We were lucky to have Emma Carter and Catherine Fitzpatrick share their experience building positive change in our workplaces and society at SydDT #124 on 12 March – and a panel led by Kate Ingram exploring this year’s IWD theme… Balance the Scales.
Emma took us through what it actually takes to elevate design inside organisations. Not just the theory. The reality.
Design maturity ladders tell you where you are – but not how to get there. So she and Diana Adorno built one that does. Eight dimensions, six levels, with descriptions of what each actually looks like inside an organisation.
Catherine shared her story as a bank exec discovering that abusive messages were being hidden in bank payment descriptions – one-cent transactions used as a weapon. Her team analysed 11 million transactions over three months and found 8,000 serious threats.
They mapped 51 design interventions, built a data dictionary to block harmful language in real time, and shared their methodology with every other bank in Australia. Since 2019, banks have collectively blocked more than a million abusive messages.
Kate Ingram led the panel, bringing her lens from KPMG’s design practice and government work. The conversation covered how to talk about design without using the word design, the power of equity impact assessments applied to financial products, and the data organisations already have but don’t use.
An evening celebrating the achievements of women in design.
Thanks to everyone who came along and made it such a fun night. Couldn’t make it or just want to relive it? Watch it now.
We did this one as Design Connection #7… another in our design megameetup series with our friends from the CCX and EUX meetups.
Morteza Pourmohamadi brought his sketchnoting magic to the medium of a used pizza box for this one. Love your work mate 😃
A shout out and thanks to Bex Haar for another great write-up with her reflections and key takeaways.
A massive thanks to Adam Faulkner from blueegg and Enterprise UX (EUX), Susan Wolfe from Leapfrog Studio, Kate Linton and Lucas Mara from SydDT, Kevin Wilkins from CCX, and Dynamic4 for making it all happen.
Our next meetup is SydDT #125: From Assumption to Evidence: Prototyping at the Right Fidelity with Gordon Burnett on Thursday, 9 April… brought to you by Atlassian, Shapeshifters, and Dynamic4. Grab your ticket!
Meetup Announcement
Thursday, 12 March 2026 @ 6pm. blueegg, Sydney
For our International Women’s Day event this year, we’re lucky to have Emma Carter and Catherine Fitzpatrick sharing the great work they’ve both been doing to build positive change in our workplaces and society.
The two talks will be followed by a panel led by Kate Ingram exploring this year’s IWD theme – Balance the Scales.
The evening is dedicated to honouring the achievements of influential female design leaders and exploring the profound societal impact design can have on safety, equity, and systemic change.
We hope you’ll feel inspired to think bigger about the transformative power of design leadership across organisations and industries. This is more than a celebration – it’s an invitation to take action.
We’re doing this one as Design Connection #7… another in our design megameetup series with our friends from the CCX and EUX meetups.
Come join us for some fun conversations with interesting people in and around the design thinking community. New members are welcome!
Speakers
Emma Carter
Author of Shaping a Designedup Organisation & DesignedUp: A Designer’s Guide on How to Lead Inside the Tech Industry
Emma is design leader who started her career in London and went onto found an award-winning design agency in her early 20’s. Now with well over 20+ years under her belt and a 3x author of books such as Shaping a DesignedUp Organisation and DesignedUp: a designer’s guide on how to lead inside the tech industry.
More recently Emma was the International Head of Design at PEXA where she partnered with executives in Australia and the UK to elevate design maturity, embed human-centered practices and launch a design system saving 1000+ developer hours within two months.
Prior to that she was a Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks for eight years where she led high-impact digital transformations across industries, scaling UX design in agile teams, aligning design with business value, and shaping innovative product experiences that balanced user needs and technology.
When she’s not balancing needs inside organisations, she’s balancing two small’ish children, a husband, and her love for cycling, running, and chocolate 😃
Catherine Fitzpatrick
Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Flequity Ventures
Catherine Fitzpatrick unmasks and disrupts financial abuse. She exposes how domestic abusers weaponise everyday products and advises business, industry, governments and regulators on how to close the loopholes.
A former bank executive turned social entrepreneur, she pioneered financial safety by design after uncovering abuse in online banking and leading industry-wide reforms to stop it.
In 2022, she was appointed as Australia’s first Domestic, Family & Sexual Violence Commissioner. When her career took an unexpected turn, she applied deep corporate insider knowledge to a mission to redesign systems that enable financial abuse.
Her ground-breaking Designed to Disrupt reports and Respect and Protect™ campaign have mobilised businesses, regulators and governments globally.
Catherine is CEO of Flequity Ventures, Adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW School of Social Sciences and an AFR | Qantas 100 Women of Influence. She is a member of Chief Executive Women and the NSW Corporate Leadership Group advising the Minister on domestic, family and sexual violence.
She is founder of the Financial Safety Alliance, a partnership with finance sector industry associations to tackle financial abuse, and co-founder of the One Generation business alliance against domestic abuse, with Thriving Communities Australia.
Her work is grounded in a simple belief:
Safety isn’t accidental. It’s designed.
And what isn’t designed to protect will be exploited to harm.
Kate Ingram
Director, Design-Led Innovation, KPMG Customer & Operations Advisory
Kate works at the intersection of design, strategy and organisational transformation. A true multidisciplinary designer, Kate is a trained in industrial and interaction designer, she has also worked in interiors and architecture, dabbled in urban design and landscaping and has also been in a number of brand and marketing roles. She now leads KPMG’s national design and research capability as Director for Design-Led Innovation.
Her career spans international luxury brands in New York and Milan through to advisory across Australia’s public sector, bringing both commercial and societal lenses to her work.
Kate is a strong advocate for design as a strategic capability – and how creativity can meaningfully shape how organisations think, decide and deliver impact.
Kate has been based in Canberra since 2019 and loves its good wine, growing foodie scene, and lack-of-traffic!
Design Connection
Design Connection #7 is another in our design megameetup series.
Design Connection is a collective of three Sydney design meetups… Ben Pecotich from Sydney Design Thinking (SydDT), Adam Faulkner from Enterprise UX (EUX), and Kevin Wilkins from Creative Customer Experience (CCX), with Susan Wolfe and Vera Chan being the backbone of Design Connection 😃
Event Sponsors
This event is brought to you by blueegg, Design Connection, Leapfrog Studio, and Dynamic4.
We take photos and record our events for documentation and promo purposes. Just let us know if you prefer not to be featured.
