I showed up a couple days before the IBM Design Lab opened to help get things set up and brought my video camera with me…Ben Edwards (VP of Digital Design and Development…my boss) took me for a 10 minute tour of the location, which is starting to look great….will be even better with some more furniture and people to work there (both are arriving as I type this!)
As Ben describes in the video, we’re going to have a bunch of teams working in the Design Lab on a variety of digital marketing and communications strategic projects — everything from our ibm.com presence for cloud computing to the web services that allow us to surface experts in social media to digital listening and marketing optimization projects and more. Biznology galore!
I worked at 590 Madison years ago in the early days of IBM’s intranet and long long ago IBM debuted some of its most powerful computers here — it’s a great locaiton for me to return to and an historic location for IBM, which makes it a cool place to design the future 🙂
Here’s the vid:
Ethan McCarty 
Can’t wait to see this up and running! On your question about what type of people/skills who will work there, what do think the ratio will be in regards to US vs. non-US people? And how about large market insights vs. small markets/countries? Or, to address it in a different way, how will the Digital Lab secure that the ‘products’ are reusable in for instance a small country like Denmark, with a different resource situation than larger countries? (surprise, surprise that I ask the question… ;o)
Christian Carlsson, Digital Leader, IBM Denmark
Christian — So glad you commented…yeah, we are definitely going to get folks like you into the lab…already forming some plans to set up residencies etc. I am not sure of the blend of folks in the lab geographically yet, but to be on an scrum team you have to be here 100%…which is something we’re definitely going to struggle with given that we’ve spent the past decade at IBM becoming more distributed and connected virtually…it’s an experiment…so I guess we’ll see what happens 🙂 At a minimum, Laurie and I will be here and I am bringing on a digital documentarian (a role I made up!) to ensure that we are able to package assets from the Lab in a way that is consumable and reusable by you and other folks around the IBM-o-sphere. I look forward to collaborating with you on them…I know I can count on you to test drive whatever looks good and give us real, thoughtful and intelligent feedback as always.
So Ethan, when are you gonna invite us to the design lab 😉
Love it! Can’t wait to move in.
Great space, lots of room to dance!
Very exciting to see the growth in agile and digital projects, looking forward to working with the teams!!
When I left the lab it had furnitre and dividers with logical spaces for team. Everyone was excited to meet each other. It was my first time face-2-face with Beverly Lovelace and Julie Bertolini from our Smarter Analytics Lab Team. I got to meet the newest team members. They rock! I day or two face to face is more productive than a month on conference calls.
Hi Ethan, this is Rob from Sydney Aus i run the Graxlab, we have had a team in place for about 10 yrs which has similar offerings as you, for the IBM internal BU’s in the AP region, see our intranet site – http://pokgsa.ibm.com/projects/g/grafxlab/ – we may be able to assist each other in the future, let me know if you’d like to discuss….
Rob