Become a leader – Lola Oyelayo-Pearson | Interaction Design History

Wicked Digital Problems for the Next Decade | Fluxible TV

Lola Oyelayo-Pearson is a UK design & product strategist.

Lola graduated from the University of Birmingham with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 2003. During her college, she discovered her unique interests in interactive systems and learned the essential skills that helped her work with people to produce better solutions. She then pursued a master’s degree in science at London’s global university with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics.

“Design leadership is emerging as an area where designers need to step up into leadership roles.”
Lola Oyelayo-Pearson

Lola focuses her mentorship efforts on design leaderships. In her opinion, in order to truly inspire change and make a difference, designers need to know how to lead. In 2016, she founded Own Your Experience (OYE), a company that facilitates small businesses and teams. Their goal is to help them navigate the complex world of digital product development. They help define meaningful, impactful and tangible product visions that the teams can actually execute.

She involves in several organizations that tackle inequalities in the design industry. One is Ladies that UX, a community of women in UX who support each other, push the UX boundaries, and promote female skill and talent. Another is Rooted Innovation, which supports creative grassroots interventions for meaningful social change with a strong focus on race, class, and gender inequality. She sees designers in a position to recognize potential opportunities and to evoke change: “We’re not here just to push out what our vision of what the world should be, we’re here to actually make sure that the world is suitable for the people who live in it — and that we are part of making that happen.”

At the end:

I’ve embedded this lecture where she talked about her perspective on “wicked problems“- those are “almost impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize“, such as poverty, education, and environmental issues. As young designers, we tend to ignore those “big problems” for the fear that we might not be able to solve them completely. But what we don’t realize is that each of us can make a small difference and that’s all it matters.