This week’s Better Future SPOTLIGHT episode with Fiona Triaca is not one to miss. Fiona is the Founder and CEO at Naked Ambition and together with our Founder Mark Bergin this episode probes and critiques the Australian design industry and questions how we can best shift the public’s understanding of design beyond the concept of ‘craft’.
Fiona and Mark are passionate about using design to solve the big issues of our society, both on a local and global scale. Part of this is tackling gender inequities and focussing on fixing low economic leverages for women and other minorities to increase socio-mobility. The conversation reaches into the Next and offers an exciting, hope-itarian vision of a better future. This is the Design Exec Club at its best.
Quotes:
Fiona
“We’re not about just trying to create artefacts for the sake of it…. we want to create design experiments that clarify potential markets, define a new value proposition or explore different business models.” 0:02:06
“So much of design leadership comes down to knowing the kind of innovation that is required and understanding what the customers can handle.” 0:23:38
“In the last five years we have seen design disciplines existing on the fringes, to becoming so mainstream that the whole industry is exploding.” 0:26:33
“Simple tools like design thinking are equalising tools that can have a lot of power when it comes to empowering our youth.” 0:27:15
“How can the organisations that are adopting innovation techniques themselves create the surplus funds to rethink corporate social responsibility and begin to invest in teaching individuals these innovation techniques as well?” 0:28:25
“People aren’t fooled by organisations trying to pretend they’re doing the right thing… we actually want to see the right thing come through in the way that the organisation is delivering its products and services.” 0:32:07
“It’s not longer just about the label now, people are supporting organisations because they can genuinely see that they’re doing the right thing.” 0:33:39
“As designers, optimism is one of the key mindsets that we need to bring to the work that we do.” 0:47:02
Mark
“The people who are accelerating into the future, taking massive valuation leaps because they've been using a design-led approach to enterprise-wise design, they are not in the artefact business, they’re in the solve business.” 0:02:53
“If you squeeze an accordion too close together, there’s no sound. If you pull an accordion too far apart, there’s no sound… our societal accordion is being compressed and stretched too far.” 0:09:57
“It’s really important that when we think about the disenfranchised we don’t just support them, but we enable them to reach their maximum potential.” 0:26:02
“We have a lazy government with a lazy media who are somewhere back in the 1980s in their thinking about design.” 0:40:47
“The design industry is about being courageous, being uncomfortable, and taking people where they wouldn’t be able to take themselves.” 0:41:33
“The state government signaling, on both sides of politics, isn’t about using design innovation to accelerate your business, it’s about looking at something pretty.” 0:43:50
“I don’t need to challenge pure designers who are trying to make artefacts, but I need them to stop strangling the opportunity for government signalling towards design innovation and what it can do for every enterprise in the state to bring massive economic leverage. That’s the bee in my bonnet.” 0:45:26