Martin Dowson

I'm a Design Leader who works mostly in large-scale legacy organisations but brings experience across start-ups, scale-ups and PE-backed firms. My hands-on skills are Research, Service Design and Futures - and I love working in complex regulatory spaces because this is where the intersect of society, economy and business lies - and herein are the foundations of what impacts human-life in our world today. I cut my teeth in Design at the Interactive Design Group of Accenture in 2000 - 13 years before they acquired Fjord we were the first HCD team in the company across London, NYC and Chicago. Having graduated in Psychology with HCI as my focus - I was in a perfect place to cut my thousands of hours - starting as a UX Researcher and moving into UX and IA. My first project was Sainsburys To you - online grocery shopping. A blank sheet of paper, 6 weeks and customers with us every other day... I've never really seen another project like it since... but the designs stood the test of time and the user research was formative for me. in the five years I was there - I felt something was missing from how we were trying to deliver 'a better customer experience' and 'design in a human-centred way'... I started to try to join up the business architecture to the customer journey to solve the problems the UI couldn't and it wasn't until I read Ben/Andy/Lars book that I realised Service Design 'was a thing'. This expanded the surface area I could work across and integrated my consulting training with my human-centred skills. I left Accenture in 2005 and went freelance to help build capability in clients to do Human centred design. I formed an agency in 2013 to take Customer-centric to the board level - working with Kodak as they came out of Bankruptcy to address their 5 year strategy from a human-centred lens (to hopefully avoid mistakes of the past)... in 2016 I moved in-house to one of my clients, Lloyds Banking Group - having re-designed the operating model for their Design team I was invited to take a seat on the leadership team - and created the first Futures team there working on 10yr out horizons to de-risk decisions of today. At one point I was leading Research/Foresight/Insight and then latterly I led a central capability of Design Language, Design Systems, Design and Research Ops as part of our enablement of the next incarnation of the Design team's operating model under the direction of their first (and last) chief design officer. At LBG I created a Design Graduate programme and hired the banks first industrial and product (physical) designers into our team, sponsored UX Design Apprenticeships - I am passionate about investing in emerging talent. I left LBG in 2021 and since then moved into Advisory and Interim work I have advised, sat on the leadership teams of and worked with the Global VPs of Design at major corporates including Colgate and BP, Led as an interim at BT and TUI and been a Design Partner in a global consulting firm. I deliver training for Service Design Apprenticeships and guest lecture/mentor at RCA and GSA.