Hello and welcome. Um I'm honored to be here today at Women Tech and I'm really excited about sharing with you. Uh I'm Natasha Rapsat and I'm a designer advisor, uh XR specialist or extended reality strategist. And I am the founder and CEO of N A Creative LLC.Uh We are a United States based uh strategic design and advisory firm that is in the tech for good ecosystem. We specifically support businesses and organizations with posturing for the future by building strong foundations and organizations to support inclusion, sustainability and mindfulness with immersive technologies such as augmented virtual reality, et cetera and the metaverse. I've worked in just a little bit about me.

I've worked in various industries and sectors, uh leading initiatives with learning uh immersive technologies on design and on the design side, I've done everything really ranging from that creative work, uh tactical design pieces. I call it building experiences working with clients, doing research, things like that all the way up to the strategic design piece where I support organizations with building culture and thinking and decision making making to enhance innovation. So today we are talking about design foundations and I believe to really bend the curve with design in the world. You must first be ready to really bend our minds and to bend our thinking. Uh So I will share how the understanding of strategic design scheme as a mental model. So these three things strategic design scheme as a mental models support and elevate these program foundations from a high level as it relates to businesses and organizations. And I do believe that we can use this conversation today to really guide our efforts with designing better more inclusively and more sustainably in today's tech driven world. As we begin this journey together, please feel free to add any questions in the chat and I will do my best to answer them um at the end of this um call. OK.

So in this digital society, you probably noticed that expectations for success have become pretty high, especially for businesses and organizations that create pro uh products and services to meet the needs of real people in the real world. We've seen a lot of social movement, great social movement across the world with everything on diversity and inclusion, how we're treating each other, how we're treating um environments and the resources in this planet. And much of this has really been accelerated through the global pandemic where the need for remote communication has become vile to society's economies and institutions across the globe. But with this growing need for this remote engagement and communication and digital transformation, the use of immersive technologies to include um A RVR Blockchain artificial intelligence in and out of the metaverse really has skyrocketed, making the needs for strong design foundations, mindfulness and human practices.

It's made it really essential. This is strong design f uh foundations at this point are critical. It's no longer elective anymore. And organizations with strong foundations are really able to pivot and scale and, and, and sustain all of the changes that are happening today and will happen in the future. And there are a lot of unknowns in the world around immersive technologies. But the time is right right now to really look inside of your organization at a deeper level, to sort of see where you are with this. So let's take a deeper look into design foundations as you see on the screen, uh there is a little foundations that these are supposed to be blocks, almost like basin ry blocks. And this is what when I think of design foundations is what I'm thinking about. Strong foundations are really said to be built upon solid ground from solid thinking and alignment with the industry, best practices and principles at the core. Design foundations may consist of many things and these are a few things that I put in here and, and these things in your organization may be described differently or defined differently based on your business model needs and values.

But there are things that are consistent across probably every organization and I've seen that design foundations must really and truly include a deep understanding of people and humanity. Also alignment with leadership and focus strongly on design principles. Design principles are really like laws or guidelines and considerations um that are applied. And these principles really anchor the foundation, I see them sort of like rebar, so rebar inside of a a foundation that's being poured, it really helps to prevent it from breaking with the slightest movement.

And so the foundations are really design foundations, that's really how I look at it. But mindfulness is another component that we kind of, it's like another layer uh where we're adding. Um we, we need to be able to build this in as well. And I I, when I refer to mindfulness, I define it as sort of this commitment, this quality or state of being conscious or aware of these principles. Um And then actually, and best practices and then actually doing something about it one step at a time, committing to excellence.

So strong foundations really help to build that um that organization that you're looking for that long term sustainability. But how do we actually do build this now? Right. So I think we can consider something called strategic design and it's really a vehicle or connector to build decision making and culture. So let's kind of dive into that a little bit. Strategic design is really the application of traditional design principles to systemic problems uh really to positively affect culture around decision making and organization, it, organizations, it works in tandem with things like organizational design and development efforts. Um And it's often led by strategic designers.

And so where does strategic design come from? It comes really out of practice with architecture and urban planning. But what it really is, there's a lot to say about strategic design, but it's really about problem focus. It's about focusing on systemic problems and not just solutions.

So I think of it as like a triangle and at the top we have solutions, the solution market and on the bottom, it's much like an iceberg where there's a lot of it under the water, but the top is the solution. So strategic design is looking at the entire problem. It's focused on contextual systems, it's focused on understanding things in context and it affects decision making culture and it's really oriented towards the future, future, not just only now or what's happening, but it's future oriented and multilevel.

And it affects the entire ecosystem, what's in the ecosystem and what's coming in from the outside, what it is not. And it often gets confused with things like tactical design, um technical design, like products going into market, creative projects now, creative projects and things like that can be um enabled to uh in a better way through strategic design, but it is not strategic design. It is not strategic design is also not organizational design, it's not strategic planning and it's not there to replace any of these other efforts in the organization. It is to work with these other efforts in the organization. So now if we go a little bit deeper, um I sorry. Um if you go a little bit deeper, uh strategic design is really important now, like let's look inside of the organization. When you look at what is happening inside the walls of organizations, you may notice a few things. There's people with diverse backgrounds, nationalities, languages, cultures, ability levels, different needs, and these people have different knowledge sets. And when we talk about knowledge sets, I'm going to eventually call this what we call schemas. That's how we essentially structure and organize information in our brains.

And then um what we're doing it with, with this knowledge is this knowledge also coupled with mindsets uh really help to drive behaviors, motivational levels, uh either support, supporting or upholding paradigms. Uh So paradigms are more like larger theories, worldviews or schools of thought paradigms are actually harder to break. So, um in your organization, um going on to the next piece here inside your organization, this graphic shows a lot of different people. And so they, they all come with different paradigms. Uh knowledge sets, mindsets and some may be the same, right? Um But really what we're looking at the, there's something that's really positive about having people with all of these different thoughts is that we, we see a, we see diversity which is a great thing that helps with innovation, uh diverse organizations and companies outperform others that are not.

We've seen many of that research on in the industry. The challenge with this is that many organizations, especially if, if there's not AAA strong alignment to strategic vision mission and values, there could be challenges with getting people on the same page to work together and not only work together in the sense of doing day to day tasks but work together, especially the goal of the organization is also to support um the reduction of effects from systemic problems in our society.

So paradigms um are pretty solid and like I said, they're harder to, they're harder to break. But knowledge sets these schemas and mental models, these, these uh mindsets and knowledge sets are easier to shape. And a lot of times when we hear the term schemas and mental models, we think of like learning, it is about learning, it's about, it's a, it's cognitive, but the goal is really not to eradicate or attempt to, to change paradigms or to reduce the the diverse hiring. The goal is really to, to embrace these different people and different schools of thoughts, but really put them into alignment from a strategic point of view. So design foundations uh have to be multidisciplinary multilevel and really tap into that contextual layer, understanding of people in your organization to really start affecting change. And so now let's start to talk about how we are connecting these dots at the high level.

Uh schemas are basically these mental representations and there's a lot to say about schemas. Um It's, this is rooted in cognitive psychology and many professions borrow from this schema theory as it's called. Um but schemas are really mental representations and enable us to organize our information in excuse me, knowledge into categories. And I look at schemas as almost like file folders on a computer. So schemas are built uh throughout our lives and a lot of times they're built without us knowing that they're there. Sometimes formal education, we can build, we can build schemas. But in these file folders think of something like a dog. We've learned that dogs have certain characteristics.

And so maybe a dog has a tail, it has, it has a nose, it has ears, it has four legs. That is a schema. I will say that is one file folder or maybe cats is another file folder. So that's the easiest way I think of schemas. But they're really tied again to this knowledge and memory that we have mental models then are really, some people will say that they are mindset. Some will say that they're not mindsets or they're, they affect, they affect uh mindsets. Um But, but mental models really are representations of how things work. It's about understanding. Um And they're more complex than schemas. They're strung together in a way. It's essentially like a la like lattice or overlapping uh more like a lattice. Um So, so what we're really saying here with uh mental models is that we, it, it's really, we cannot, um we cannot remember everything. And so mental models really help us to connect the dots between many different uh pieces. Um And then kind of going into this strategic design part. Now, strategic design is truly like the vehicle where a scheme as a mental models are the knowledge and the mindset within your organization or business. So we just moving on a little bit now. So how are we actually bridging the gap? So we need to be able to identify and deconflict mental models and even schema but mostly mental models that are not supported, supportive of the larger organizational vision.

But really we want to set guideposts to show people in the company or your organization a better way. The goal again is not to remove people because of their differing knowledge sets or their backgrounds, but really aligning their backgrounds to the larger organizational mission, vision and goals to, but really to help to dismantle systemic problems that are affecting them from the outside in society a little at a time, no one designer leader or person in any organization will be able to do this type of heavy lifting and have a result that will automatically align the culture and support this again, dismantling.

It is important to really consider leveraging strategic design for these purposes. And this type of design work is really intentional. And as you see on the right side of the screen, there's this graphic with a lot of different dots and I and it's almost representing different people in the organization. So with all of these different backgrounds, this can work very nicely that diversity and to support long term sustainability because you have all of those points of view, you have all of those um perspectives to be able to challenge ideas and businesses so we can come up with better solutions.

But on the strategic layer, really strategic design is the game changer. It is a game changer for businesses and organizations. It goes beyond that tactical product focused design and really anchors that organizational design culture. It really helps to anchor our design foundations.

What we stand for and schemas and mental models in this context are, are really, again, they're foundational to understanding how people think and store information in their brains and how they retrieve it and how it affects their actions and behaviors and organizations. And we can again, easily break schemas and mental models uh through uh application, but it's hard to break those paradigms. So we really want to focus on shaping the future through uh leveraging this knowledge around schemas and mental models and really the future state when we get into the last piece uh because we're almost here at time, uh really to get into that mindfulness piece around immersive technology.

We have to be able to enable this from the ground up again in your design foundations, mindful, inclusive and sustainable immersive or even metaverse design. It has to be enabled at that design foundation's layer. So things around humanity, we value inclusion. So how are we truly building inclusion in? It's not, it's, it's beyond uh guidelines and pieces like that. We have to intentionally design our foundations and our organization in a way that supports this through their mission and vision, but also um align to what's happening on the outside.

So you can dismantle some of these issues a little bit at a time through your efforts. And um that's really all I have for today. I really uh thank you for your attention. I'm gonna take a quick minute to answer some questions. Uh Please feel free to add them in the chat and thank you to Women Tech for uh this amazing uh event. Are there any questions? Well, if there are any uh aren't any other questions or any questions? Um I definitely um for us to stay in touch, that's my contact information. Uh Thank you again to Women Tech for um for hosting this amazing event so that we can share meaningfully together.