Designer Profiles: Alex Wilcox Cheek
Meet Alex Wilcox Cheek. He is Senior Group Director for Products, Services, and Platforms at Learnvest/Northwestern Mutual. He’s also one of IxDA NYC’s local leaders and co-founder of IxDA’s first chapter in the Middle East, IxDA Doha.
Briefly describe your career path, including the reasons behind job changes and shifts.
I've always sought a variety of experience as a designer. As an undergraduate I studied industrial design and then information design, I worked professionally for a few years, then to grad school for interaction design and rhetoric with an advisor in computer science.
For ten years I was an assistant professor in design and information systems, and later in human-computer interaction. I had one anchor course that I taught nearly every semester: Design and the Human Experience, a theory course that covered everything from communication theory to living systems, architecture to wicked problems. I also taught studio courses like interaction design, service design, and designing for behavioral change. I taught all the topics that were interesting to me and that my students responded to — and the topics that were most relevant at the time.
For many of those years at Carnegie Mellon, I was based in Qatar where we had a satellite campus. I was the faculty member representing the School of Design and had free rein to explore new teaching techniques and course content with a small, dedicated group of students. I landed there in the campus’s early years. None of us had any experience starting a full-service campus like that and it felt like a start-up (sometimes the wild west). Living abroad was thrilling and exotic and risky and rewarding all at once.
While teaching, I was also deeply engaged in research and professional practice, spinning work out of the university and into start-ups like Classroom Salon and Macromicro. As I began to burn out of the university environment (it's intense, and being based overseas added another layer of strain), I leapt at another start-up opportunity in food tech that we called Skale.
But I also wanted corporate experience too, which is how I landed where I am. Organization design and using design to change and modernize a company is what I’m doing at Northwestern Mutual. I have been leading work on its digital transformation — a unified digital platform approach, strategy, service design, and helping to build a more design-oriented culture.
What excites you about being a designer?
We're always at the forefront of understanding and addressing difficult questions about people, behavior, tech, environments, and society. And that the questions are always on-going. Tony Golsby-Smith said that design is about the rise and fall of rhetorical issues — we begin by untangling a problem through a design method, that leads to some form of resolution, which then leads to new questions which we subsequently address through new methods to move forward in the problem space.
What advice would you give someone starting out in their career today?
Live abroad for a while. Read a lot. Be open to and interested in everything. We designers get cast as magicians and unicorns which is a bit silly; great designers solve problems in novel ways because of their diverse experiences. Buckminster Fuller once said, “I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.”
What’s one thing every designer should know?
Design is always in service to others.
What’s the most annoying design debate out there? You have the last word; what’s your take?
It's amazing that the notion of “rockstar designer” still persists in some disciplines. Given the complex challenges we face, no single designers are likely to stand-out; it all has to be through teamwork.
Also, no, designers shouldn't have to know how to code. There’s way more to the world of design than just tech.
Who or what influenced you to become a designer?
There were a number of factors. My mom had studied human ecology at Cornell where everything from childhood development to environmental factors came together with a lens on the built world, so the notion of HCD [human centered design] was around me from very early on. I also had a Mac SE growing up and I loved everything about it. Hypercard was a big deal for middle school me. I also had a fifth grade teacher who recognized the creative side in me and helped me explore topics like math and science through visual and tactile means.
What’s the most inspirational thing you've read recently?
I recently finished To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy. It was engaging and interesting to hear the business angle on how to IPO a creative company. I also appreciated his Buddhist perspective and "middle way" approach to strategy.
I also just watched Bob Iger’s MasterClass and it was the only one I was glued to from beginning to end.
What’s your favorite NYC bagel spot?
Murray's, in the Village. Everything bagel, cream cheese. Coffee, black.
What’s your favorite place to escape in NYC?
The pocket parks, especially Greenacre.
Give us your favorite bad joke.
Why do Swedish warships have barcodes on their sides? So they can scan-da-navy-in.
Photo by Emily Baron