Highlights
What happens when design finally gets its seat at the table? If this DesignMeets panel—with a number of insightful comments from the audience—is any indication, the answer is: it gets complicated. But also more essential than ever.
Design is finally strategic, now it’s everyone’s business.
Design has moved past surface-level aesthetics and into the guts of organizational change. From banking to government, it’s shaping services, streamlining systems, and asking bigger questions than, “Which font?”
Distributed teams need more than Slack and good intentions.
Embedding designers in pods sounds great, until no one speaks the same language. Without rituals, cross-pollination, and time with other designers, isolation sets in and creativity stalls.
Design school isn’t the finish line.
Many grads arrive ready to push pixels but not always ready to navigate complexity, ambiguity, or politics. Organizations need to fill the gap with coaching, context, and crash courses in facilitation.
Leadership gets learned the hard way.
No one on the panel learned to lead in school. Their real education? Trial, error, late nights, and figuring out how to get things done without burning out… or burning bridges.
AI is helpful… until it starts stealing junior designers’ jobs.
Used thoughtfully, AI tools are great for speeding up the small stuff. But rely on them too much, and you risk skipping the messy, formative work that turns beginners into pros.
Hosted at the Rotman School of Management and moderated by Mike Dila and Emma Aiken-Klar, this in-person panel brought together three leaders working inside very different institutions: Milica Stefancic (Ontario Government), Azadeh Houshmand (Scotiabank), and Farwa Kazmi (GreenShield Canada). What united them was a shared challenge: how to keep design integrated, impactful, and human inside large, often fragmented organizations.
Design Expands—and Gets Messy
In a room abuzz chowing down on veggie sliders, flatbread pizzas, and braised beef brochette with Argentinian chimichurri, the conversation began by tracing the evolution of in-house design. Milica, who leads design teams in the public sector, has watched design shift from surface-level visual work to deeper service design and transformation. “Large organizations can have that sort of aesthetic layer,” she said, “but it’s the deep transformation that is really necessary."
Azadeh noted a similar shift inside the banking industry, where design’s value now lies in orchestrating entire customer journeys. “It’s starting to really feel like the value of design as a holistic, strategic sort of capability is becoming a big opportunity.”
Farwa brought the startup perspective, where designers are often expected to be generalists, ‘wearing a lot of hats’, and involved in everything from mockups to strategy. But as GreenShield scales and absorbs smaller companies, her role is increasingly about systems and structure. “We call this the ‘designification’ of venture capital,” she noted. “Design became a hot topic... we finally got a seat at the table.”
New Talent, New Realities
The panel also reflected on the changing needs and expectations of early-career designers. As Milica put it, many students still think they’re being hired to design screens. In reality, “You can’t really go about solving wicked problems if you think you’re just going to be creating a new app." At the Ontario government, junior designers are immersed in facilitation, service mapping, and deep research from the start.
Azadeh emphasized the translator role helping new hires bridge business objectives and design intent. “It’s really about facilitating conversations and translating what’s important for the business and what makes sense for the designer."
The Trouble with Pods
Several panelists reflected on the challenge of spreading design across organizations. Pod models and squad-based team structures have their perks, but also create silos.
“We developed this format called the hub and spoke,” Milica explained. “But if the designers spent too much [time] being the sole designer on another team far from the mothership... they would really start to struggle." Her team now prioritizes rituals and touchpoints that reconnect designers to each other.
Farwa has tried a similar “hive” model grouping pods by domain (e.g. pharmacy, mental health, insurance) and encouraging co-creation workshops across teams. “We realized there were other designers, like on the marketing side or CX... just operating in a bit of a silo,” she said. “So we started including them in our process."
Lessons in Leadership
When asked how they learned to lead, the panelists didn’t sugarcoat it. “Trial by fire,” said Farwa, who got her start pitching projects out of a friend’s living room. Milica added, “As a leader, you can’t do it all… it’s about building that trust, knowing you’ve hired the right people, and getting them to do their best work."
For Azadeh, leadership has been a journey of feedback, self-awareness, and understanding where to push and where to let go. “It’s an ongoing learning,” she said. “The journey never stops.”
The AI Tension
When the conversation turned to AI, responses ranged from cautious to pragmatic. Both Azadeh and Milica noted strict privacy regulations and data governance in their industries, which limits the use of AI in design practice. Milica shared concern that “our team may not stay up to date” if they can’t experiment with these tools.
Farwa’s view? Augment, don’t automate. “We’re not at the automation stage,” she said. “We’re more at the augmentation stage, where we still need human oversight.” She also flagged a growing risk: that AI tools may reduce opportunities for junior designers to learn through hands-on work.
Designing Work Itself
Finally, the panel reflected on the future of design careers. With few clear ladders left to climb, panelists emphasized lateral growth, domain learning, and creating internal mobility.
“Sometimes, the opportunity may not be on your team or even within your org,” Farwa said. Instead of clinging to titles, her team explores role-switching, skill expansion, and passion projects.
The panel ended with a provocation: what if part of design’s future is redesigning how work happens, especially in a post-AI, hybrid, and siloed world?
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