YEARS

Dan Makoski

Chief Design Advisor

ex-Google,

ex-Microsoft,

ex-Walmart,

ex-Capital One

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past collaborations

I combine the empathy of Design with the ambition of Silicon Valley to transform the world’s most impactful businesses.

Dan’s expertise

Explore Dan's key skills, specialized expertise, and industry preferences below.

Skills

Team Leadership

Design Strategy

Design Research

User Experience Design (UX)

Ethnographic Research

Expertise

Strategy & Business Design

Learning & Organization Design

Service Design

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PASSIONS

Areas I'm passionate about

As creative leaders with a shared commitment to quality, collaboration, and creativity, we're proud to pursue out most meaningful work and deliver the best every time.

MAIN PASSION

❤️‍🩹 Good Health & Well-being

After having spent a decade in Silicon Valley and seeing the transformative power of technology, I've spent the last decade leading Design in the regulated industries of financial services and health care. There is so much buzz about #fintech or #medtech, but the real opportunity is to reimagine how people can connect to their health and money in ways that are simple and empowering, supported by personally adaptive AI and behavioral design.

👨🏿‍🦱 Racial Justice

💸 Poverty

Portfolio

Chief Design Advising

Dan is available to advise leaders on how to elevate design. His 25 years of experience as a Chief Design Officer at 5 of the Fortune 100 can be distilled into a 10-week advisory, a 1 week workshop, or weekly coaching.

Coaching

Innovation

Heart-Centered Leadership

Design Thinking

Experience Design

Share a challenge with Dan

Share your challenge and work together with Dan

Share a challenge

showcase

Work in Focus

See Dan Makoski's work to see the extent of their creative portfolio.

AllProjectsThought Leadership

Projects

Google's Project Ara

♻️Circular Economy

🫡Responsible Consumption and Production

Product Design

Sustainable Business

Capacity Building

As Head of Design at Google's Advanced Technologies and Projects team, I asked the question: what if instead of making one phone millions of times perfectly, we made millions of phones perfectly unique? The answer was Project Ara, aiminging to simultaneously address waste and hardware innovation.

Projects

Walmart Redesign

❤️‍🩹Good Health & Well-being

🤗 Inclusion & Accessibility

+5 more

I led a redesign of Walmart.com, centered around the idea of "Design for Living Better". Using iterative participatory design methods, we reduced information density by 50+% while tripling the number of personalized elements. The result was a doubling of conversion, rivaling Amazon.com.

Projects

Hey Google

🙋🏼‍♂️Digital Wellbeing

🗣️Learning Ecosystems

+5 more

As Head of Design Research at Motorola, I was asked to discover one differentiating feature that would launch with the Moto X, a pure Android phone in partnership with Google. Through participatory design in people's homes we discovered and then designed "Hey Moto", which soon became "Hey Google".

Thought Leadership

Design for Living Better

🤗 Inclusion & Accessibility

❤️‍🩹Good Health & Well-being

+5 more

Based on personal experience building products for Microsoft, Google, Capital One and Walmart, this is a call to action to user experience professionals to deploy their craft as an expression of humble service, and to make their work more human, authentic and real. https://youtu.be/Vkb6idi0mrA

Thought Leadership

Designing EI into AI

🤗 Inclusion & Accessibility

Behavioral Insights

+4 more

We get so excited about AI, but the reality is we focus too much on the hype of the "Artificial" part of the story, and forget that the "Intelligence" side is where the breakthroughs lie. This talk gave a design perspective on how to approach AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfVVOqukrGM

Thought Leadership

The Secret of Great Design

📚Access to Quality Education

🤗 Inclusion & Accessibility

+5 more

This was a design talk in Hong Kong for a TED event around the future of education and creativity. There were over 2,000 attendees, who all jumped into their creative confidence by sculpting a toothbrush from the future using modeling clay. Check out the talk to see why: https://youtu.be/1WwMzNTj6Vw

Values & Ethos

The future of creativity and innovation will be defined by how well networks of talented leaders come together in partnership with businesses and the communities they serve to passionately design for a better world.

Dan Makoski

Chief Design Advisor