Oen Michael Hammonds – IBM Design Principal

Oen Michael Hammonds is an experienced designer, advocate, and lifelong educator. For over three years, Hammonds has been working with cross-functional teams at IBM as their Design Principal. As the lead facilitator, Hammonds has designed across the gamut. From services and advertising to graphic and interaction design, Hammonds collaboratively directs IBM global employee experiences’ creative and brand direction by implementing his interdisciplinary approach – ensuring the core employee experiences coherently and consistently execute the design to the highest quality. One of Hammonds’ current critical responsibilities and focus of his role involves the education, creation, and adoption of the latest scalable design standards, enablement, and guidelines that further elevate the impact of design across all IBM employee experiences.

Hammonds’ passion for design began in high school, where he started designing different projects for others. Later after an eight-year stint in U.S. Army, Hammonds continued his design journey and eventually earned his BFA degree in graphic design at Northern Kentucky University. While in the last year of school, Hammonds started his first job as an art director at Benchmark and continuously worked there for eight years. Then, Hammonds had a shorter interval with his next five jobs at different companies and served in as many designer roles like associate creative directors, education directors and design advisors. The positions he has had since, have all challenged him and have added many valuable experiences to his skill set. He believes one of the most important factors to his path to his success today is to have humanity in his work. He states in one of his interviews with Austin Art Talk, “We delve into the subject of Design Thinking and all the ways that framework can be adapted to people’s careers and everyday life.”

Driven by design thinking, Hammonds carries more than two decades of experience in the fast-paced world of design. His solid grasp of implementation, development, and optimization of communication and leadership skills allows him to maximize organizations’ potentials and expand their successes. As a multi-disciplinary designer, in his work, Hammonds instills and develops design thinking among many aspects of the work environment: executives, sales, and software development teams. “…That is one of the greatest things about design thinking is that it (design thinking) is not just for product design, it can be used for a lot of things. I’ve seen teams using for how to create a better experience for people who were first hired onto companies.” said Hammonds, in Revision Path interview.

Reference:

Gordon, S. (n.d.). Oen Hammonds – Design Thinking. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://www.austinarttalk.com/79

Cherry Editor-in-Chief, M., & Cherry, M. (2017, March 06). Oen Michael Hammonds. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://revisionpath.com/oen-michael-hammonds/

Frostholm, J. (n.d.). Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://feastingondesign.simplecast.com/episodes/150-bd5e5ea0

Hammonds, O. (n.d.). Visual Notepad. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://www.visualnotepad.org/