My name is Silvia, I am a designer and writer and I work in the field of enterprise innovation. But if you ask me, after a couple of wines, what I feel like I really am, I guess it would be a bit of an investigator.
After my first university degree, I took a stab at journalism and spent one year in a TV newsroom, for what proved to be one of my most significant and transformatve experiences. Unfortunately it was also the least paid and most exhausting - as an intern I couldn´t afford accommodation in Milan, and I had to wake up at 3:20 am to drive all the way down from the Lakes for my dawn shift, or drive back at 1am after the evening shift. I moved on and ventured in the at-that-time nascent digital design field.
I worked as a content designer for the Public sector. (Back then, that role was still largely referred to as "digital copywriter").
Post recession precariety hit hard.
I bounced in an out of different roles, but still very much gravitating around digital communication. In any pockets of time I had between jobs, or interviews, I would invest in learning new things, including front end coding and marketing, slidthering my way, slowly but steadily, towards technology.
Evenually it was time to move on again, to find the one thing that could make my veins pulse with the life of passion. I enrolled in a Master in Strategic Design at Milan Politecnico and this is how ten years ago, my journey in design thinking and UX officially began.
I feel like we are investigators because our design job entails asking ourselves a lot of questions - and often lead other people to ask themselves lots of questions. We delve into people´s journey with products and experiences, again investigating to find the unmet needs, the struggles, the issues that need fixing. Throughout the lens of the human and the user, we find opportunities for business to innovate, to find irresistible solutions that address users´problems to be fixed. Suffice it to say, in our modern world many of these solutions are grounded on some form of digital technology.
The beauty of design is that you can apply one same approach and mindset to different domains, what theorist Richard Buchanan calls the 4 orders - communication(graphic and brand design), physical products (industrial design), interactions and processes (UX, service and interaction design) and systems (strategic, business design). The last decade in the profession has covered all of them, with a progressive focus from brand to UX to service to enterprise processes and systems. Now, as Innovation Designer in IBM Client Engineering, my role is about synthesing research, client insights and requirements to craft user experiences that connect people in enduring ways with product, services and brands; facilitating and leading innovation sessions with clients, using design-thinking and agile frameworks; leading UX and customer / user journey design for prioritized use cases and Minimal Viable Solutions', often reimaging how work is performed. This involves high-level conceptualising, wireframing and prototyping MVPs or Proofs of Concept; applying information architecture, research and evaluation in user design and ensuring coherence of vision and conceptual solidity of our projects.
In my spare time I write and conduct independent research - spanning emerging digital experiences, behavioural change, critical design and change managemennt.