Delivering design education during a global pandemic: lessons learned
The IBM Patterns Design Education team had to pivot from an immersive, in-person program to entirely virtual in a matter of weeks. That experience left a lasting impact, including recognition from the iF Design Awards!
Before the pandemic, last-minute preparations for Patterns — IBM’s design education program for early-career designers and interns — had my team use a lot of mental energy and physical space.
We stuffed swag bags and laid them in rows across the tables and floors of our Austin studio; we corralled designers to welcome their new colleagues and give them tours; we even booked a large chunk of rooms at a local extended stay for the 6–8 week duration of our program.
As designers across the world gathered to learn about design at IBM, they often walked away most marked by an implicitly stated lesson: In Austin, we care about design — but more importantly we care about our designers.
However, in March 2020, our team faced an unprecedented challenge: completely transitioning our 6 and 8-week, in-person training programs to a 100% virtual format for designers across the globe. The pandemic forced us to give these designers a feeling of belonging agnostic of physical location. And since our designers live all over the world, that meant learning how to support people who work when I sleep.
On top of that, our program is meant to be rigorous, pushing designers so they’re more than ready to do impactful work at IBM. But working in isolation in the middle of a global pandemic is draining even with a light workload. So we had reimagine Patterns so that it maintained its quality while avoiding virtual meeting burn out.
What we’ll take with us
This experience changed our program in ways that will long outlive a global pandemic. While we don’t know every detail of how Patterns will run in the future, the unideal circumstances of the past year surfaced ideas that made the program stronger.
First, we learned to be more intentional about when to conduct live sessions. In the before times, we made just about every educational component live, in-person. But we found that much of that content works just as well or better as a self-paced resource. That said, we made more time for Patternites to direct their own learning while still following a curriculum. We found a healthy mix of online versus offline, self-paced learning for our program participants.
Oh boy, I did not know what to expect when starting this program, but I was blown away by how polished every session was and the structure of the overall program especially in a remote setting.
- Patterns attendee, exit survey
We also utilized good old storytelling to make challenging situations emotionally fulfilling. Using Enterprise Design Thinking and modeled after the cadence of challenges and victories in the Hero’s Journey, we could plan how we provided support and guidance through our programming. We conceptualized an objectives-based, storied approach to their course, where every lesson, activity, and talk aligned to the journey.
Further, since our guest speakers no longer had to be in Austin to deliver sessions in Patterns, we were able to bring in a wide diversity of folks to enrich the program with our company’s experts in design, development, and product management.
Feedback has always been infused into our program, and we requested even more of that during the pandemic.
For example, most of the time spent in Patterns is on group incubator projects — where attendees apply enterprise design thinking to strategic IBM business challenges. We asked for designers’ incubator project preferences so they felt more ownership and excitement around their work. Since keeping up morale proves challenging in a completely virtual work environment, our team wanted to make sure that everyone was invested in the most important part of Patterns from day 1.
Additionally, when we polled the designers asking where they grew the most during the program, one of the most common responses was design research. Even though they won’t all play the role of design researcher on their permanent teams, I’m proud to say that we sent them off with an appreciation for arguably the most important aspect of modern design: understanding their users.
These 3 principles — intentional scheduling, a solid storytelling model, and continuous feedback — got us through 2020 and into 2021 with an even stronger understanding of our purpose as a design education program. They even earned us some recognition from the iF Design Awards! Regardless of delivery model, our goal will always be to prepare designers to deliver excellent experiences at IBM.
A huge thank you to Amanda Booth for ghostwriting this post.
And a huge shoutout to my teammates Katie Parsons & Debra Staff for the collaboration that went into delivering our virtual program in Summer 2020 and beyond!
Nicole Umphress is an Education Designer at IBM based in Austin, Texas. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
