Sparking inspiration, design excellence, and connections
Some highlights from this year’s IBM Spark Design Festival.
The IBM Spark Design Festival is an annual celebration of all things design. It’s open to all IBM employees but aimed particularly at our community of roughly 3,000 professional designers. The live program of events runs for three days across three timezones and includes many inspiring design presentations, lightning talks, social activities, workshops, networking events and more.
Following its success in 2021 and 2022, the IBM Spark Design Festival recently returned (September 26-29) — this time with seven of our global design studios hosting live, in-person sessions, which were also live-streamed for remote participants around the globe.
Origin and aims
IBM Design is known for having a great design studio culture, where designers work collaboratively in bustling, modern, purpose-built, studio spaces. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, like everyone else, our designers suddenly found themselves having to work from home, with all interactions limited to digital communication channels.
So as a way to help our designers reconnect with each other, share inspiration, teach and learn new skills, and have some fun, we launched the first Spark Design Festival in May 2021.
It proved to be a huge success — so much so that it has now become a much-loved annual event. Even though our global studios have been open again for some time now, people still really appreciate the opportunity to connect with colleagues from other parts of the company, celebrate award-winning design work, and see fresh ideas and innovations. For more details about the origins of the IBM Spark Design Festival, see this 3-minute video by Spark’s early sponsor and VP of UX Research at IBM, Karel Vredenburg.
Format
With designers located all around the world, the festival itself has to be truly global. We achieve this by running related but separate live (at some points overlapping) programs in three geographies (geos) or time zones: the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
It’s also designed to work both as an in-person and a virtual conference. This year we had at least two ‘host’ design studios in each geo, so presentations and discussion panels took place in front of a live, in-person audience. But all these sessions were also streamed live so that any IBM designer in that time zone could watch the sessions and ask questions or add comments via our festival Slack channel. Other studio locations held ‘watch parties’ where local designers met up to experience the festival together, often involving food and fun activities.
A broad program
One of the tenets of the festival is that it’s accessible to and inclusive of all of our designers. So as well as catering to people in different geographies and time zones, it’s just as important that the festival program offers content covering different design disciplines, contexts, and domains.
At IBM we have designers who specialize in content design, motion design, service design, UX design, and visual design, as well as dedicated researchers, design managers, and DesignOps professionals. Furthermore, our design community works across different business units and in different contexts: some in software, some in infrastructure, some in research, some in consulting, and some in internal finance and operations.
The festival reflects this diversity by having design-related topics spanning three broad tracks:
- The craft of design (covering each of the design sub-disciplines)
- Career development for designers
- Design strategy and impact
With AI being such a hot topic both inside and outside of IBM right now, we made sure that our programming addressed different aspects of AI and particularly how design can contribute to AI. For example, in the lead-up to this year’s festival, we reached out to the SVP and Director of IBM Research, Darío Gil, and to the VP of Design, IBM Research, Susana Rodriguez de Tembleque, and asked them to address the value of design in an environment increasingly dominated by AI. Our goal with this and other AI-related sessions was to equip our designers with the confidence and skills they need to become leaders in the world of AI design.
This year, there were also numerous sessions related to sustainability and to user research. We also had individual sessions covering storytelling, data science, design standards, cognitive biases, motion design, UX metrics, design career paths, managing your manager, designing for software platforms, and many other topics.
But Spark’s more than presentations
Part of the aim of Spark is to provide designers with a platform to showcase their work and share their skills. But just as important to the festival is that we provide ways for people to connect and have some fun.
Social activities
As well as question and answer times in many of the presentations, each of the geos also held a speed networking session (‘Find a Spark’) to help people make new connections. Several studios also held lunch events, others baked and decorated cakes, and some held origami sessions.
Design challenge competition
This year, we partnered with Adobe to provide an engaging design challenge competition that ran during the two weeks leading up to the festival. Participants were given the following design challenge prompt:
How can IBMers leverage the power of AI to develop solutions that effectively mitigate the global impact of misinformation and disinformation, ensuring the content we consume is reliable and trustworthy?
There were some really impressive submissions, showing just how innovative our design community can be even with very limited time.
Showcasing people’s creativity
As you might expect from a group of professional designers, there is a lot of artistic talent in our community — not all of which gets to be included in our day-to-day IBM design work. That’s why we have our ‘Maker Gallery’ — an (internal) online art exhibition where IBM designers can share their personal creative hobbies. This year, we saw submissions featuring painting, pottery, digital art, typography, embroidery, floral craft, photography, nail art, and much more. It was a true celebration of art and creative design in all its many formats!
We also invited people to submit posters as a visual way of ‘presenting’ their IBM design work and expertise. This year we had entries covering effective teamwork, how to scale research personas, facets of explainable AI, effective curriculum design, and client success hints and tips. There’s an example later in this article.
The festival in numbers
Here’s a quick summary of the stats:
Sessions
- 100 lightning talks (maximum 10 minutes in length)
- 60 presentations (longer, more in-depth sessions, often with more than one presenter)
- 6 design workshops
- 4 discussion panels
People
- 245 speakers
- 129 participants (working in 24 teams) entered our design challenge
- 83 volunteers (including session submission evaluators, community event leaders, multimedia producers, live session MCs, Slack moderators, etc.)
- 76 people submitted contributions to our maker gallery
- 14 people contributed posters
With thanks to all those involved
To adapt the old proverb: truly it takes a village to raise a design festival.
The following people all gave of their time, their passion, and their skill to help make the festival a success. It simply wouldn’t have happened without them.
Firstly, with sincere thanks to our IBM Design executives and sponsors:
- Shani Sandy (Vice President, Design — Technology Lifecycle Services and our Spark Executive Sponsor), Katrina Alcorn (General Manager of Design at IBM), and Karel Vredenburg (Vice President, IBM UX Research).
Secondly, huge thanks to the festival chairs, past and present:
- Jon G. Temple (Chair for 2023 and Co-Chair in 2022), Jill Sherman (Co-Chair for 2023) and Felix Portnoy (Chair in 2021 and 2022 and a 2023 advisor).
And finally, props to the awesome IBM designers who formed the Spark Design Festival leadership team for 2023, who all gave so much of their time and skill:
- Alisha (Moore) Padolsky, Sarah Pugh, Dawn Ahukanna, Christine Jowdy, Jen Hatfield, Jason Telner, Mika Jugovich, Christina Adames, Dayna Harper, Corey Keller, Ana Fucs, Kristine Berry, Michael Tam, Garrett Hourihan, Zach Meyer, Jessica Ramirez, Kristin Kronk, Siddiq Nasar, Kelsey Scott, Ashley Brimsted, Jenny Price, Derick Montague, Jason Lynch, Teodora Preda, Jiju Thomas, Jillian Nicole Duckwitz, Dante Guintu, Jessica Crisp, and Chris Browne.
Tom Waterton is a Senior Content Designer at IBM based in Hursley, UK. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
