Katie Lim, IDSA

Senior Industrial Designer, frog

Katie has designed and overseen over 150 concepts through production in her 11 years of experience in Industrial Design. Her career started at Kids2 where she designed infant and toddler toys while also supporting play gym innovation.

When Katie joined BARK in 2017, her designs quickly established a point of view and design standard within the pet industry. The success of these designs led to the rapid growth of BARK’s Super Chewer subscription customer base and expansion to retail placement. Her focus shifted towards building a focused Industrial Design team to continue the push for design process, manufacturing techniques, aesthetic, story, and play through award-winning designs.

Katie is now a Senior Industrial Designer at frog design to dive deeper into research, design strategy, technology, user testing, brand creation, and UI/UX considerations across multiple product categories and clients.

Cool, But Is It Safe? & Beyond The Hype

IDC

Panel Discussion

August 23 & 24, 2023

Breakout - Majestic

Cool, But Is It Safe?

Understand key insights and best practices to make sure a product is safely designed for any potential user and user scenarios. Through 25 years, KID (Kids in Danger) has seen products designed and marketed for use by parents and/or children that overlook safety hazards that can lead to injury, death, and/or lead to a recall. Safety starts with designers and safety professionals collaborating from the start to leverage expertise from both sides throughout the entire process. Product safety professionals, designers, and safety advocates discuss the issues involved in design safety for children. Learn how to bring safe, engaging, useful, and meaningful products to market.

The audience will learn:

1) The importance of a design safety mindset, both to bring safety to the product and to encourage safety to be enhance by design, not with warnings or restrictions

2) Ways to incorporate safety, child development, and real-world use to design for the end user.

3) How to make your design concept more convincing and one step closer to reality with safety considerations.

4) How to find the safety information and guidance needed early in the design process.

Moderated by Nancy Cowles and Katie Lim

Panelists: Aaron Cadotte, Fiena Wu, Boaz Green

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Beyond The Hype

Design strategy has quickly become a buzz term inside and out of the design industry. While it is a very impactful approach to design solutions and processes, the term is developing connotations of pretentiousness and corporate b.s. How can we protect design strategy and change people’s experience of it? How do we make sure we don’t get caught up in using this term lightly or lost in going through the motions? Professionals and educators will discuss their experiences with design strategy throughout their careers and share their opinions on what are and are not successful ways to execute it.

The audience will learn:
1. Various approaches and applications for design strategy, including practices to avoid and how to navigate these requests as designers
2. Considerations for design strategy in the future and tools to leverage
3. Collaboration methods between internal and external teams

Katie Lim, IDSA

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