Sheryl Cababa

Sheryl Cababa is the author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers. She's a design researcher and strategist, and is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, an education-focused research and insights studio based in Seattle. Her practice is focused on systems thinking and equity-centred design, and she's worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IKEA, and Khan Academy. Her focus is on using design to help clients reimagine education.

Thinking in Systems to Design Your Personal Design Principles

As design practitioners we often use design principles to help give definition and act as an anchor point to the decisions we make about products and services.

What if you took a bird’s eye view of your values, the system that makes up your career, and the goals that you have as a practitioner and used those to create your own design principles?

In our complex landscape, I’ve often felt that our processes and methods fall short of guiding us as practitioners, despite designers being capable of so much more. I’ll share why I think creating personal design principles is an important exercise and how a systems mindset is crucial, and using my own journey as an example, and hopefully provide tools that inspire your own creation of personal design principles.