New inventions and iterations

I’ve spent about 20 years working in the world of business and big tech. I’ve put my heart and soul into projects for insurance companies, corporate consulting, manufacturing, healthcare and utilities. I’ve enthusiastically approached these problems because I believed that as a designer, I could bring good to the world I was in by bringing creativity and thoughtfulness to a problem that likely hadn’t benefited from that yet.

But now it has become time for a new iteration. In my 20+ years of working for others as a designer, I can’t bring to mind a project that stands out in my mind that strongly that I would say that the time was extraordinarily well spent, save one: a bathroom remodel that I did during the pandemic.

During this project, I found myself face to face with so many opportunities to grow. I found the design process to be much more relevant than the one we followed at work, I experimented, I iterated, I evaluated, and I revised all aspects of this bathroom until I found myself with the perfect final one.

The before and after are stark and from all the work I’ve ever done, I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten more validation from a project I have worked on. This work was tangible, it wasn’t a file on a hard drive that might get lost or accidentally erased. And now in the dawn of the AI revolution, I find myself really craving this kind of tangible work, something I can put my hands on, and see and interact with, with my body and my eyes, in a lasting and ongoing way.

So when I got laid off in the spring of 2023, I decided to dedicate my life to this kind of work, and these kinds of challenges. Tangible, built environments. Contributing to a sense of home, the kind of design work that everyone can relate to.

As a result, Scavenger has been reinvented as a design-build renovation company and will endeavor to provide more women with the same experience that I had learning and building my own bathroom. Coaching and life transformation are ready outputs of a renovation effort, especially when one engages with the materials themselves. We hope to bring joy and empowerment to the world we work with, in this newest iteration.

Innovation and differentiation

The ability to differentiate is a dwindling art. Every app these days copies the other apps, and many companies take their cue from their competition. This, in our opinion, is the wrong way to go about success. 

At the California College of Arts, we're learning to approach business a different way. Our chair Andy Dong calls it differentiated heterogeneity, in other words, doing the work to understand what sets you apart from from everyone else doing exactly what you're doing. This isn't marketing, it isn't content, and it isn't finance. This is design strategy, solved by speaking to your customers and not only giving them what they want but also anticipating those needs beyond empathy, beyond trends, and beyond intuition. 

Creating insights like these takes a design minded approach to the bigger problem of creation and growth. We need to be the kind of leaders and strategists that ask questions before providing answers. Questions like why, how, and what will my customers do with what I create? Solving for need is what designers have been doing for years. Isn't it time the business world caught up? 

Scavenging for dreams

Most great endeavors start as a jumble of thoughts, ideas and musings. How can you amass these disparate concepts into an instrument for success?

You need three things: a story, a strategy, and a design. 

Story has been with us since the beginning of mankind. We want stories to relate to, we need stories to understand each other, and we crave stories to buy in and participate with. Stories are incredibly valuable for setting the stage to communicate your special and unique offering to the world. What's your story? Who are you? What do you bring to the table for your clients?

Strategy defines who you are and where you're going. You can't move without a strategy and an idea for a direction toward success. Strategy defines the what, the who, the where and the how. How do you take a story and make it reality? With solid strategic direction behind your story, you can drive your efforts toward business growth efficiently and with confidence. 

Design brings it all together. You want everything in your project and your business to align to your story and your vision. Design is the wardrobe for your business to shine. Armed with a strategy and a good story, great design creates confidence and communicates everything about who you are consistently and creatively. Design takes everything into account and communicates who you are and where you are going without your ever having to say a word. 

Alignment from story to strategy to design is essential in your communication to clients and to the world. With all three in place, you can find your way through the maze of creation to the fulfilling reality of manifestation. Using user centric design thinking to execute on these steps ties your project together and makes the journey fun, as opposed to the heaviness of business have to's. When you have these three things organized and set, all your business decisions can operate smoothly and from one vision: namely, what you can do for your clients.