Lisa Marie Chen
3 min readFeb 14, 2019

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Immerse yourself in Design at Think 2019!

Last post I shared our schedule of design sessions happening this week in San Francisco for Think 2019. I hope that you will join us for a session or two, but if you’re spending most of your time on the show floor, you can still get find us at Booth #370 in Moscone South Hall at the Data & Cloud Design Immersive.

But Lisa, what’s a design immersive?

At Think 2018 in Las Vegas, the team and I hosted a session called “Meet the Designers” of IBM Business Analytics after our keynote. It was a wonderful opportunity for customers to meet members of the design team, learn about our process, and discover all of the opportunities to influence the future of our products. We had a few screens printed out on the walls where customers could tell us what their thoughts were directly to the team responsible for designing them – co-creation at its finest.

We realized that conferences are a wonderful way for our Design team to engage our customers in person. While we often host virtual sessions using Zoom and Webex, there simply isn’t anything quite like doing it in real life. So for 2019, we decided to go all in. With the help and support from the Hybrid Cloud Design team and my partner-in-crime, Tracy McGoldrick, we are so excited to present the Data & Cloud Design Immersive.

Step inside to explore our dynamic space that not only offers you design-led product demos from the Hybrid Cloud portfolio, but also provides an opportunity for Think attendees to engage IBM product designers in design thinking activities by providing feedback and co-creating potential future innovations.

Our Wishing Wall asked visitors to let us know what they wanted or hoped to see in the future of IBM products, services, or events.

In addition to the design thinking activities, several of the Hybrid Cloud Design Teams will be on site to demo a range of products from the new mobile experience from IBM Business Analytics to bringing your data to life with AR and IBM Immersive Data. Each demo will be followed by a conversation where customers can provide feedback directly to the designers responsible for creating the experience. This type of engagement is the cornerstone of our design practice. Putting our users and prospective users are at the centre of our process, ensuring that we are solving the right problem for the right people — making their lives better, easier, and simpler.

Which brings us to the last area of the Design Immersive — our sponsor user lounge. In a memo dated December 20, 1966, T.J. Watson Jr. famously stated, “Good design is good business.” Over 50 years later, the pursuit of good design continues to be our raison d’être. And we achieve this by involving our customers in the process. Through our Customer Experience Program (aka our Design Partner Program for IBM Business Analytics), sponsor users work along-side our product teams to preview early design concepts, engage in one-on-one interviews, and participate in design workshops to co-create the future of our products. As a value-added service, our sponsor user program renews our commitment to designing outcomes that help you and your company succeed.

Visit the Data & Cloud Design Immersive (Booth #370, Moscone South) and ask any of our designers for information about our sponsor user program, or you can sign up for more details here: http://ibm.biz/userexperience

See you there!

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Lisa Marie Chen

Design Program Director @ IBM Business Automation, Porsche enthusiast, and part-time overlander. Loves bubble tea, tech, and thinking about the future.