Metamorphosis of Designers to Leaders - 'Moonshot Assembly Mixer'

With the London Design Festival and Cambridge Tech Week both in full flow, it was a pleasure to join a fringe event in central Cambridge, last week.

Hosted by The Extended Pack Collective, the Moonshot Assembly Mixer unpacked how designers navigate influence, ambiguity, and responsibility as their roles expand beyond execution.

Over hot coffee, I reflected on my industrial design craft evolving from a focus on creating people-centred artefacts, through making decisions and building teams, to facilitating cross-functional alignment, and ultimately cultivating scalable innovation capability and organisational capacity.

Perhaps counterintuitively, as responsibility increased, I often found my most valuable contributions centred less on having all the answers -

And more about creating conditions (people-centred insight, method, mindset and culture) for better thinking and decision-making across teams.

(All that said, I had to admit I still love scratching out a quick brainstorm sketch or exploring ideas in real-time on a whiteboard. I find many challenges can be broken open with a Venn diagram or 2x2!)

Thanks to my sparring partners for the morning

🤝 Ashish Handa of Amazon

🤝 Samadrita Sarkar of Observe AI

🤝 Mohit Yadav of Wolffkraft- Global Strategy & Design Studio

🤝 Arnab Ghose of Nutanix

🤝 Sonam Sengar of Extended Pack Collective

🤝 Nathan Crilly of University of Cambridge

🤝 Scott Parker of Fifty

The Extended Pack Collective continued their Design Dialogues exploration of the evolving value, relationships and responsibility of design with guests at the Royal Society of Arts at RSA House, as part of the London Design Festival 2026.

Notes: More about the mixer at https://moonshotassembly.com/