Andy Polaine
Dr. Andy Polaine is a design leadership coach, educator, and writer who helps clients build and grow their own design and innovation capability, transform their organisations and themselves. For several years he worked at Fjord where he was global Group Design Director of Client Evolution. Previously Andy was Fjord’s APAC Regional Design Director, based in Sydney, Australia.
Andy has been involved in interaction design since the early 90s and was co-founder of the award-winning new media group, Antirom, in London. He was a creative producer at Razorfish, UK and later Interactive Director at Animal Logic, Sydney. Andy was Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of Media Arts at The University of New South Wales, Sydney before moving to Germany and holds a PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney in which he examined the relationship between play and interactivity and he teaches on the MA Service Design at the Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland.
He has had a long career as an academic and independent consultant with nearly three decades of experience in design and innovation with clients across a range of industries, including financial services, public services, life sciences, telecommunications, automotive, media, design and education. He has written over 160 articles and papers and co-authored the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation. Andy is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and events and can be found online at polaine.com, @apolaine on Mastodon, on Twitter as @apolaine and also on LinkedIn. He writes a popular newsletter called Doctor’s Note and hosts the Power of Ten podcast.
Presentations
Leadership By Design 2024
Navigating The Design Leadership Dip
“The worst thing about growing up is realising adults don’t have all the answers.”
Moving into a design leadership role can lead to a confidence jarring dip. You let go of your craft skills while learning new leadership skills, often feeling inadequate at both. Many design leaders also discover loneliness at the top, being the sole executive with a design background. And yet is this not the place you aimed to be your whole career? Why, then, does it lead to such a crisis of purpose and uncertainty?
Drawing upon hundreds of hours of coaching design leaders, Andy Polaine, explores how to become more confident and comfortable with your leadership style and how to find resilience over burnout, authenticity over faking it.