Ronald Clark, Partner & VP of Strategic Design, BCG Digital

Ronald Clark (BS Design 2000) spoke at this year’s End of Year Celebration on May 16, 2025. Following is the transcript and video of his speech.

Good evening everyone.

I want to start my remarks with a somewhat provocative question. To the 2025 graduates, how many of you are nervous about the job market right now? Raise your hands. I appreciate the transparency. Thank you for sharing.

I graduated from ID a long time ago, and I’m nervous as well. To be honest, I’ve never felt as weird about the state of the design industry as I do right now. I’m embarrassed to say that while I’m here to inspire you about your futures and tell you that everything is trending up and to the right, we can’t ignore the big elephant in the room right now, and that’s that the design industry is in a particularly funny place.

Studios that we admired have been acquired. Some have disappeared. Innovation budgets are shrinking and the role within corporations is evolving.

But despite all of that, I’m hopeful and beyond that, actually I’m more than hopeful.

This moment that we’re in reminds me of something ancient, something regenerative, something that I consider to be deeply designed. This moment reminds me of a forest that I once walked through—a Sequoia forest.

A few years ago, I took my family to Three Rivers in California and we went to the Sequoia National Forest. And if you’ve ever been there, you know that this place is absolutely majestic. These trees are—some of them are 3,000 years old, and they’re as tall as skyscrapers.

Here’s the part about the forest that they don’t tell you right away or that you learn about later: Sequoias cannot grow or even reproduce without fire. Their pine cones are sealed shut, and it takes extreme heat like a wildfire for them to crack open so that the seeds can grow.

The fire clears the forest floor, it burns away the overgrowth, and it gives new seeds light, space, and a chance to take root.

When we look at this scorched earth, our first thought is destruction, but for the Sequoia, it’s simply a beginning.

And when I think about where design is today, I see a similar kind of clearing. Right now, safe paths imagined are gone, but it’s not the end of the story.

All of you sitting here today are the seeds. You’ve been cracked open by disruption. But what’s important is that you are not here to rebuild the old forest. You are here to grow something better, stronger, more inclusive, and more resilient.

The message that I want to leave with you here today is that design is a regenerative practice. Like a forest after a wildfire, it grows stronger when it grows back differently.

And this regeneration itself is not linear—it loops. I’ve seen this in my own career and I’ll see it in all of you.

My personal first loop was as an undergraduate student, flunking out of a prestigious engineering school, coming home lost, frustrated, and hopeless. I came to eventually meet a gentleman by the name of Nate Thomas. He was a legendary educator here at IIT, and he introduced me to the Institute of Design.

Taking my first week of classes in the Institute of Design with Patty Carroll, Dale Fahnstrom, Craig Vogel, I realized literally from the first day of classes that I was in heaven—that I had found my true calling in design.

Here is my first loop, which is again this notion of burn, clear, seed, and grow. After finishing ID came my next loop.

My earliest career experience was at the visionary firm Doblin, specifically when it was in the incarnation of Doblin, Keeley, Malin, and Stamos. This distinction is important because at the time it finally clicked for me that if you combine the best in design thinking with the best in business consulting, you would have an unbeatable innovation offer to clients.

Doblin did really bold work. This idea combined with my ID training around systems thinking, tackling large problems and storytelling through design briefs, set a standard for me of what best-in-class innovation consulting could look like.

At Doblin, my “seeding” was set and afterwards I grew through different stints at eLab, the Sony design group, and at BMW Designworks.

My next burn cycle, if you will, came for me personally when I saw legacy industries struggling to grapple with digital disruption and digital innovation, and for me in my practice, I needed to get to a new space.

After Designworks, I got a message on LinkedIn. I got a call from a gentleman named Kevin Bethune and he asked me if I was interested in joining a new type of innovation startup that was part of the Boston Consulting Group.

I asked him what was the thesis around the practice—like what do they want to do? And he told me that they were looking to combine the best in design thinking with the best in business consulting to deliver amazing value to clients as they build new ventures.

So in my mind, once again, it all clicked here. Here, the premise I deeply believed in that I had learned at Doblin was regenerating itself and coming right back to my doorstep, thus my second loop.

Except in this loop, this process was driven by digital transformation and the output wasn’t physical products, but instead, new ventures. Here, the basic DNA of my forest regenerated, but it was different and more challenging.

This regenerative loop had come full circle, albeit ten years later. While at BCG X, I’ve been able to help Fortune 500 companies launch new businesses. I’ve led multimillion dollar programs with multidisciplinary teams of designers, engineers, and business consultants.

But most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to influence the innovation methodology and bring other like-minded folks to the conversation to grow our practice. And I can say with pride that I’ve hired many people from this program.

The whole time, however, ID’s tenets of human-centered design, thinking in systems, pushing methodology, and creating frameworks to empower non-designers has carried me throughout my entire experience.

I’ve seen the design model evolve, I’ve seen it rebuild better, but what’s constant isn’t the title. I’ve had a different title for every design role that I’ve had throughout my career. But the way design works, as we all know, is by listening, by shaping, imagining new futures in the gaps of the old futures.

This next revision or this next regenerative cycle is already happening and it won’t take ten years. As we all know in the room, in just one-and-a-half, two years, artificial intelligence has created seismic disruptions and it’s creating another clearing for design.

All of you are graduating from one of the best design programs in the world.

At ID all of you have been trained to carefully look at the needs of people, their behaviors, their motivations, and the tools they use in order to create breakthrough innovations. These skills are the foundational nutrients, the seeds, if you will, to regrow your current forest. Your job is to apply these skills in new ways.

The next IDEO, the next Continuum, the next IA Collaborative is going to come from one of you in this room. Or you’re going to develop an entirely new way to define a design model.

My ask of you is to take your ID superpowers and be bold and regenerate the design industry. And I think you need three things to do it—three is the magic number today.

First, you need to build your forest. Community is your greatest infrastructure. Stay close to your peers, build new practice communities. You are each other’s accelerators.

I can’t stress enough how much my network through ID—literally undergrad—has carried me throughout my entire career, through twists, through turns, through different roles, different promotions. Half of it has always been my ID network.

Number two, I suggest, please build your eminence. Write, share, lead out loud. If the world doesn’t hear from designers, it hears from old systems. There are so many platforms today for you all to grow your eminence, make your voice and your POV heard. Please share all the amazing work that you’ve done in this program.

And lastly, continue to grow your toolkit.

Design as a regenerative practice also means that design has a constantly evolving methodology. From your work here at the Institute of Design, you are all well-practiced in new ways of innovating.

There are many companies still trying to innovate, but still not getting the process right. They’re just at a different scale in this market today. There are many companies hungry for the fresh thinking and the innovation processes that all of you can provide.

By doing these three things, you plant the seeds, but most importantly, you control what comes next.

But Ron, you say, in conclusion, Sequoias take a hundred years to grow. I wasn’t going to skip that detail in my analogy, but what I think is important here is that technology itself is the multiplier.

Your work will bear fruit much faster than you think. You will grow something better, you will grow something different. You will build new systems and new types of engagements.

Design is not just what we make. It’s how we work, who we include, and what we value.

You will be the ones to build the next model for how AI and designers collaborate. You will be the ones to redefine how community input shapes public design. You will be the ones to design a new way for people to learn, heal, or govern themselves. You are arriving at a turning point with your graduation.

The past decade for design burned bright, it burned fast, but now it’s your turn to rebuild with intention and to redefine how design is done. You are the founders and leaders of something better.

Remember, fire doesn’t end the story. Fire starts the story. You, class of 2025, must start the regeneration. I want to thank the Institute of Design and Anijo for the privilege to speak before you all today. This school has changed my life in so many ways.

I want to congratulate the class of 2025. I hope to collaborate with many of you in the future. Thank you.