Doug Powell: Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Faculty Visiting Lecture

Doug Powell is an award-winning designer and executive design leader with more than 30 years of experience in a wide range of design disciplines. An alum of the WashU College of Art, Powell received the school’s Distinguished Alumni Award and the AIGA Minnesota Fellow Award, both in 2014. Powell is a lecturer, commentator, and thought leader on design issues. He has presented at a variety of global conferences, forums, and universities, including Beirut Design Week in Lebanon, Fortune’s Brainstorm Design in Singapore, and the Yale School of Management. He was on the jury of the 2018 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. From 2011-2013, Powell served as the national president of AIGA, the professional association for design in the U.S.

In the past decade, Powell served as vice president of design at IBM and Expedia Group, where he oversaw design practices, design systems, and designer career and leadership programs, as well as the scaling of cross-functional design thinking practices across the companies. Alongside his leadership training and coaching practice, he is the producer and host of “This Is A Prototype: The Design Leadership Podcast.”