Pilar Moreno Azcárate
I’m a Strategic Designer passionate about human-centered design, innovation, and sustainability
Pilar Moreno Azcárate is a design strategist and industrial designer. Currently, she works at VMware as a strategic designer in the Social Innovation Team, managing nonprofit organizations’ engagements with VMware Tanzu Labs to identify, develop, and design practical solutions to pressing challenges around the globe. She also manages the Service Learning and Good Gigs Projects programs at the VMware Foundation. She previously worked for Fjord leading projects and exploring new business opportunities with clients. She focuses on developing and facilitating collaboration and innovation strategies in various sectors such as technology, social impact, agriculture, healthcare, financial services, consumer products/food industry, technology, and the creative and cultural sector. She is a Fulbright scholar and a graduate of the MFA in Design Management at SCAD—Savannah College of Art and Design, where she was awarded the SCAD Dean’s Fellowship Scholarship (2015-2017). She gained years of entrepreneurial experience building and running her own brand of ethically and socially sourced jewelry. She has worked extensively in areas such as contextual research, UX research, service design, organizational innovation, strategy design, product design, program management, facilitation, pedagogical training, capacity building, and community development in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
Specialties
Design Strategy
Human Centered Design
Service Design
Design Thinking
Contextual Research
Experience Design
Sustainability
Systems Thinking
User Research
User Testing
User Interviews
Facilitation and Training
Work
VMware
Position: Manager, Social Innovation
Services: leading multidisciplinary teams, manage client relationships, service design, program management and iteration, facilitation and training.
Collaborations:
Internal: Tanzu Labs, Office of the CTO, ESG Office, VMware Foundation, IT Academy
External: 30+ nonprofits around the globe
Fjord - Insitum
Position: Senior Consultant, Design Lead
Services: leading multidisciplinary teams, project development from research to implementation, ethnographic research, business strategy, user testing, facilitation and training.
Clients: Facebook, Roche, Bimbo Group, Grupo Sura, Grupo Bolívar, Sodimac, Tecnoquímicas, …
Rockefeller Foundation & Pyxera Global
Position: Design Lead
Focus: mitigating tomato post-harvest loss in Nigeria, empower smallholder farmers and women entrepreneurs, local value creation.
Services: research, development, and implementation of technologies for post-harvest loss mitigation, trainer of trainers program design, capacity building, leading multidisciplinary and multicultural teams.
MFA Design Management Thesis
Focus: identifying strategies to incentivize just community development in contexts affected by emotional distress and conflict.
Realization: research, prototyping, user testing with community development leaders in various organizations in Savannah, GA.
City of Savannah
Focus: empowering the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability to better collaborate with other departments towards the city’s sustainability goals.
Services: research, prototyping, user testing, strategy design, workshop design and facilitation, capacity building.
SCAD - Design Management Program
Focus: discovering the requirements for effective collaboration within Design Management at SCAD and designing a space—in a new building—that reflected those insights.
Services: research in collaboration with IBM and Steelcase, user testing, industrial design, experience design, interior design, facilitation, interaction design.
Hispanic Chamber of Commerce - Savannah, Georgia
Focus: helping the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to clarify the roles of their team members. Building alignment through clearing out the organization’s goals.
Services: research, capacity building, organizational strategy, workshop design and facilitation, leading multicultural teams.
Locoki - Business Strategy
Focus: creating a hospitality exchange network that builds a trustworthy community of travelers and locals by enabling them to access authentic immersive experiences at any destination.
Services: research, business strategy, prototyping, user experience design, user testing, interaction design, leading multidisciplinary teams.
Gulfstream Center of Design
Focus: identifying the challenges of the multicultural academic environment at Gulfstream, in order to develop strategies to increase cultural intelligence and improve the experience of collaboration at Gulfstream.
Services: research, capacity building, prototyping, user testing, user experience design, facilitation, workshop design.
EMRU - Urban Planning
Position: Communication strategy. Design
Services: corporate identity, project communication, strategy design.
Love is in Savannah
Focus: understanding and leveraging the culture of love in Savannah, the most romantic city of the South of the USA. Discovering business opportunities for the Love Industry in the city.
Services: research, user testing, prototyping, experience design, interaction design.
Course Design - Design Management Program
Focus: understanding the collaboration dynamics and successful practices of organizations, and utilize the knowledge to design a curriculum for a collaboration course at SCAD’s Design Management Program.
Services: research in collaboration with IBM, user testing, facilitation, prototyping, user experience, curriculum design.
Moraz Jewelry
Position: Founder, designer.
Services: handmade, contemporary, and socially responsible jewelry line for women, product design and distribution, strategy design, jewelry technique development.