José Manuel dos Santos, Head of Design & User Experience - Americas at Signify: articulating the value of social science to design; working alongside anthropologists

José Manuel dos Santos has an MA In Industrial Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design/UK, an Executive MA in Product Design and Development from the Northwestern University/USA and over 20 years of experience in design and design management having worked with companies such as Masco, Node, Innovagency and Phillips Lighting (currently Signify) where he is at present the Head of Design and User Experience for Americas.

He also formed and sold two product design companies and co-founded a non-profit organisation dedicated to young entrepreneurship. He has been a guest speaker at numerous industry events speaking on design and design thinking, taught design to designers and non-designers at a higher education level, and has been a jury member at several design schools and competitions.

In today’s episode we talk to José about insight and good design and about how to find and scale an insight across organisational silos. We also cover the origin of his interest in social science and his experience working with applied anthropologists. Lastly we talk about the value of the academic and applied anthropology fields to business design and he offers advice on how to get started connecting them.

Mentioned in podcast:

• Phillips Lighting becomes Signify
  https://www.signify.com/en-us/about/news/press-releases/2018/20180516-philips-lighting-is-now-signify
• Why the World needs Anthropologists event, Jose’s session https://www.applied-anthropology.com/session/for-human-centric-design/

José’s work:

https://www.behance.net/JoseManueldosSantos

Social media or other links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josemanueldossantos/