The Maelstrom is IBM Design's Design Internship program, headed by Devin O'Bryan.

Over the course of 10 weeks in the Fall of 2014, thirteen of us split into 4 teams took on software design through the lens of IBM Design Thinking.

IBM Design is part of a large, corporate restructuring to a design-centric IBM. They are dedicated to shaping the future creating delightful experiences that work together, work the same, and work for users.

Find out more at ibm.com/design.

Internship Structure

There were 13 of us representing various aspects of the following four design disciplines:

Design Research

We targeted and interviewed several real users and worked closely with our Sponsor Users, so that we could find what needs we had to solve, and how to make the resulting solutions impactful.

IBM Design Thinking's Hills and Sponsor Users ensured we were working towards a real purpose, rather than an imagined one. My team worked directly with the Mobile Innovation Lab to develop an application that, in their words, would "accelerate the delivery of mobile solutions that improve and enrich people’s lives worldwide."

Visual Design

Typographic hierarchy, color harmony, modular grids and clever visual ingenuity together carry and direct the interpretation of a product.

The IBM Design Language helped us retain a consistency, so that our users could read content in a familiar language and make emotional connections.

UX Design

The most holistic and intangible of the four, designing the user experience involves analyzing user behavior, mapping their journey, and figuring out what we would like for it to be.

Front-end Development

This is where things get tangible, including the the excitement of shipping a product.

Developers work closely with the rest of the design team to breathe life and feasibility into a product. Programming has various applications such as web and mobile, that are also subject to the consistency of the IBM Design Language.