Design Thinking 101

When I first connected with Jason Trew (callsign: TOGA), I knew this conversation would challenge some assumptions about where design thinking belongs. Jason is an Air Force fighter pilot and strategy leader turned professor. What emerged from our conversation wasn't just another story about design thinking adoption, but a deeper exploration of what he sees happening when we distinguish between ca...

Jon said that when he first discovered the design operations community at the 2019 Design Ops Summit in Brooklyn, it felt like coming home. Here was this entire tribe of people who cared about the same things he'd been passionate about for years—creating systems that help designers do their best work. In this episode, I'm talking with Jon Fukuda, co-founder of Limina.co, about how design operation...

The tension between doing good research and delivering on tight timelines is something I've experienced throughout my career in design and innovation. This conversation with Sam Zucker unpacks powerful approaches to making research more sustainable and equitable while building systems that support continuous learning and engagement. What particularly struck me was Sam's practical framework for emb...

In this episode, I explore how architectural thinking enhances strategic decision-making with Adam Griff. Our conversation reveals how his architectural background shapes his approach to helping higher education institutions navigate complex decisions and create flexible space solutions. We dig into the challenges of designing spaces that can adapt to unknown futures and discuss how universities c...

Sahibzada Mayed is a creative alchemist who uses design and storytelling to cultivate joy and imagination as tools of liberation. Mayed serves as the Co-Lead for Strategy and Research at Pause and Effect, a liberation-focused imagination and design collective based on Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Beyond that, Mayed leads a small-scale startup, Naranji...

Matthew Van Der Tuyn is a designer and healthcare innovation strategist. Matt is the Senior Director of Design and Strategy at the Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation at Penn Medicine. The mission at the Center is to serve as a catalyst and accelerator for initiatives that dramatically improve health outcomes, patient and provider experiences, and decrease the cost of care. Matt h...

Christina Hanschke's career journey has spanned many diverse roles. She's been a music therapist, nanny, and UX researcher, and she's currently a Design Lead at Final Mile, where she applies a multidisciplinary approach to address pressing societal changes, drawing from behavioral science, human-centered design, and systems thinking. As an adjunct faculty at DePaul University, Christina extends he...

Stephanie Gioia is a founder at Future Work Design with a focus on strategic planning and organizational innovation. She also serves as the director of the Either/Org project and teaches human-centered design for organizational innovation at the University of Oregon's Executive MBA program. She's taught at Stanford's d.school, University of Michigan, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is th...

Sarah Doody is a user research experience designer and researcher. She's also the founder of Career Strategy Lab, a UX career coaching program. In 2011, she co-created the curriculum and taught for General Assembly's first 11-week UX intensive program in New York City. She has extensive experience doing experience design, product strategy, and user research for companies including Fatherly, Sling,...

This is the inaugural DT101 Live!, with guest George Aye. George co-founded Greater Good Studio with the belief that design can help advance equity. Previously, he spent seven years at global innovation firm IDEO before being hired as the first human-centered designer at the Chicago Transit Authority. He speaks frequently across the US and internationally. George holds the position of Adjunct Full...

Kareem Collie is an accomplished designer and educator with a rich background in both the corporate and academic worlds. Leading design teams for organizations like Nickelodeon, Coca-Cola, and USA Network, he has driven transformation and engagement through his expertise in visual and user-experience design. As Design Lead at IBM, he was instrumental in innovating user experiences. Currently, as t...

Holly Owens is an Adjunct Professor at the Touro College Graduate School of Technology, where she teaches in the Instructional Technology program, and works full time as an Instructional Designer with PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy. She has over 15 years of experience in education in various roles, including high school educator, instructional technologist, and podcast host. Today, we talk about inst...

David Staley is an associate professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University. He teaches courses in digital history and historical methods. He also holds courtesy appointments in two departments, the Department of Design, where he has taught courses in digital history and design futures, and the Department of Educational Studies, where he has led the forum on the university. We tal...

This is a Design Thinking 101 episode in the Ask Like a Designer series. Ask Like a Designer helps people explore creating services and solutions by thinking and solving like a designer. You'll learn about design thinking, service design, learning design, leading and building high-performing teams, and ways to achieve better outcomes. This episode is based on this article: ALD014 // 5 Ways Nobody...

Julie Dirksen is the author of the books Design for How People Learn and Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change. She is a learning strategy consultant with a focus on incorporating behavioral science into learning interventions. Julie was my guest for episode 42 of the show. In this episode, we talk about her latest book, ways to motivate learners and workshop participants, desi...

David Lemus is an independent design strategist with engineering roots working with organizations to empower teams to be customer obsessed and have a culture of iterative learning. He has designed and facilitated dozens of design thinking workshops across Fortune 500 companies, non-profit and government organizations. David is also currently an adjunct professor at the University of Portland's Pam...

Liz Chen is Design Thinking Lead at Innovate Carolina, the unit dedicated to innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Liz is also a co-author of The Experimentation Field Book, a practical how-to guide on rigorously testing assumptions and concepts. We talk about teaching and applying design thinking in higher education, and learn m...

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel is an Afro-Trinidadian design educator and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design Studies at North Carolina State University. Lesley promotes greater critical awareness among designers and design students by introducing critical theory concepts and vocabulary into the design studio. We talk about questioning design practice, dreaming and prototyping, and her book, D...

Victor Udoewa works in the Office of Public Health Data Surveillance and Technology at the CDC. Previously, he worked at the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs at NASA, as well as at 18F and Google. We talk about his journey into design and leadership, the role of design in the civic space, radical participatory design, and orchestrating relationship...

Pinar Guvenc is a partner at the award-winning global design studio SOUR, where she leads design innovation strategy. Pinar is also a member of the faculty at Parsons School of Design, and she serves on the Board of Directors at Open Style Lab, a National Design Award-winning nonprofit organization initiated at MIT, with the purpose of making style accessible to people with disabilities. Today on...

Justin is an internationally-renowned design leader, author and speaker from Chicago. You'll often find him at AIGA's speaking events, he's been interviewed in Forbes magazine and Medium's "Forge" publication, and he writes articles for Aquent, CEO World Magazine, and A List Apart. He speaks internationally on culture and design, and today on the show, we talk about values, aligned design, nurturi...

Scott Shigeoka is an internationally-recognized curiosity expert, speaker, and the author of SEEK: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World . He is known for translating research into strategies that promote wellbeing and connected relationships around the globe, including at the University of California Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and through his groundbreaking course...

Natalie Foley has over 20 years of experience leading teams in designing and launching new products, programs, and strategies across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Recently, she joined Opportunity at Work, where she builds, tests, and launches new services to help rewire the labor market for the 71 million workers in America whose skills were acquired through alternative routes i...

Rob Lister is a designer in healthcare, creating meaningful experiences in many arenas, including medical device design, care delivery, service design, and population health strategy. His experience as a design leader at IDEO and AT&T, and his background as a mechanical engineer, inform a strategic and operationally focused approach to innovation in healthcare. We talk about service design in heal...

Shipra Kayan is a product evangelist at Miro, a designer, and a facilitator. She has built inclusive, engaged, and effective distributed teams at companies like Upwork and Miro. Armed with two decades of experience teaching design teams to collaborate across time zones, cultures, and knowledge silos, Shipra is a leading advocate for adopting visual collaboration within distributed teams. We talk a...