EP68 Tarra Van Amerongen On Elephants And Turtles

This episode we did a house call and visited Tarra van Amerongen, Group Director of Fjord, to talk about her role and how she thinks about the future. A massive shout out to Streamtime, as it’s with our new travelling recording kit that we were able to do this. Tarra has recently had a baby boy so we started there, talking about the change a baby brings and how she wants to redesign the complete hospital experience. As you might expect, Tarra is an incredibly big thinker and in a position to bring about change through her role with Fjord, her teaching at UTS and her work with the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) – a 260 year old networking group ‘dedicated to enriching society and shaping the future’. Interestingly Tarra didn’t take the standard design journey, instead studying business and management, working as an Investment Analyst and managing CBA’s Innovation Lab, before moving into more typically creative roles. This experience puts her in a unique position to understand both sides of the corporate/creative divide and we discuss how she navigates it. Matt first met Tarra through an AGDA panel they were on during VIVID in 2017 entitled Can Technology Make us more Human – you can see that panel at agda.com.au/inspiration/agda-tv/can-technology-make-us-more-human-panel-discussion Fjord: fjordnet.com 2018 Fjords Trends: trends.fjordnet.com RSA: thersa.org CBA Innovation Lab: commbank.com.au/about-us/innovation-lab.html