"Design is not decoration. It's how you make technology worth adopting."

A conversation with Guy Van Wijmeersch, strategic designer at Sweetspot

Guy Van Wijmeersch likes to ask the question many product leaders skip: not “how do we build this”, but “why does it matter?" Trained as an industrial designer, Guy spent nearly three decades at Barco working where engineering ambition meets market reality. Today, he brings that same design-driven mindset to companies wrestling with questions they don't yet know how to ask.

Your background is in industrial design, but your career went somewhere else. What happened?

I was trained to create products. But early on in my education I realized the why interested me more than the how. Technology is fascinating, don't get me wrong. But technology without a reason behind it doesn't go anywhere meaningful.

So I kept pushing further upstream. From product design to service design, new business models, and innovation strategy. The through-line in everything I've done is the intersection of technology, people, and business value. Design is the discipline that lets you navigate that intersection.

You spent a long time at Barco. What did that teach you?

Almost everything that matters, honestly.

Barco is a company with extraordinary engineering depth. The feasibility side — what you can build — was never really in question. That's where I could always rely on incredibly smart people around me. My role was to bring in the other two dimensions: desirability and viability. What does the market actually need? What problem are we really solving? That's where design thinking adds the most value, and where I found my place.

You use the term "strategic design" a lot. What does it actually mean?

Design is not decoration. It's how you make technology worth adopting. And strategic design specifically is about reframing the challenge before you jump to a solution.

Most companies are very good at solving a problem once it's clearly defined. But defining the right problem is often the part that gets skipped. Product roadmaps get built as linear continuations of what already exists. Nobody zooms out to ask: does this trajectory still make sense? Are there adjacent opportunities we're missing? Is this really what our customers need, or just what we've always delivered?

Strategic design introduces that zooming out as a discipline. It brings together business, technology, and user perspective to reframe what's actually being asked. And when you do that well, you start to see opportunities that were hidden in plain sight because everyone was looking in the same direction.

What draws you to software in particular, now at Sweetspot?

Software is where the stakes are highest right now.

I've always believed that bits and atoms are inseparable. It's not because you're building software that the physical interaction disappears. There's always an interface, always a user, always a context. But the speed at which software decisions compound means that getting the foundations wrong is very costly.

What I see too often is UX that's been designed beautifully in isolation, but the underlying architecture, the integrations, data flows, and system interactions running behind the scenes, don't actually support the experience it promises. You end up with a beautiful front door and chaos behind it.

Are you an AI believer or skeptic?

Technology optimist, with caveats. I went through this same cycle in the late nineties. I was based in Los Angeles for Barco, right in the middle of the internet bubble. I used to drive up to San Francisco every month to visit design studios like IDEO and Frog. What struck me then was that the best designers weren't just building products, but helping founders articulate what a completely new kind of business model could mean.

That's exactly the question we should be asking about AI now. Instead, a lot of what I see is technology implementation without a clear job to be done. Features getting added because the tools are available, not because they create meaningful value. That ends badly. The companies that get it right will be the ones that start from the human problem and work backward to the AI capability, not the other way around.

You're pretty direct about Belgium underperforming on innovation. Why does that matter to you?

We have the talent. We have strong research institutions. But we consistently fail to convert knowledge into market impact. Belgium sits in the mid-twenties on the Global Innovation Index. Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands are all well ahead. This is more an ambition gap than a talent gap.

Part of it is cultural. There's a fear of the big leap, a tendency to stay cautious and incremental. Countries like Finland and South Korea have embedded design thinking into national innovation programs. Companies like Bosch decided fifteen years ago that they were going to become a data company and actually prepared for it. We tend to wait until the evidence is overwhelming, which means we're always a step behind.

What's your personal working style? What do you bring to a room?

Co-creation. I've never been comfortable in the role of the expert who delivers the answer. What I find genuinely energizing is sitting around a table with people from different disciplines — engineers, designers, business leads, operators — and creating the space where something new emerges. Not compromise, not negotiation, but actual synthesis.

And then there’s my curiosity. I read constantly about design theory, leadership research, technology trends, and organizational behavior. I follow companies that have made genuine transformations, not just talked about them. I try to understand the patterns underneath what's working, so I can recognize them earlier when I see them again.

What made you want to work with Sweetspot?

The people first. Ronny and I worked together at Barco on complex projects across the design and technical divide. That complementarity felt important.

But beyond that: the timing. Software is defining the next decade of B2B business, and most companies are not approaching it with the right questions. They're asking "how do we build this?" before they've answered "should we build this, and for whom, and to what end?" That's exactly the space Sweetspot operates in. That combination of strategic and executional thinking is what I was looking for.

Want to explore what Guy and the Sweetspot team could do for your product or innovation challenge? Book a quick intro call with him.