Life in Beta: A Few Things I Wish I Knew Before I Knew Anything
A career in design rarely follows the path you imagined—and that may be the point. Drawing on more than 25 years moving between design, technology, innovation, leadership, and strategy, Antonio García shares stories, provocations, mistakes, and hard-won lessons about building a creative career while the work itself keeps changing.
Life in Beta is less a retrospective than an argument for staying unfinished: following curiosity, learning to navigate uncertainty, developing judgment, letting go of old definitions of yourself, and remaining useful as the tools, disciplines, and expectations around you evolve. Along the way, Antonio explores what changes as a designer becomes a strategist—and what shouldn’t.
Speaker Bio:
Antonio García is Strategy Director at Gensler, founder of Dadwell & Co,. and chairman of the board for Marwen.
Previous to leading strategy at Gensler, Antonio served as Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer at TXI. Prior to TXI, he was Group Experience Director at Rightpoint where he led UX across five studios. Before Rightpoint, he helped launch Northern Lab—Northern Trust’s internal innovation accelerator. Ahead of the Lab, he led gravitytank’s interaction design discipline and social innovation practice. Before entering innovation consulting, Antonio was Director of Strategy for Firebelly Design.
In addition to design and strategy leadership, Antonio is a mentor with 1871’s WMNtech Leaders and the AIGA Chicago Mentor Program as well as an adjunct lecturer—having taught Communication Design and Visual Storytelling at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute; Customer Discovery as part of University of Chicago’s Polsky Center Entrepreneurship Essentials; and New Product Definition at IIT Institute of Design.
A frequent contributor to community conversations on the topics of diversity and inclusion, design ethics, culture and creativity, Antonio was named one of 50 People to Watch by Graphic Design USA and a Global Leader in Consulting Excellence by ALM.
When he’s not hard at work designing the future, Antonio is most likely DJing, drawing, or out on a long run.
This lecture is part of the DS-CDMC Lecture Series, an annual program offered through the Design Studies Department in co-sponsorship with the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture. Twice each academic year, a scholar and/or maker in support of each of the three design studies majors is invited to campus to present a public lecture. In conjunction with their lecture, they visit classes within the Design Studies Department, meet with faculty and students, and may host workshops for students connected to their practice.