Hello. I'm Dave.

I build design organizations that develop people and produce rigorous work.

Twenty years of design leadership across complex organizations and problems. The work I care most about is building the conditions for great design and raising the ceiling on what a team is capable of becoming.

Get in touch

ABOUT

Design as a practice.
Leadership as a craft.

I chose design because I believed the quality of an experience could change the quality of a life. That conviction has held for over twenty years. Most recently I was a Group Director of Experience Design at VML, where I led teams across complex B2B and consumer-facing programs for over 18 years.

I work at every altitude: from organizational strategy and team structure down to UX systems, IA decisions, and pixel-level judgment. I am most effective when the mandate is to build design into an organization, rather than just manage it within one.

I am also incorporating a fractional Chief Design Officer practice serving nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. And I am pursuing an Executive MBA at Rockhurst University, where my focus is on the formal organizational and strategic frameworks that take design into rooms where design alone does not open the door.

APPROACH

How I work

Imagination Making meaning.
The brief, the mental model, the constraint canvas are design in its earliest form, the place where anything is still possible. Before anything can be generated toward a goal, someone has to make the idea legible. At this stage I am not solving. I am understanding what the problem actually asks of people and where there's space for something new.
Ideation Generating possibility.
Concepts turn nothing into something, tangible enough to establish a common vocabulary for everyone working together. Divergent thinking goes wide and in numerous directions. Convergent thinking brings those ideas back into the reality of the problem space. Ideation is finished when enough has been made that other people can catch the idea and propel it in new directions.
Iteration Refining toward something real.
Most of the traditional experience design work lives here, in the progressive resolution of an idea toward something that can be built. With a shared vocabulary already established, collaboration at this stage carries the depth of everything that came before it. Get it in front of people, learn what lands, and when it's right, ship it.
Inquiry Learning from the world.
Once something is released, the feedback available from real usage is categorically different from anything testable before it. Seeing how people actually engage, proving or disproving the assumptions built into the original brief. That's the macro loop that feeds the next cycle of imagination.

WORK

Selected experience

Case studies are in development. The work spans 20 years of design leadership across agency, enterprise, and nonprofit contexts: team-building, UX systems, information architecture, and organizational design practice.

In the meantime, I am happy to walk through specific projects, team-building moments, and strategic decisions directly. Get in touch and tell me what you are trying to understand.

CONTACT

Let's talk

I am currently open to design leadership roles and fractional CDO engagements with organizations at a meaningful moment in their design maturity. If that sounds like your team, I want to hear about it.

Email daviddnelson@gmail.com LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/davenelson