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.

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!

Contact the host of Design Connection #7: IWD. Building Positive Change in Our Workplaces & Society