#ebaydesign

Tonight I went to the event, A conversation with John Maeda and design leaders from eBay, held by AIGASF and located at Zendesk, where they have a beautiful and huge space for events!

To be honest, I really have a small database of well-known designers in the world, especially I'm really bad at memorize English names. It took me a while even memorizing Jony Ive. (Steve Jobs is not in this case though.) Anyway, I wouldn't have been to this amazing sharing by John Maeda if AIGA wasn't looking for volunteers. Thank you AIGA for giving me this opportunity!!! Now I know who John Maeda is and what great works he has done.

John is really a great speaker. I felt fully concentrated and engaged while he was talking. He shared about his thought process before coming to Silicon Valley and after, and the relationship between design and Silicon Valley. Does Silicon Valley need design? Or, is that design needs Silicon Valley?

The part that I also thought about a lot is when John was talking about "Top-Down". In any given company structure, people on top have more power to make decisions, so any change from bottom up will be hard and little. It's clear that the more the leader thought about design, the greater the company can grow. That's why when he saw John Donahoe, eBay CEO, and Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, had a meaningful conversation on the stage, it gave him a ratatouille-moment. They are both CEOs and they both know the value and importance of design.

Watching him talking about how the CEO brought design thinking into the huge company and had the courage to try new stuff, I'm really moved. I want to make change in the place I'm working with, but I feel lots of resistance, and don't know if I'm should insist to push it forward, or the leaders are the one that should take the move. The more talks I went, the more expectations I put on our leaders, and I'll look back at myself thinking that maybe I'm not trying enough?

Borrowing his words, I'm also thinking about how to elevate the value of design thinking, but actually what I need to do is to reveal the value of design thinking. This shouldn't be anything new, but I look at this as a strategy to talk about design to non-designers, and it's brilliant! I'll have to think about how to implement it from now on.