UX Strategy Lead, Publicis Groupe, Experience.Lab
Carmina Correa
Talk
‘The System Said No.’ Designing Ideas That Survive Risk-Averse Environments
“I love the idea! But… has anyone done this before?” Design culture celebrates bold ideas and challenging conventions, but in risk-averse environments — Japan included — change is also a potential liability, and stability is often exactly what the system is designed to deliver. Yet a country that keeps reinventing its infrastructure for earthquake and tsunami safety is hardly allergic to change; the question is what makes it worth the risk. Drawing on cross-cultural experience and practical “do this, not that” examples across UX, UI and product design, Mina explores why even brilliant, user-centred ideas struggle to see daylight, and how designers can make innovation easier to say yes to — because our job doesn’t end with imagining better experiences; we must also design the conditions that let them become reality.
Profile
Carmina “Mina” Correa is a Chilean UX Strategy Lead at Publicis Groupe’s Experience.Lab in Tokyo. In an era where production is accelerated by emerging technology, she advocates for something harder to automate: the human judgement required to position design intelligently within the systems that must support it — navigating organisational resistance and occasionally asking uncomfortable questions. Embracing the perspective of a “permanent foreigner,” she studies the unwritten rules of the systems around her well enough to make meaningful change possible. Her conviction that design belongs at the heart of humanity’s most critical challenges goes back to her graduate research at the University of Tokyo on tsunami evacuation through the lens of user experience.