Nanda Dias
experience & strategic designer

Hi, I'm Nanda. I've spent my career designing visuals, products, and the communication that makes new technology feel trustworthy rather than strange. I thrive at the intersection of curiosity and courage: exploring how emerging technologies, art, and design can enhance human connection, fairness, and well-being. One of my longest-running obsessions has been how new technologies change people's behavior, and how the way we communicate them shapes whether people trust what's new or pull back from it. That thread ran through my MSc thesis, questioning the traditional musical album format and treating physical space as an interface, years before that thinking had a name in product design. It was published in the MIT Press Leonardo Music Journal and presented at Audio Mostly, an interdisciplinary ACM conference on the design and experience of interaction with sound, in Aalborg, Denmark. I was one of three women among 45 researchers, and the only one from South America. I didn't realise how much that experience shaped my instinct to name whose perspective is missing in a room until much later.

That question is still what I chase. Just now at enterprise scale, post Gen-AI boom, with a lot more iterations behind me.

Before the big company years

My first Lead Designer role was at TobyRich, a Bremen startup bringing one of the first Bluetooth smartphone-controlled toys to market: planes, boats, cars. I worked directly with engineers to test the physics and hand movement precision behind each device, and closely with the founders to translate their brand vision into visuals that were playful but stunning enough to earn trust. That last part mattered: back in 2012, a product that responded to your phone in mid-air was novel enough to trigger strangeness, even rejection. We tested concepts alongside Google Glass and early VR prototypes, on a market that wasn't sure yet what to make of any of it. I was the founding designer, which meant art direction, UI design, packaging, and mentoring a student designer, all at once. No established playbook. I learned faster in that context than anywhere else.

Before TobyRich, I co-founded a design studio in Rio (Supernova) with two university friends (Walter and Livia) and three former professors (Luciano Tardin, Marco Aurelio Martins and Ricardo Campos) working across corporate identity, brand design, and marketing materials for print and digital. My first two junior roles were in educational and fashion visual communication design, learning early what actually speaks to people across very different audiences and registers. Then I moved abroad: London, Dessau, Bremen, Berlin. Nine industries. Startups to global enterprises, B2C to B2B. I kept landing in the uncomfortable edge between "this technology exists now" and "we're not sure yet what it changes." That's where I do my best work.

Eight and a half years at SAP

I led and contributed to UX, research, and design strategy across four products at the intersection of managerial finance and sustainability: SAP RealSpend, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP Sustainability Control Tower, and for one semester the Data Intelligence Platform during a major consolidation from scattered tools into one coherent system.

The work that mattered most wasn't always in the product itself. At SAP RealSpend, I joined a team that hadn't worked closely with a UX designer before. Our ML proof of concept was headed for SAP Sapphire under real time pressure. I recognized the opening: this was as much about showing what design and research could contribute as it was about shipping. When visual designers resisted running research (it wasn't their territory), I showed rather than argued. The findings from external validation sessions changed the product in visible ways, and developers who'd been skeptical started asking to sit in on synthesis. One said: "It helped me understand the concepts better and do my job better." Running a DesignOps initiative called "Designing for Change" weeks later, I built empathy maps across POs, managers, and engineers, and we landed as Agile human-centered squads. That change showed up in how validation sessions were experienced by our team, not as a burden but something that adds value.

On the SAP Data Intelligence Platform, I used to think better-written guidelines would fix the consistency problem across 10 teams in 7 locations and three tech frameworks. The teams that pushed back showed me the real need was communicating reasoning, not more rules. I distilled SAP's design system for that platform, creating a shared reference (a.k.a our lean design system) that made design decisions legible to both developers and designers in one place. That's what shifted my approach from "write better guidelines" to "show the decision and the reason together."

The hardest cross-functional work came on the AI sustainability reporting initiative at SAP Sustainability Control Tower, which earned public recognition from one of our major AI leaders. I was orchestrating across engineers, ML leads, an AI ethics team, and customers across four countries, each with different stakes, different levels of trust in AI, and different ideas about what "ready" meant. Getting to consensus in that room required holding the line on testing assumptions before building, even when the pressure to move faster was real. The early validation caught gaps that would have cost an estimated €280k and six months to unwind later. I treat that as a strong signal, not a settled win: I left before we could validate the full impact at scale.

I co-led the SAP Design Hub Berlin, appointed by our Chief Design Officer (Arin Bhowmick and Carolina Marquis, lead of the Gloabal Design Hub Initiative). With the goal to strengthen our community, often meeting virtually all over the globe, with a local flavour, we started listening to their needs and maiin interstes and catering talks and events that would foster that debate and excahnge in different formats. We were reconnecting designers who'd been working in isolation across large, distributed organisations. A few initiatives catered by us was Design Monthly gatherings of 20-40 people, coaching our leadership team in OKR framework, to allow objectives come to life via smaller, easier to implement key results. We were doing this work as volunteers, besides our usual product teams, so the careful work of building trust across teams with very different cultures and contexts was often challenging yet rewarding.

Designing for behavior change, outside the building

Sustainability design has crossed my life more than once. At university, I contributed UI and concept design to Hyprions, a strategy serious game built to raise environmental awareness in 14+ players. Years later at SAP, six cross-national teams from different countries competed in a 3-day design sprint to lower carbon emissions in urban mobility. Our team focused on behavior change and rewarding systems rather than technology novelty. We won with the Leaf concept, judged by external experts from Smart Dublin, MHP, BVG Berlin, and others. The jury asked if we wanted to sell the idea. We didn't. Jelbi, a very similar concept, launched in Berlin shortly after.

“Bold ideas welcome. Assumptions? Checked early and often.”

A deliberate break and what followed

Last October I took a short break after a transition from SAP to Fresenius Medical Care that didn't meet my expectations. Medical devices taught me about resilience and regulated, high-stakes development, and it also confirmed that I do my best work in agile environments where ownership and creativity actually move things forward, not in multi-year release cycles without UX metrics to learn from along the way.

I also felt I needed to experience the current wave of AI change more intensively myself, not just read about it. That led me to join d.MBA, a program for design leaders bridging design and business strategy. It sharpened exactly what I needed: how to make design's impact legible to stakeholders who think in revenue and risk, and how AI will reshape the way design and business teams actually work together.

Alongside that, I keep a side project running called Gen_We, a regenerative tourism platform grounded in my passion for travelling, the sea, Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics and the UN's 30x30 ocean protection goal. I built it to practice discovery on a problem nobody handed me: market research, behavioral framing, a business model, end to end. The same muscles this work needs, exercised on my own time.

“Living and working across cultures taught me to be more aware of unconscious biases, and made me a more empathetic designer.”

How I work across very different contexts

Living and working across cultures made me more aware of my own unconscious bias, and more deliberate about naming whose perspective is missing from a room before treating a decision as settled. That instinct started at my MSc thesis conference, where I was one of three women among 45 researchers and felt the weight of whose voice was absent from the field. It shaped how I run workshops, how I structure research, how I think about who's not yet in the conversation, and how I hire. When I built the Sustainability design team at SAP, I developed a framework to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process, because the instinct to name whose perspective is missing doesn't stop at the product.

I've seen Agile and Design Thinking both spark and clash in the same room. I've learned to lean into that tension rather than smooth it over. My journey has been guided by two values I keep coming back to: curiosity and bravery. Curiosity to explore what's unfamiliar, in a new industry, a new culture, a technology not yet understood. Bravery to hold a position when it's uncomfortable, to name the difficult thing, to stay in the room after the consensus breaks down. Global teams across time zones and professional cultures are where both values get tested most. I'd rather be tested than comfortable.

Background

MSc in Digital Media Design, Universität Bremen
“Soundtracking Paths” researching interaction design in the music industry. Published in MIT Press Leonardo Music Journal. Presented at ACM Audio Mostly 2014, Aalborg, Denmark.

Bachelor's in Industrial Design, Visual Communication, Estácio de Sá University, Rio de Janeiro.

Since then: d.MBA; Lean UX & Agile, UX Leadership, Stakeholder Engagement, Measuring ROI through Nielsen Norman Group; Design Thinking Coach Training at SAP; Designing for Change at IDEO U; SAFe Agile Training.