Future Centered Design: Designing for Sustainable Business

Speaker
Janaki Kumar
Senior Director, User Experience, SAP Labs

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

This talk outlines the changing attitudes of business leaders towards sustainability and the opportunities this presents to product and information designers. Smart business leaders are beginning to understand the importance of sustainable practices to their success. We will examine the key drivers for this mind shift.

Just as businesses have to reconsider the way they do business, designers have to re-think aspects of the way we design to participate fully in the creation of a sustainable world. We have to be prepared to rethink our design process, our materials, our product lifecycle, and our notion of customer experience.

Information designers and product designers have to work together to create the next generation of sustainability products. While product designers play a direct role, information designers play just an important role by gathering critical information across the enterprise and presenting them in a consumable way to allow decision makers to make informed sustainable choices.

Speaker's Bio

Janaki Kumar has over 15 years of experience designing business software. She has a degree in both business and information design. She works at SAP, a leading enterprise software vendor that enables business to manage their resources, supply chain, customer relations, product life-cycle, supplier relations etc. SAP has over 100,000 customers in over 120 countries. SAP is headquartered in Germany and has offices all over the world. Janaki works in the Palo Alto Labs. She is part of the User Experience organization, and leads a team of interaction designers who design the Sustainability Suite of products at SAP.

Speaker's Website
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/community/readers/reader_kumar.asp

Host
Brad Myers