Isabell Fringer on Designing Beyond the Tangible
Isabell Fringer’s design journey began at the workbench. Her father was a joiner, and from an early age she grew up surrounded by the tactility of making. “I started at a very young age designing things with my hands,” she recalls. At school she was already sketching furniture, working with wood, building the tangible world around her intentionally. That early grounding in objects naturally led her to study industrial design. But as she tells it now, the story of her practice is less about a steady trajectory than about ever-expanding horizons. “At every stage of my career,” she says, “the practice of design became increasingly holistic.” What began with objects and furniture moved into space, then services, and from services into organizations and culture. Along the way, Fringer realized something fundamental: that design is not about products or even processes — it is, ultimately, about people.
“The hardest part of any transformation isn’t the strategy — it’s bringing people along. ”
“If I did another degree today,” she reflects, “it would be psychology. Because the hardest part of any transformation isn’t the strategy — it’s bringing people along. You need to earn buy-in, navigate resistance, and build a shared sense of purpose. That became the biggest shift for me. Which is also why I don’t call myself a designer anymore. At least not purposefully. But of course,” she adds with a confident smile, “I am a designer at heart, 100 percent.”
Fringer’s recent work years have been defined by large-scale transformation projects — complex ecosystems with 20,000 employees or more. Here, the designer’s task is no longer drawing journey maps or prototyping interfaces. It’s about unblocking leadership, aligning stakeholders, and creating conditions for change. “It still takes me time to leave hands off,” she admits. “As designers, our intuition is to create. But now my role is supporting leadership to move forward. I have to resist the urge to just jump in and make...” That tension — between craft and orchestration — runs through her reflections. It is a shift many senior designers will recognize: from executing the work to enabling others to do it, from holding the pen to holding the room.
“We have to distinguish what’s just a moment in time versus what’s changing forever”
When asked if design is in crisis, she first dismantles the question. “We have to distinguish what’s just a moment in time versus what’s changing forever,” she argues. Economic downturns have made design expendable. “We got very harshly exposed: design and research were some of the first to go in layoffs. In crisis mode, organizations cut what they see as nice-to-have.” But alongside these cycles, structural shifts are happening. For Fringer, the tectonic force is AI. She points out that phases of the design process — and even their sequence and duration — are being fundamentally reshaped.
“What used to take months before, for example research or prototyping, can now be done in much shorter timelines. For example, you start from a strong hypothesis, and instead of a prototype you already have a functioning product you can test in the market. That’s amazing.” But she also questions whether our inherited methods are still the right ones. “I’m not sure if the design thinking process applies in the same way when we design AI solutions. The right starting point might not always be people. At times it’s the technology — what it can do, and how we use it for the better.” It’s a provocation: to flip the human-centered paradigm that has guided design for decades, or at least to stretch it to include non-human agents. “From now on,” she says, “if you work on a service blueprint, you will have to include a swim lane for AI. Agents will be stakeholders in the system, and we’ll need to orchestrate interactions between humans and non-humans.”
“Our real superpowers are visualization, innovation and facilitation (...). That’s what we’ve always been good at, and it’s even more relevant now.”
Despite these shifts, Fringer is clear about what designers already do well—and what will matter most going forward. “Our real superpowers are visualization, innovation and facilitation. Surfacing tensions, making things discussable, helping organizations navigate change. That’s what we’ve always been good at, and it’s even more relevant now.” She emphasizes that designers’ ability to visualize possibilities remains crucial. “We can make the future tangible. We can sketch, storyboard, prototype—whatever it takes to help people see and feel what might be coming. And it’s not just empathy. It’s also precision: knowing how to brief clearly, define vision sharply, and avoid vagueness when everything is complex. That discipline is part of our superpower.”
“Design is still too often perceived as a soft trait, (...) less business-critical. Until that perception shifts, we won’t reach the impact we want. ”
Yet for all the optimism, Fringer is candid about the barriers. Again and again, she has seen transformation efforts stall for the same reason: lack of leadership buy-in. “If there isn’t leadership in place that really stands behind change, nothing moves,” she says. “You can have great bottom-up initiatives, but in the end it comes down to resourcing, financing, and commitment from the top.” Her metaphor is vivid: “It’s like a boat where everyone is rowing in different directions. If leadership isn’t aligned, you won’t move anywhere.” This is why she has spent much of her recent career working directly with C-suites, and at times, straight hand-in-hand with the CEO. “Yes, design has an influence. I’ve been in those conversations for the last ten years. And leaders are listening. But still — design is still too often perceived as a soft trait. Mauricio Manhaes did a study showing design is often associated with feminine traits. Not female, but feminine—soft, less business-critical. Until that perception shifts, we won’t reach the impact we want.”
“True agility requires constant orchestration, continuous information-sharing, and leadership that protects time and space for experimentation”
Fringer is pragmatic about what organizations must do to adapt. Cross-functional teams are important, but they often just create new silos. True agility requires constant orchestration, continuous information-sharing, and leadership that protects time and space for experimentation. She points to models where large companies spin out smaller entities that operate like startups. “It’s about finding the balance — what stays in the pyramid, what is best self-managed, and what is best to run outside. Most companies haven’t cracked it yet.” Still, she insists that mindset is the first barrier. “People learn the tools, they attend the workshops, but then they fall back into old patterns. Real transformation takes constant effort. It’s culture work, not just process work.”
“Processes themselves are being taken over by AI. Our job will be to orchestrate: where do we let automation run, and where do we insist on human presence? That’s going to be the real design challenge.”
Looking ahead, Fringer imagines a new role for service designers and strategists — one that explicitly accounts for AI as both collaborator and stakeholder. Designers will need fluency in technology and the discernment to decide where the human touch is essential. “It’s not about us putting information into a front-end anymore,” she says. “Processes themselves are being taken over by AI. Our job will be to orchestrate: where do we let automation run, and where do we insist on human presence? That’s going to be the real design challenge.” It is a vision both sobering and hopeful: sobering because it acknowledges disruption, hopeful because it reaffirms the distinct value of human judgment and empathy.
For all the complexity of technology, organizations, and leadership, Fringer returns to a simple conviction. “Sometimes our work feels intangible,” she reflects, “but our superpower is to make things tangible and discussable. We bring things to the surface when others can’t. That’s what we need to use wisely, whatever challenge we face.” It’s less a manifesto than a reminder—an insistence that design’s greatest impact may lie not in its artifacts, but in its capacity to bring people together, to structure conversations, and to chart paths through uncertainty.
With over a decade of experience in CX and digital transformation, Isabell Fringer helps organizations to put humans at the heart of business strategy. She has shaped transformation programs for large scale businesses such as Lufthansa, MANN+HUMMEL, McKinsey & Company, and Signal Iduna. As both consultant and partner, she combines strategic rigor with hands-on execution to make change not just possible, but tangible for the customer and the business.
