Dre Szymczak
Dre is a California based executive creative leader, focused on Innovation and Digital Product and Experience Design. As a Creative Fellow, he leads the award-winning design team at Deloitte Digital, while focusing on ideas that create real-world impact, design storytelling, and creative culture building.
Design and Hope in Times of Change
a brief thought experiment in future-casting
This year I can definitively say that I’ve been a professional designer for exactly half of my life. And so what was true for me in the beginning— and what is still true today — is that to design is to hope — hope for a great idea to show up, hope for the right opportunity to materialize, and hope for a better future…
To be a designer for me is to permanently suspend the disbelief, and to daily go into design battles thinkning that change is possible…
Design and Destruction
why your business (and your designers) need to pay attention to everything.
Yes, everything.
In the 1940s, Joe Schumpeter, an Austrian economist and Harvard professor theorized that one day we will live in a society so intertwined with its economic system, it will be almost impossible for businesses to create new value without disrupting or destroying some part of the system, often impacting the lives of people on both sides of products and services. In this so-called “advanced” capitalism businesses…
Dre’s work was featured in Fast Company and has been internationally recognized with Cannes Lions for Business Transformation in 2022. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and is an active member of the design community.
—Deloitte and Creative Fellow
Head of Prodcut Design
Deloitte Digital—2019/Present
—Creative
Director
Razorfish—2011/2015
—Group Design
Director and
Head of
Practice
Fjord—2015/2019
—Art
Director
Leo Burnett / DDB / Branding Shops —2000/2010
—Fine
Artist
UAP—1995/2000
Apple Commerce
Global Partners
Design Philosophy
—Less,
but better…
Following nature’s
lead as the best designer around,
I strive to create
value with simplicity and efficiency.
Strategic design, creativity and technical acumen are all at play when breakthrough innovation takes hold.
To supercharge our ability to innovate, we master new rituals of collaborative creativity, dialogue, and flow.
Businesses embrace design when its value it brings is clear, and when the experience resonates well with the end user.
Simplicity, although not always achievable, should be an undercurrent of our efforts to elevate experiences.
—Discover.
Define—
Design—
—Deliver
Living in the Anthropocene brings new responsibilities to the role of Design: We are radically redefining the remit, the methods, and the domain designers and creatives must occupy to create a circular, planet - and therefore human-centric products, experiences and policies.
