The Talent at PepsiCo Design & Innovation Discuss Their Methodology

Summary

The Mexico Design Center is a collective of multidisciplinary designers focusing on innovation through design thinking. They prioritize empathy, strategy, and prototyping to align creativity with business goals. By working internally within organizations like PepsiCo, they leverage unique insights to create impactful solutions. The team thrives on collaboration and transparency, applying their diverse skills across branding, product design, and experience creation. Their mission extends beyond business value, aiming to craft meaningful social experiences that enhance people’s lives through moments of convenience, safety, pleasure, and health.

Takeaways

• 🎨 The Mexico Design Center is a collaborative space where creators and designers from diverse backgrounds come together.
• 💡 The center focuses on a wide array of design disciplines, from graphic and motion design to product and experience design.
• 🧠 Design thinking is emphasized as a core process, involving empathy, strategy, and prototyping.
• 👥 Empathy is crucial in understanding user needs, translating them into strategies that influence the organization's brand, customer relations, and business models.
• 🚀 The design team works at the intersection of feasibility and innovation, aiming to turn the impossible into reality.
• 🔍 Transparency and collaboration are fundamental values at the center, fostering innovation across different functions and departments.
• 📊 The Design Center integrates design as a business value within PepsiCo, making it an internal part of the company's strategy and future vision.
• 🛠 The multidisciplinary nature of the team allows for seamless cross-functional collaboration, combining skills in various areas like sketching, 3D modeling, and project management.
• 📈 Designers at the center contribute to large-scale projects and events, focusing on the impact of design within society and how it evolves over time.
• 🌍 The ultimate goal is to build value not only for customers but for society as a whole, creating meaningful experiences that enhance convenience, safety, pleasure, and health.

Q & A

What is the focus of the Mexico Design Center?

The Mexico Design Center focuses on collaboration and innovation among creators, designers, and collaborators from various backgrounds to enhance the overall design experience.

What roles do the members of the design team hold?

The team includes graphic designers, brand experience designers, 3D animators, product and experience designers, brand and packaging designers, architects, and brand strategists.

What is design thinking and how is it used in this context?

Design thinking is an approach based on empathy, strategy, and prototyping. It involves understanding people's needs, translating them into strategies for organizations, and using design tools to create solutions and align teams around a central idea.

How does the Mexico Design Center encourage collaboration?

The center fosters collaboration through transparency, with the architecture and work culture designed to inspire and instigate collaboration across different teams and departments.

Why is empathy important in the design process?

Empathy allows designers to understand people's needs, dreams, and desires from a different perspective, enabling them to create solutions that resonate deeply with users.

How does being internal to a company like PepsiCo give the design team a competitive edge?

Being internal allows the design team to have a unique perspective, as they are integrated into the company, which helps them drive value by understanding internal dynamics and aligning design solutions with company goals.

What is the role of prototyping in the design process?

Prototyping is used to visualize ideas and create sketches or models, helping align teams and stakeholders around a common vision and enabling quick iteration based on feedback.

How do designers handle innovation between the feasible and the impossible?

Designers work at the edge between the feasible and the impossible, constantly pushing boundaries to transform impossible ideas into possible, innovative solutions.

How does design thinking create business value for companies?

Design thinking integrates into a company’s way of working, helping to address user needs and transform challenges into opportunities, which ultimately drives business value.

What is the ultimate mission of the Mexico Design Center's design team?

The team's mission is to build value not only for customers but for society as a whole by creating experiences that deliver pleasure, safety, convenience, and health for consumers.

Outlines

00:00

🎨 Collaborative Design Innovation

The Mexico Design Center brings together creators, designers, and collaborators from diverse backgrounds, focusing on a wide range of design disciplines such as graphic design, brand experience, motion design, and architecture. The core philosophy of the center revolves around transparency, collaboration, and leveraging design thinking, which includes empathy, strategy, and prototyping. The goal is to create solutions that are user-centered, while transforming challenges into design opportunities. The multidisciplinary approach allows the team to work across departments, focusing on the user experience and the company’s growth.

💡 The Power of Internal Perspective

Working internally within the company, rather than as outsiders, gives the Design Center an edge. Being embedded within the organization allows the design team to bring real business value by deeply understanding the brand, products, and goals. The internal perspective fosters innovation, aligning the design process with the company's broader objectives and making it possible to create meaningful connections with the audience and deliver exceptional value for the company.

🛠️ Holistic Design Across Touchpoints

The team at the Design Center thrives on a multidisciplinary approach, working holistically across all touchpoints. From sketching and 3D modeling to project management, the design process integrates various skill sets from the team members. By bringing together cross-functional expertise, the center creates a unified design approach that drives innovation, turning chaos into structured opportunities for the brand. This integration within the company’s ecosystem ensures that design adds real value and contributes to the business’s success.

🌍 Designing for Society and Future Value

The Design Center's mission extends beyond just the company; it seeks to create value for society at large. The designers focus on crafting experiences that improve people's lives, emphasizing moments of pleasure, safety, health, and convenience. By building designs that resonate with societal needs, they aim to shape a future where brands contribute positively to the world. Despite the team’s diverse backgrounds, the shared love for enhancing human experiences unifies them, reinforcing the power of storytelling as a tool for connection and social impact.

Keywords

💡Design Thinking

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach focused on empathy, strategy, and prototyping. In the video, it is emphasized as a key method for understanding users' needs and translating them into innovative solutions. The process fosters collaboration and ensures that both the brand and product development align with human experiences.

💡Empathy

Empathy is about understanding the needs, dreams, and challenges of users from their perspective. The video stresses its importance in design thinking, as it helps designers create products and experiences that resonate emotionally with people, ensuring that the solutions address real-world problems.

💡Prototyping

Prototyping refers to the process of creating preliminary models of a product or service to visualize and test ideas. The video highlights how this practice helps teams align around a single concept, allowing for feedback and adjustments before a final product is created.

💡Collaboration

Collaboration is central to the work environment described in the video. The multidisciplinary team at the Mexico Design Center integrates their diverse skills to work together on solving complex design challenges, leveraging their combined expertise for innovative results.

💡Transparency

Transparency, both in the design process and the architecture of the Mexico Design Center, is presented as crucial for fostering open communication and collaboration. The video mentions how the transparent design of the space inspires creativity and allows for a fluid exchange of ideas.

💡Multidisciplinary

The term multidisciplinary refers to the involvement of professionals from various fields, including graphic design, animation, brand strategy, and architecture. The video emphasizes how combining different perspectives leads to a more holistic and innovative approach to design.

💡Innovation

Innovation is framed as the ability to push the boundaries of what is feasible, transforming the impossible into the possible. In the video, designers are encouraged to explore the edge of feasibility to create groundbreaking solutions, making innovation a core value at the center.

💡Brand Experience

Brand experience refers to how users interact with and perceive a brand through various touchpoints. The video underscores the importance of designing not just the product, but the entire experience that surrounds it, from the brand's story to its interaction with the audience.

💡Customer-Centric

Being customer-centric means focusing on the user’s needs, desires, and overall experience. The video describes how design thinking aligns the brand, product, and service with the user's perspective, creating solutions that are not only functional but also emotionally meaningful.

💡Internal Perspective

An internal perspective refers to the advantage of being an in-house design team, as highlighted in the video. Working within the organization allows designers to have a deeper understanding of the company's goals and strategies, giving them a unique edge in driving value for the business.

Highlights

The Mexico Design Center is a collaborative hub for creators and designers from diverse backgrounds.

Designers work holistically across every touchpoint and skillset, creating synergy in multidisciplinary teams.

Design thinking is central to the process, emphasizing empathy, strategy, and prototyping.

Empathy is about understanding people's needs, dreams, and desires from a unique perspective.

The process involves translating insights into organizational strategies, business models, and customer relationships.

Prototyping and visualization tools are used to align teams around a common idea, fostering collaboration.

The integration of design into the company’s internal processes gives an edge in driving business value.

Designers focus on transforming problems into design opportunities by leveraging cross-functional skills.

Innovation is born at the intersection of the feasible and the infeasible, turning the impossible into reality.

The Design Center works across departments, focusing on the user experience and removing obstacles.

Being part of the company allows designers to have a unique internal perspective, enhancing competitiveness.

The goal is to create not just brand experiences, but broader social experiences that impact people's lives.

Design fragments of social experiences are aimed at improving convenience, safety, health, and pleasure for consumers.

Designers at the Mexico Design Center are united by a passion for creating experiences that resonate with people on a human level.

The center's mission is to elevate value for both customers and society through innovative design solutions.

Transcripts

welcome to the Mexico Design Center very

group of creators designers

collaborators from a variety different

backgrounds from the broader design work

I'm a graphic designer rapid-response

brand experience design motion designer

in 3d animator I'm a product and

experience designer I'm a brand and

packaging designer architect brand

strategy design is what about the

solution the product the brand the

service the overall experience with

those products and new brands as well as

the way to get to the solution but the

mindset and the creative process I think

creatively the language you should be

able to explain that to others and take

them along on the ride to make that a

collaborative process there's very

little opacity here there's very little

that you can't see it's built into the

DNA of the architecture is transparent

in every way it inspires and helps

instigate and multiplies that spirit of

collaboration innovation for us see

these people is all about leveraging

what we like to call design thinking the

Zen thinking is about empathy strategy

and prototyping empathy is about

understanding people need one dreams and

desires suffering from a completely

different perspective from other

functions then click goes inside you

translate them inside a strategy of the

organization equally our brand our

customer relation our business model and

then you've used the typical tools of

the design world our ability to

prototype to visualize to create a

sketch and a multiple video essentially

align everybody around one idea so one

of the great opportunities for a group

is that we can work across other

department and with partners in the

organization to understand their growth

loss and using design thinking to really

focus them on the user and the

experience and take away the problems

that they're facing and transform them

into design opportunities as designers

we law so from the edge between the

feasible and iam feasible because that's

where innovation lies unless we want to

take impossible and make it possible you

know I look around it's a real set of

multidisciplinary designers the way that

we work holistically across every single

touch plan the cross functionality of

each individual team skill sets the way

that we bring all of that together

is what creates billion of the chaos for

designed to be a business value for

company PepsiCo you need to be totally

integrated inside company it needs to be

part of the way we work the way we think

the way to imagine the future of our

brand and the future of our product

being internal gives us an edge because

we drive value for the company because

we're not outsiders looking at we're on

the inside and that gives us the

competitive edge because we have a very

unique internal perspective well I mean

I work on a lot of different things like

sketching and facilitation you know 3d

modeling up to project management in a

big event such as Super Bowl working on

large brands the Design Center I think

it's very interesting because you have

to see how it fits within society today

how it fits is reciting the task why it

was important in the past and why it's

important in the future despite all

these different backgrounds that we have

here the thing I truly unifies us in the

love for people who are experienced a

brand because at the end of the day

we're human beings and human beings tell

stories and stories build other story

and that's really the power of our brand

but it's a power moving beyond just our

brand to touch people in ways that they

don't expect our mission in elevating

the one or building value for our

customers to go swimming eventually our

mission even sucks and that we want to

build value for the society we are

driven by this idea of designing

fragments of a broader social experience

by creating experiences of moments of

time pleasure of safety of convenience

of health for our consumers and in

general for people in the world