2019 was a year of being super active, completing our large scale design work at MATUROLIFE, getting international recognitions and hosting our 19 business partners across 9 countries in Europe in Istanbul and being associated with the brands like SXSW, DMI, ESSEC Business School.
Some highlights from this year:
By November, we have completed our 9 months of design research and co-creation workshops that we have run in 9 countries in 7 languages with older people for our MATUROLIFE project and formed the product concepts. This is probably one of the largest design research project that a design consultancy can do. We are super proud. With the concepts, we have experienced handover the product development from design teams to technology teams in a large-scale project from a design management perspective.
GEDS’ 19 Business Partners in MATUROLIFE Project, SALT Galata, Istanbul, Turkey – July 4th, 2019
Deciding to apply for DMI awards was a big highlight in 2019. Preparing the application, we had the chance to formulate our design management approach that we have been developing over the last 12 years. Receiving second place in the DMI Design Value Awards was not a surprise for us, but receiving it among a broad field of global competitors including 3M and McKinsey was quite surprising and honoring. We would like to thank our MATUROLIFE business partners for their support.
In July, we hosted our 19 business partners for our three-day 18th-month meeting in our MATUROLIFE project. The project is 3 years long and this was a milestone meeting as we also hosted the monitoring officer from the European Commission in the meeting. We designed the meeting with service design tools with a motto of “Istanbul by walking”. The meeting went super well and the participants’ feedback was extraordinary.
We have completed preparations for two new large-scale projects that will start in 2020. We are very excited and will be sharing the news in the coming months.
Last but not least, this year we had the chance to present our work at SXSW 2019 in Austin, Texas, Future Possibilities in Amsterdam organized by Soorty Enterprises and many more events. We have also supported SXSW 2020 Design and Fantastic Future tracks of the conference and Place by Design Awards. In December, we were pleased to be part of the ESSEC Business School Executive MBA program to teach a design course covering design thinking, service design, and design management. All these experiences have helped us organize our work and our thoughts and share it with greater design and business communities.
Gulay Ozkan with Executive MBA 2020 Class, Paris, December 13th, 2019
We would like to thank the GEDS team first, and then our business partners from all around the world, our friends and families for their enthusiasm and support. Wishing everyone a great fruitful New Year.
[…] the in-person class in Paris. Therefore, I run two sessions of my ESSEC Business School EMBA class on Zoom. Our evaluations showed that the students found this practice very efficient and […]