Olympia
Datta
Design Strategist, UX Specialist
Fuego, Qatar
Hi! My name is Olympia Datta, I am a strategic design practitioner and leader, specializing in experience, innovation and business design. Working at the intersection of technology, social innovation and business transformation, I help create value by aligning business goals to user/customer needs. Read more about my design practice.
My forte is stakeholder engagement, research, sense-making and pattern recognition. Unburdened by labels, undeterred by presumptions, my priority is to do good for as many people as possible and fostering empathy, by designing for compassion.
An amateur artist, prolific creator and avid book sniffer. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, I worked as an innovation analyst, web developer and now lead UX and strategy at a Canadian Tech firm, based in Qatar. I am also a recent graduate of the Strategic Design and Management, graduate program at Parsons, NY.
Track 2: Design Leadership & Influence
Humanizing Tech by Design
Trust in design has yet to be universal, this talk will cover the transformation of the role design plays in a small to mid size, Qatar-based Canadian tech company. Born from tech, Design first broke free of its visual-only, aesthetic first role as an experiment in a project. From there on it was a journey of educating clients and colleagues alike, getting in buy-in from top management to on boarding core teams.
It has been an uphill battle, which has carved out space for design, but it’s far from over. Practicing design is what brought us this far along, the basis of which has been empathy. By communicating the story of the users, the needs of the clients, the positions of the team members, it took several iterations to align, define and implement a human-centered design process.
Today, putting the human in the story first is second nature.
Track 2: Design Leadership & Influence
Three key takeaways
– Strategic Design peeks around the corner and prepares the now for what’s coming, which is what translates to added value in business.
– Educating the market is the strongest form of proof or validation you can offer to senior and executive members for buy in.
– Getting buy-in from that top management is important especially for those who do not understand or cannot reframe their stance on design.
