CoDesign LIVE
Things Become What You Call Them: Writing For Design

Join Mike Mooney for a virtual lightning talk that spotlights writing as a discipline that permeates the work of design-driven teams.

Tune into CoDesign LIVE on February 25 at 12 pm ET / 9am PT for a virtual lightning talk with Mike Mooney, Principal of Meant LLC, on Writing For Design. Too often, designers treat writing as a supporting skill—something already mastered and secondary to “real” design work. But inside interdisciplinary teams, writing quietly does far more: it shapes strategy, aligns stakeholders, names problems, and makes decisions durable.

This lightning talk reframes writing as a design discipline in its own right. Beyond copywriting or AI harvesting, Mike explores how design thinking principles—prototyping, constraints, structure, and collaboration—enlighten written work. In a world where content is everywhere, thoughtful writing stands out. How might approaching story crafting through a design lens add perspective to your writing style?

About Mike Mooney:
Mike is a writer and a strategist who operates at the intersection of brand strategy, verbal branding, and experience design to elevate brand storytelling. As a writer and principal at Meant, Mike gives voice to brand, marketing and design strategies in ways that help make hard things simpler, new things more engaging, and nuanced things more discoverable. His work building communications platforms for new-to-the-world products, services and technologies includes engagements with market leaders and challengers, as well as early and growth-stage startups, across the healthcare, consumer electronics, industrial, consumer, high- tech and other sectors. Mike founded Meant in 2018 after leaving Catapult Thinking, the interdisciplinary design consultancy he co-founded in Boston in 1998. Prior to Catapult he worked as a writer and information designer at Fitch (formerly Fitch RS, but originally RichardsonSmith+), where he had an epiphany regarding creative writing as a catalyst for interdisciplinary design thinking.