Q. What are your main priorities and goals in your role?

My main priorities are to build relationships with companies and organisations to show them how design can add real quantifiable value to their product or service. The goal is to deliver an offering that allows them to innovate faster and more efficiently, using design as a strategy.

Q. What are your biggest challenges as Director?

Today’s requirement for product development is speed to market, a process of incremental steps and testing rather than a long, arduous build and launch and crossing fingers for good market feedback. Clients now expect us to create design solutions with more immediate feedback. This challenge pushes us towards finding processes for repeatable innovation cycles to give clients the competitive edge for today’s rapid, disruptive, digital environment. Not only that but we have to find a delivery process that will work across the spectrum of our client requirements, be they digital or physical.

Q. How do you keep your team/staff motivated?

Being selective and working on projects that excite us, continuously learning and staff flexibility. Getting out of the office and seeing how other people work so we can find solutions to problems in the day-to-day operations always helps.

Q. What are the challenges facing the industry going forward?

Perception of design in industry is the challenge. The design industry has long been seen, from a business perspective, as a service of making things look good rather than what design really is, that being problem-solving. It is encouraging when clients brief us with the latter perception, you’re almost guaranteed at that early point that success is down the line.

Q. What new trends are emerging in your industry?

One notable trend is the design industry is now being taken far more seriously. Over the last couple of years many design agencies have been acquired by large corporations such as IBM, McKinsey, Accenture and PwC. Design has long been a missing part of their service delivery, and quite a lucrative one, too.

Q. Are there any major changes you would like to see in your sector?

The design sector tends to live in its own echo chamber: designers talking to designers about design. More time spent interacting with other industries and understanding their problems and pain points will create far better designers.

Q. As an employer are you finding any skills gaps in the market?

The obvious one is that not many design graduates have an understanding of coding. This will become a prerequisite for many employers in the design industry. You don’t have to be a code expert but an understanding and ability to read code is a great start. I also noticed programmers now starting to embrace design as part of their skill set so watch out, designers, they are coming after your lunch and some of them are exceptionally good.

Q. How did your strategy develop in the context of the banking crisis and economic crisis?

I can’t say the strategy changed from our end but for our clients it did and we adapted, fast. Our client base moved from print and branding projects to design strategy and digital work. There was upskilling involved and it was an exciting transition. As the economic crisis deepened, we were growing, you don’t hear enough stories like that but they are out there. Design skills are definitely an advantage during a recession.