Design With Purpose
This is a talk I gave at Northeastern University hosted by Scout as part of their design lecture series. It's about purpose, why having purpose is important, how we articulate that, and what we can do to find it.
Scout is a student run design agency on campus at Northeastern University. They manage themselves and take on real client work over the course of the year. When asked by a former intern to give a talk at their design lecture series I agreed without knowing exactly what I wanted to say to an audience of young designers. At the time I was reading Simon Sinek’s book “Start With Why” and I found the lessons in that book to be so important and fundamental to my own practice that instantly wanted to speak about purpose. This talk applies the principles of Sinek’s book to the art of storytelling and presents it as a way to guide clients, users, and even yourself to understanding purpose.
This is a clip from Mad Men that I showed during the talk, in which Don Draper perfectly illustrates the power of storytelling to tap in to human emotion to convey a message.