Design Thinkers Podcast

Welcome to our new series: The Art of Change. In this series we will deep dive into the transformative world of design, innovation, and the people driving pro-social change. Each month, we’ll bring you exclusive interviews with the people behind the scenes of change-making. We’ll dive into their stories—what inspires them, what challenges them, and how they’re making an impact. Stay tuned for our...

In our latest Design Thinker podcast we explore the importance of experimentation in business. We are on a quest to find out: What do we mean by experiments in business? Why should business leaders care? What does a good business experiment look like? And most practically of all, we are going to discuss how you run effective business experiments. The podcast guests today are well-placed to answer...

In this podcast we talk to our new Design Director, Goldie Chaudhuri . Goldie was Goldie was the individual we spoke to on our first ever podcast and we return to talk to her today, nearly four years later, to discuss her new role. Moreover, we focus on what it’s like working as an ensemble both within our team and with our clients themselves. This touches upon exciting projects involving South We...

How might we create equality of opportunity through design and tap talent potential in a multicultural society? That's the question we sought to explore in the first event of our 2023 Good Morning Design series: The Equity Activists. This event featured Design Thinkers Academy London and DK&A founder, David Kester , in conversation with the social entrepreneur, Poppy Jaman OBE , the HR expert,...

With LGBTQ+ hate crime on the rise, what would you do to stop it? For Marta Lima, a Technical Product Owner for Cloud Engineering at Vodafone, the answer lay in design. In this podcast she talks us through her creation of Zoteria, a new app to help the LGBTQ+ community and the wider public to come together and tackle the issue of hate crime. Here Marta shares her own experiences and those of the w...

The pressures of the pandemic have left healthcare even more crippled than before. With patient backlog and patient waiting times at their worst in years across the NHS, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust knew they needed a new approach to improve Ambulatory Care for their patients. So they contacted our parent company, design consultancy DK&A , to research the problems patients are facing. This resea...

"How to unleash the power of intrapreneurs like Joe? The key is to enable them to pursue their vision." This question, asked by Richard Branson back in 2010, feels more realised now than ever before. Across the globe more and more companies are giving autonomy and freedom to the so-dubbed intrapreneurs to drive innovation from within. Yet what is it like to be an intrapreneur? Well who better to a...

So do you want to learn about Design Thinking but you're short of time? Well, our Design Thinking Fundamentals course may be the one for you. Taking place over just two-days at our London studio, it covers the complete double diamond: discover, define, develop and deliver. Adam Forbes is one such person who has taken the. course. He is the founder of Familiarize , a startup passionate about custom...

So you’ve taken a Design Thinkers Academy London course, but what’s next? Perhaps you slot straight into a Design Thinking project, but what if you’re in an organisation where Design Thinking is almost non existent? In this podcast with Design Thinker and facilitator, Arnoud Koning, we share all the tips and tricks you need on how you can become a Design Thinking champion at work and make it take...

A Service Blueprint is a is a diagram that shows how a service really works in detail. It connects the customers experience with the people and activities that help deliver that service. In this version of the podcast, coach Simon Gough explains how to use Service Blueprints and why it makes Design Thinking even more powerful.

In our latest podcast, coach Simon Gough explains what is Systems Thinking and how it makes Design Thinking projects more successful. Simon Gough is an experienced design consultant, facilitator, trainer, speaker and writer with clients ranging from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies to central government. He also teaches our Systems Thinking three-day course. Listen to him explore System...

Despite the many business closures of 2020 due to the pandemic, it also saw the launch of a record number of start-ups. Around 407,510 new businesses were formed during this period in the UK and one of those was Plateaway – an online platform that enables users to create their favourite restaurant dishes using meal kits. Meal kits feature all the ingredients and instructions needed to help make yo...

Some of you may have heard of the charity YMCA – the Young Man’s Christian Association. It was founded nearly 180 years ago in Britain. Now it’s based in Geneva and helps more than 60 million youth in 120 countries. Lloyd Wamai, is Programme Innovation and Management Executive at the Africa Alliance of YMCAs. We first met him in 2019 when he attended our Design Thinkers Bootcamp. At the time he fe...

Shambala is a four-day festival that takes place in Northamptonshire, England with over 200 musical, comedy, and dance acts across dozens of venues and stages, winning multiple awards along the way. We first met Shambala’s Creative Director and co-founder Sid Sharma back in 2019 when he attended our Design Thinkers Bootcamp. He loved that experience so much, he’s since been back on our Online Faci...

In our craft series we recently introduced our new prototyping course, which teaches participants to use prototypes to test their ideas: determining if they are solving the right problem, building the right thing, failing fast if you aren’t, and improving their concept through an iterative process of learning-by-doing. One of the participants on the prototyping course was Annemarie Sheridan-Antill...

For our upcoming Design Sprint Camp, we have a wide range of facilitators and coaches here to teach the very best of Design Thinking focussed towards our climate based challenge. One of those is Design Thinking innovator, facilitator and creative leader Arne van Oosterom, who we talk to in this edition of our Design Thinking podcast. We talk to Arne about why he is joining as a coach for the upcom...

In this podcast we look at how the Design Thinkers Academy London used a Design Sprint to help one of the world’s largest software companies to initiate an idea that has led to real world solutions in tackling the scourge of plastics pollution. For it we spoke to Stephen Jamieson, Global Head of Circular Economy Solutions at SAP and DTA Founder, David Kester. The podcast was hosted by environmenta...

For our latest podcast we spoke to one our newest facilitators, Alieu Fofanah. Alieu is a senior consultant, facilitator and leadership coach and has worked within the private and not-for-profit sector for 12 years. He is well known for challenging mind-sets and behaviours to get leaders and teams to a place where transformative change can happen. For the podcast we interviewed Alieu about the wor...

Effective facilitation in the workplace has never been more important, as the world navigates the vast complexities of remote working. So, for our latest podcast, we speak with two expert facilitators, Arnoud Koning and Susana Osorio, about their experiences as facilitators, touching upon the art of facilitation itself, great facilitation examples and people to learn from, and also covering our ne...

For our next podcast we focussed on the research method critical to Design Thinking: ethnography. Here we explore what ethnography is and its history as a research method. We look at the benefits of ethnography to business and how it can still be conducted during the current lockdown. For this podcast we interviewed ethnographer Dr. Katie Gaddini . Katie is a sociologist and a writer and a Senior...

Our second Design Thinkers Academy London podcast is here, this time with The Climate Group focussing on climate action and the role Design Thinking can play in the crisis facing the planet. Hosted by former BBC journalist Daniel Boettcher and featuring Helen Clarkson, CEO of The Climate Group and Goldie Chaudhuri, the Learning Designer at DTA London, we talk about sustainable diets and the impact...

In our first Design Thinkers Academy London Podcast, we talk to our Learning Designer, Goldie Chaudhuri, about Design Thinking itself, its role in society today on challenges such as climate change, and more specifically about her role as the Learning Designer and bringing Design Thinking to a wider audience.