Written by Daritza Perez, photos by Nick Thomsen and courtesy of Daritza Perez
I’ve had a job at IBM lined up since fall quarter when they visited our campus. Like me, many students from SCAD found themselves with a nice surprise to give to the family on Thanksgiving. But since Thanksgiving, it has been an extremely long wait with so much
I was extremely nervous since it’s my first real job. But IBM helped relieve some of the first-day nerves by creating a Slack channel for all the new hires. We were able to spend quality time together before becoming coworkers, so when starting my journey at IBM, I had familiar faces and friends.
My first day at IBM was daunting with an overload of information. It felt like 100+ years of IBM history was being pumped into my brain, but they needed to express how much they value designers and their efforts to sustain a culture of design throughout the entire world-wide company. Up until six years ago, there were only 100 designers scattered around IBM out of their 40,000 employees. Today, they have 2,500+ formally trained designers, so I am one of many new designers to come.
I was comfortable by the third day since they broke up the 80 new hires into their discipline groups. I was able to learn about IBM’s visual designers and resources and gain a clearer idea of my day to day workload. I was especially happy to have gone to SCAD when IBM started teaching us about motion design. The other visual designers had never touched After Effects or even attempted motion graphics. Since I was pretty ahead, I’d advise everybody to take a motion techniques class
Another valuable lesson I learned was collaborating with people coming from different backgrounds and expertise. Since design is becoming apart of IBM culture, new designers will be in charge of convincing and implementing design when needed. Most designers go to teams where they’ve never been introduced so there is a pressure to be leaders in our profession. It’s important to be open-minded and to communicate efficiently.
Throughout our training period, they focused on “design thinking.” To summarize, design thinking requires focusing on the user you are designing for, collaborating with a diverse team and a ton of post-its. When we started, we received a field guide booklet which described all the methods of design thinking. I found they were really similar to what I had seen UX designers go through at SCAD, but all of the methods had a new twist at IBM. For example, they understood their personas by creating “Empathy Maps.” This diagramed what your persona thinks, says, feels, and does. It seems simple when you do it on your own, but a collaborative environment is what implies design thinking. Other people will help fill in all the blanks for the persona: “What type of car is he/she driving? What is the hotel he/she is staying in? Did he/she just jump into a relationship?” The questions get specific and personal, which never happened in school.
Honestly, I felt like I ended up understanding and empathizing with my personas on a deeper level.
After our first week, we jumped right into our Incubator Projects. There were 14 different Incubator Projects with six to eight members on each team. I was assigned to a team of six: one researcher, two UX designers, one visual designer and two offering managers. We were given an existing product’s problem and were asked to create a prototyped solution by the end of the five weeks. Our project was sponsored by IBM “Blockchain Platform” to help communicate their pricing better. The hardest part was learning what blockchain was. The first week, our project leads and stakeholders spent three full days trying to teach us what blockchain was, how it worked, why it’s important and every single component it entails. It was like a giant Einstein math problem, and to be honest, I still can’t put all the pieces together. Either way, my team was able to fill the gaps when needed.
The first few weeks were pretty slow, most of the heavy lifting was done by the researchers on our team. We were given contact information for users and stakeholders, and gathered primary and secondary data to decide a direction for our project. Since we collaborated with another team that had an extremely similar task as us, we used our Design Thinking booklet as a Bible and accomplished nearly exercise. In the end, our team filled up around 20 whiteboards with post-it notes. It was insane and wonderfully colorful.
However, not everything was rainbow post-its and sunshine. As a graphic design major, I felt as though SCAD didn’t prepare me for collaborative environments such as the one I’ve been exposed to at IBM. While at SCAD, I did one CLC [now SCADpro] and one group project in a studio class. One of my greatest challenges was learning to effectively communicate with my teammates. When my team was moving too slowly or was unmotivated, I didn’t know how to approach them. Thankfully, our team had an assigned mentor who helped me through most of those issues. By the second week, I started taking on more leadership positions. Then by the fourth, I was debating and standing my ground as the only visual designer amongst two teams. I felt like I truly grew within those six weeks of Patterns.
Another bump in the road during our Incubator Project was actually designing the project. If there’s anything I regret now, it’s not designing more webpages at SCAD. Unfortunately, my team took too long to arrive to the design phase of our project which left the visual design of the project to the last weekend of Patterns. I didn’t have much experience designing screens [though I was willing to learn] and the time constraint wasn’t forgiving to new designers like me. Although IBM already has an existing design language and grid, it took me all the way up until the very last hour to finish my part of the project. After so many trial and errors, I can now say I understand their language.
All of the hard work paid off when we presented our project to the stakeholders. They were very pleased and expressed a desire to implement our solution. The other team that had a similar problem to ours actually got critiqued from Phil Gilbert himself, realizing the team’s solution could easily qualify for three patents. It was mesmerizing and inspiring.
Through it all, Patterns was incredibly difficult but it was a great learning experience. There was laughter, tears and a lot of grit in our team and we pulled through by believing in the talent that IBM saw in us. I am proud to be a new IBMer and will be looking forward to my career here.
