts and coordination across silos. The cultivation of a creative perspective and the allocation of time and space (indeed, a 'third space', like one of our global centers, works particularly well) allows teams to break the inertia of BAU (business-as-usual) and see their current reality with new eyes (also referred to as reframing). This aspect—designing for cross-functional alignment and collaboration—makes the work both valuable and stimulating, and in this sense, creative facilitation has the potential for all kinds of positive effects on businesses. I’ve heard the phrase ‘business therapist’ used jokingly to describe parts of the work—in fact, a client remarked, just this week, “this is like therapy”. I’d call it the effect of ‘active listening’ but, in the ‘age of AI’, I do appreciate the in-person, human-to-human aspect of this work, less because it feels hard to replicate, more because I see the impact of it.
Anyway, there was an attempt at explaining my day job. Hopefully, this gives you a glimpse of what I’m keeping busy with of late. As always, many threads to explore further, and I would love to discuss your questions and/or reactions!
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Postscript: for my Dad :)
My father has always been my supportive coach, my executive sponsor, the original ‘trusted advisor’—he stepped up to the challenge of being the first role model for a young human being and gifted me a lasting sense of security so that, whenever I’ve wanted to try something (like these blogposts), I needed only to take the first step. I am blessed to be his son, and want him to know it immediately, so, I declare today Father's Day. And since he’s one of my esteemed subscribers, here’s wishing Dad a Happy Father’s Day, today and everyday!