✨ Last night I went to an inspiring talk hosted by #Design Connection, spotlighting trailblazing women leading change and making an impact with design, in their own rights.
This wasn’t just another International Women’s Day event, this was an intimate presentation in how design can drive real, meaningful change — from getting a seat at the boardroom table to literally saving lives through safety-by-design principles.
💃🏼 Speaker 1: Emma Carter — Redesigning the Boardroom Table
Emma Carter, (author of ‘Shaping a Designed up Organisation’ and ‘DesignedUp: A designers guide on how to lead inside the tech industry’How ), is on a mission and is delivering her purpose: redesigning the boardroom table to make sure women and designers have a seat at it.
👀 The stat that got our attention: Companies that have design at their core outperform those that don’t by 219%.
But here’s the reality — a lot of companies focus on outcomes for shareholders and the masses, skewing data to impress the board, while completely missing the mark when their products can’t quite scratch that itch for the people actually using them.
Emma shared some genuinely shocking examples of design failures with massive impacts:
🧴 Marriott Hotels rolled out automatic soap dispensers across their entire network. When women with darker skin tried to dispense soap, the dispenser couldn’t recognise their skin tone. Why? They’d failed to test diversely.
🩺 Mammography machines — if you’ve ever had a breast scan, you know the uncomfortable reality of having your boob pancaked on a flat surface. Did you know the first machines were created by two very tall males? No wonder they’re not built with women in mind. But GE changed this — they got women to design and build a product that women actually USE.
🔹 Getting designers a seat at the leadership table is no mean feat. Although we, as designers, appreciate the importance of design, not everyone else does.
Emma walked us through how to achieve this, and the hard reality is: senior stakeholders only listen when we’re speaking THEIR language. When we know what the business is trying to achieve and can show how design moves the needle on metrics, execs become more receptive.
She introduced the Star Model and how design can influence and impact all of its pillars — but the key is being able to articulate how design helps the business.
💡 Emma’s 6-step design maturity ladder provides a framework to identify design capabilities based on maturity. It helps map how execs view the business versus how it’s actually performing, allowing you to bridge gaps and identify what’s holding you back.
💃🏻 Speaker 2: Catherine Fitzpatrick — Design for Safety, Design for Lives
Catherine Fitzpatrick, CEO of Flequity Ventures and former bank executive, completely shifted gears. If Emma showed us how to get design into the boardroom, Catherine showed us why design desperately needs to be there.
Her message was clear and urgent: Safety isn’t accidental — it’s designed.
🔹 As the architect of Commonwealth Bank’s domestic and family violence strategy, Catherine has seen firsthand how products can be weaponised and misused against those who are disadvantaged or in need.
😱 She shared a story that made the entire room go silent: a woman trying to leave her husband. Her ex was using bank transfers to send threatening messages through the transaction descriptions. The bank account had become a messaging service for abuse. Shocking!!
🔎 Catherine and her team conducted thorough investigations into transactions and identified the patterns of violent behavior. Whilst of course there were some random transaction descriptions out there, they were shocked to discover that DV messages were more common than they thought. They looked at the research insights discovered and mapped these against the eSafety Commissioner’s principles around safety by design, to come up with a plan of action:
- Safety first
- Accountability and transparency on platforms
- It’s not up to the user to report — platforms need to act
💸 Their first solution: Block the words, not the money.
They created a data dictionary of abusive language. To date, over 1 million messages have been blocked across all banks. Banks are now actively monitoring for inappropriate words. CBA even published their code on GitHub for identifying these patterns.
The impact? They’re helping to stop psychological violence, identify offenders, and protect victims in real time.
💪 But Catherine didn’t stop there. She wrote a paper called ‘Designed to Disrupt’ — exploring how financial products are weaponised through financial abuse, and how we need to design them differently.
The examples of how coercive violence occurred in other sectors kept coming:
- Insurance policies – eg – abusive partners calling to cancel policies and then threatened their partner to burn the house down with them and their children in it.
- Energy and power bills racked up by others, putting victims into debt and using joint accounts as a way to track partners down.
I think these examples truly brought to light how easy service design and products can fail to keep customers when they need it the most. And current terms or policies do not accommodate or make exceptions for these cases.
💡 Catherine introduced a new Design for Safety Framework:
1. Understand how products can be weaponised
2. Design for safety from the ground up
3. Communicate acceptable behaviour
📣T&Cs should explicitly state: “You can’t use our product for misuse.” Her Respect and Protect website shows how companies are now using these terms to protect customers — arming customers to make more informed decisions on providers with better protection terms.
Check out her website, where you can nominate providers to improve their terms or say thanks to those who are making the change.
⚜️ The call to action: Think of safety as innovation. Do what we can to protect women and children. Stop the systemic suffering and give victims the support they need.
🤔 Her final question hit hard: How do you help the people you can’t see get a seat at the table?
💬 The Panel Discussion — Real Talk on Design, Diversity, and Imposter Syndrome
Kate Ingham from KPMG moderated a powerful panel discussion that dug into the messy, honest realities of driving design change in organisations.
❓ Where is the design concept struggling in organisations and how do you explain value of design at all levels?
It depends on maturity. The key is taking stakeholders on the journey and explaining why. Most companies are scared of change — so meet them where they are.
❓ How do you get government to understand safety by design?
Catherine shared that the government has written to all ministers asking them to look at systems that are being manipulative, misused, or weaponised. It’s really complex work — unpicking policy to protect people while maintaining things like tax systems. But there’s an appetite to look, which is progress.
❓ How do you ensure inclusivity in design practice?
🔹 Bring all teams and backgrounds into the room
🔹 Test with a diverse pool of users
🔹 Have the right people at the right time to get the right insights
🔹 Use equity impact assessments and stakeholder research to understand what’s working and what’s not
Catherine mentioned using the triangulation of data from her research was interesting. And recognising that there are a lot of people who aren’t experiencing the product like the mass audience. This opens up opportunities for new products or highlights missed audiences.
❓ When there’s an overwhelming amount of data, what do you show companies?
Companies have a lot of data, but it’s hard to get the right insights. The answer? Speak to customers to learn. And when you bring diverse voices into the room — people who aren’t normally there — let them talk and uncover what you’re missing.
❓ Imposter syndrome — how do you navigate it?
This question brought out some beautifully vulnerable moments.
🔹 Catherine shared the devastation of being dumped as commissioner, and how becoming a leader meant trying to fit into a workplace mold that wasn’t designed for her. Her advice: Be yourself. It’s okay to be different from the mold.
🔹 Emma opened up about writing not being her forte — she wasn’t good at English or maths in school. She learned from great male mentors and got guidance from colleagues. But she also drew a hard line when she was badly bullied by a female colleague — she voiced her concerns and made it clear she wouldn’t tolerate it, even if it meant leaving. Her takeaway: Know which hill you want to die on.
✨ The Takeaway
Last night wasn’t just about celebrating women in design. It was about recognising the real, tangible impact design can have when it’s done with intention, empathy, and a commitment to safety and inclusion.
Whether it’s getting a seat at the boardroom table, or designing systems that protect the most vulnerable among us, the message was clear: design has the power to change lives — if we’re brave enough to lead the change.
🙏 Huge thanks to Design Connection – comprised of SydDT (Ben Pecotich, Lucas Mara and Kate Linton), #CCX (Kevin Wilkins, Lydia Bradshaw, Sylvia Luk, and James Earnshaw), #EUX (Adam Faulkner), Leapfrog (Susan Wolfe) and Vera Chan.
#InternationalWomensDay #DesignLeadership #SafetyByDesign #ProductDesign #Inclusion #DesignThinking #WomenInTech #DesignConnection
