DEI for Innovation 2: Creating innovative products, with Erin Peace

A diverse team makes companies stronger and more productive. In this series, Kurt Merriweather, The Diversity Movement’s VP of Products and Innovation, talks with DEI leaders about how diversity, equity and inclusion can lead to incredible developments in your organization and beyond. In this episode, Kurt talks with Erin Peace, associate director at Experience Design from Method, about how DEI leads to innovation in product development.

Transcript

Kurt Merriweather: Welcome to Winning with Diversity, a podcast to help you learn the strategies to transform your business through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Our series on DEI, presents different techniques and approaches to build high-performing teams that operate more effectively and unlock new opportunities for business growth. We’ll also talk about technology and different techniques to build great products as well. 

I’m your host, Kurt Merriweather, VP of product and innovation at the Diversity Movement, and today we’ll be exploring how we help companies transform themselves through technology, data-driven insight, and new approaches to DEI. 

I’m excited to be joined by our guests, Erin Peace, Associate Director of Design from Method. Erin works in experience, design and strategy at Method, and Erin has a background in journalism, graphic design, and service design. Outside of work, Erin loves to read, run, and travel. Welcome to the show Erin. 

Erin Peace: Thanks so much Kurt. Happy to be here. 

Kurt Merriweather: Excellent. I’m going to, I’m going to change things up a little bit and ask you a question about, something somebody wouldn’t know about you from Googling you? 

Erin Peace: All right. Yeah. So, I have a, well, you probably don’t wouldn’t know this from Googling me either. I have a sister, half-sister who lived in Hawaii for much of her life. And so, I used to go and visit her and was out in the water, swimming, snorkeling, one time visiting her and was suddenly attacked by a large man o’ war.

Thought I was going to die. It had like six feet long tentacles that were invisible and wrapped themselves all over my body. And I had to swim back to shore with those all over me. And my niece was on the shore at the time. And she took, she was about three years old, she took one look at me and she just burst out crying because I look so scary.

 So, it was one of the worst, what do you call it? Injuries I’ve ever had, but it was also really funny and a great sort of community experience because literally everyone on the beach came over to me and gave me different tips on whether I should put vinegar on it, whether need to go to the hospital, it was intense. So, I don’t know if that’s going to make it in the podcast, but that’s definitely something you wouldn’t know about me Googling me. 

Kurt Merriweather:  Being attacked by a man o’ war in Hawaii. We would not know that about you Googling you, so that is a really good story. I wasn’t expecting that one. 

So, you obviously you’ve, you’ve had a pretty varied set of things that you’ve done in your background, and so wanted to talk to you a little bit about, you know, how you got to be where you are based on your journey and what led you to, navigating the things that you navigated to get to the point where you’re doing design work now.

Erin Peace: Sure, yeah.  I started out actually studying journalism in undergrad. I remember I was trying to decide what to major in, got the packet and circled everything.

Full Episode Transcript

Winning with Diversity is brought to you by The Diversity Movement, hosted by VP of Products and Innovation Kurt Merriweather, and is a production of Earfluence.

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