Design Thinking 101

Welcome to the Design Thinking podcast! I’m Dawan Stanford, your host. Today I’m interviewing Chris McCarthy. He is the Vice President of Strategy & Design at Hopelab where he is excited to deepen its impact on the health and wellness of young people through design and systems thinking. He is also the Executive Director and Founder of the Innovation Learning Network. Today we explore the different pathways of healthcare and the effect of design thinking on the healthcare industry, the beginnings of design thinking in the healthcare industry and why design thinking is so challenging to implement in the field of healthcare. One of the most important factors for Chris was to not put the Innovation and Design team out front first. Putting the Innovation and design team out first “triggers the immune system of the organization” as the team is so different from the other sections of the company. He explains why he had the innovation and design team behind the scenes when working with staff members. Chris and I

Welcome to the Design Thinking podcast! I’m Dawan Stanford, your host. David Dunne, Professor and Director of MBA Programs at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business, joins me today. David and I were introduced by Paolo Korre, who you may remember from an earlier episode of the show! We’ll chat today about a range of subjects, including the use of design thinking in redesigning an MBA program. As you’ll learn today, David’s background in experience and marketing helped to lead him to design thinking. When he returned to school intending to become a professor, he found himself deeply interested in student-centered methods of teaching. He worked in design on the side, taking sabbaticals to spend time with designers and in design schools. Design thinking is a practitioner’s art, and it takes experience with it to really make the methods your own. This applies both to my own journey and David’s, and we’ll explore the concept today in our conversation. We’ll also talk about the struggle to help

Welcome to the Design Thinking podcast! I’m Dawan Stanford, your host. I’m excited to welcome Jessica Dugan to today’s episode. Jessica is a Design Principal on the Healthcare Design team at 3M Design. She has worked in the healthcare industry for over five years. In our chat today, you’ll learn about her journey as a designer into her current role, her experience as a service designer in healthcare, and the lessons she’s learned that might serve others. As Jess will explain today, she also comes from a non-traditional background. Her undergraduate degree is in writing and journalism, but she soon realized that wasn’t her path. She began getting into design, and realized that the part of writing that resonated with her was the ability to connect with people. She went back to graduate school for design, and joined a service design consulting firm. Because Jess has worked in various significantly different environments, it’s fascinating to hear her perspective on how they differ, as well as what the transitions

Welcome to the Design Thinking podcast! I’m Dawan Stanford, your host. Jess Roberts joins me today for a conversation about the designer’s role in healthcare, problem-finding with healthcare experts, the importance of the design studio in his work, and design thinking in public health. Jess leads the Culture of Health By Design initiative of the Minnesota Design Center at the University of Minnesota. He also holds faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota’s School of Nursing and School of Public Health. After receiving a master’s in architecture, Jess found that the practice was incredibly technical and had very little to do with his education in the field. He also found that he had very little space to practice problem solving, because what he did was just responding to decisions that had already been made. He realized how much more useful what the did would be if it occurred at the beginning of the decision-making process than at the end. Jess realized that he didn’t want to be an architecture at

Welcome to the Design Thinking podcast! I’m Dawan Stanford, your host. My guest today is Paolo Korre, Director of Service Design and User Insight for SE Health, a not-for-profit healthcare company in Ontario, Canada. We’ll chat today about Paolo’s transition from industrial design to design thinking in the healthcare space, challenges he faces as a designer working in healthcare, and his experience with being the lone designer on an innovation team. Paolo reached industrial design through a love of fine arts, drawing, painting, and crafts. He did his undergraduate degree in industrial and product design. He assumed he would be working on making furniture or other “stuff,” but soon realized that this isn’t what the world really needs. As he evolved beyond traditional design, he went back to school for further education. Eventually, he was able to bring design thinking back home. In our conversation today, he’ll dig into how his skills in design relate to his work in healthcare (and how he convinced people to g

The Better Government Movement, Amy explains today, is built for public servants. She realized that the baton (in terms of innovation and transformation in building 21st-century government) isn’t adequately being passed on. She collaborated on research on creating change and transformation in government, and the best ways to create something that is useful and scalable across government. When Amy was getting started with the initial conversations around innovation and design in this realm, she started with the people who were leaning into the conversation. These early adopters, she explains, are the people who will help you unlock what the culture or organization should turn into. In addition to this powerful insight into getting through to the right people, Amy will dig into how to pass the torch and help to ensure that processes are passed on. Amy will also share tips and insights into how to teach and support innovators, including focusing on learning to relieve pressure, and to get comfortable with ambigu

Adam Royalty, founder of the Columbia Entrepreneurship Design Studio and long-time lecturer at the Stanford d.school, joins me today. We’ll dig into topics including reflective practices in design education, designing for learning, and connecting design thinking to change management and change leadership. Every time I’ve had a chance to talk with Adam, I’ve come away with all sorts of thoughts and ideas. I’m excited to have him as a guest on the podcast, and hope he can spark similar inspiration for you! One important point that Adam makes is the need for reflection. He’s been doubling down on having students reflect, and supporting that reflection in very intentional ways. In our conversation, you’ll hear how students respond to this, and how Adam uses it as a powerful tool to encourage and support creativity. Often when he’s teaching design, it’s to help teach students a creative process so that they can solve problems and become more innovative. I’ve been wrestling lately with the mashup between design th

Today’s guest is the remarkable Linn Vizard, currently an independent service designer based in Toronto. Linn writes and speaks frequently on service design, and has taught on the topic around the world. In today’s conversation, we’ll talk about creating customer journey maps (and other maps), implementation challenges with service design, and accessibility in service design. Linn shares her journey today, including mentioning that she found herself more interested in people than things as she was studying design. When she started bringing together the service design community in Toronto, she encountered some confusion, and she’s enjoyed the process of illuminating the topic for people and creating connections with those interested in service design. Maps, Linn points out, have become a ubiquitous tool and have become a compelling entry point for people. They’re also a powerful tool for getting people excited, and to visually create a shared understanding of the space you’re working in and where the opportuni

Today I’m joined by the remarkable Doug Powell, a Distinguished Designer at IBM who directs the global tech company’s program to scale design and design thinking. Doug is also an award-winning designer, a thought leader, and a lecturer and commentator on design issues. In our conversation today, Doug and I will cover some tactics and strategies for growing a design practice inside your organization, thoughts on how to measure the value of design thinking and communicate that value, and talk about building design thinking capacity in design thinking studios. When he joined IBM, Doug explains, the company’s design aspect had dwindled from its heyday when it was led by Thomas J. Watson and Eliot Noyes. For a couple decades after this design heyday, design was de-emphasized in the company. In 2012-2013, the company reinvested in and recommitted to design thinking. In our conversation, you’ll learn about some of the challenges that Doug faced during the process of reviving design thinking and creating a new class

Julie Schell is the Executive Director of Learning Design, Effectiveness and Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, and an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Design and the College of Education at UT Austin. Julie and I met a while back, and we did some work together at a fantastic convening at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m thrilled to have her on the show, especially given her focus on teaching and learning design thinking and human-centered design. Design thinking has hit a peak this year based on Google searches, Julie explains, which demonstrates that there’s a lot of interest in the field. Most of the people who are making these searches are unlikely to be formally trained designers, but instead are probably individuals outside the field who are looking for opportunities to innovate. Julie is enthusiastic about these people being able to learn design thinking, and digs into how to go about that in the right way. For example, she points out that when you’re working wit

Stephanie Wade, my guest today, leads the Innovation Teams program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. She helps cities around the world develop and implement innovative approaches by using design, data analytics, and behavioral economics to deeply understand complex problems. She has applied design thinking at the federal, state, and local levels. Stephanie is an artist in multiple mediums. She got to where she is as many designers do: via a meandering and non-traditional path. Now, she’s at a point where she sees a clear thread running through all the work that she’s done to lead her to exactly where she is now. She believes that strong designers put their whole selves into their work, and that’s what makes them good in so many ways As a “design activist,” Stephanie believes in the power of design to be transformative. As a result, she explains, she’s also protective of design, thanks to having seen the pitfalls and consequences of doing design wrong. If you screw up design at an organization, the people there wh

Tune into today’s episode to hear my conversation with my friend and colleague Karen Hold, an innovation strategist who helps individuals and organizations build cultures of creativity and collaboration using the language of design thinking. Our conversation today will cover her path from brand management at Procter & Gamble into design thinking, her leadership at Summer of Design and Design Thinking DC, how she works with individuals and teams as they learn and practice design thinking, and much more. Karen is the daughter of a lawyer, and points out that she grew up in a home that used auditory language to communicate. She married into a family of visual communicators, and discovered that she’s more of a visual communicator than an auditory communicator. This opened up a learning journey for her about how people communicate, and how some learners can be lost in conversations because they don’t communicate in the language that is being used. Design thinking gave Karen a framework to find an intersection

I’m joined by Martin Dominguez Ball, a graphic designer who teaches design thinking at Fordham University. He’s also the cofounder at WOMB Service Design Lab. We’ll talk about what works for students in the design thinking classroom, how Martin has helped people wrestle through working visually, and the connections between design thinking, art, and making, as a teacher and practitioner. Martin, who hails from Uruguay, had a long path into design thinking. As an entrepreneur, he owned a business for over a decade, and mentions that he applied design thinking to this business without really knowing what it was. His passion, though, was being an artist. He eventually decided to close the company and pursue the things important to him: education and art. Tune in to the episode to learn how this process evolved into him teaching his design thinking course. In the process of getting his degrees, Martin developed a love for academia. Design thinking gave a framework to what he had been doing intuitively, and he fell

Tune into this episode for a fascinating conversation with Aaron Faucher, a product designer focused on design ethics and augmented reality. You’ll hear about lessons from his path into design for augmented reality and virtual reality with clients such as High Fidelity, Alpha Computing, and Designation Labs. We’ll also dig into how being a Master’s student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University builds on that experience, and where he sees his design practice going as he explores the intersection of UX design and emerging technologies. As Aaron shares, he’s early in his design career, and has been working professionally in the field for a bit over two years. His first exposure to design thinking was when he was an undergrad, when his focus was on social impact. He became obsessed with the question of where the logical end point of emerging technologies is, and started looking at technology as a social issue. Since then, Aaron has been trying to situate himself in the design w

I’m joined by Eugene Korsunskiy. Eugene is a design thinking consultant and the Senior Coordinator of Design Initiatives at the University of Vermont. Both there and at Stanford, Eugene has taught classes like “Design Thinking” and “Designing Your Life.” In our conversation today, we’ll talk about how and why he became a designer, his insights from teaching “Designing Your Life” to Stanford students, and aspects of creating good design thinking learning experiences and design teams. When he was in college, Eugene thought he wanted to be an architect. As he studied architecture and interned in the field, he learned that it’s a lot more about fire codes and occupancy permits than he had hoped, and his romantic notions of the field faded away. He still knew, though, that he wanted to be in an occupation that involved creating something for people while using both halves of his brain. Eventually, design replaced architecture, and Eugene went to grad school for design instead. The most interesting part of a design

I’m happy to announce that today’s guest is Nathan Ritter, a design researcher at IA Collaborative. We’ll talk about how his path to being a third-generation mechanical engineer turned into a design research career. We’ll also talk about transforming clients into design evangelists, before closing with a project that Nathan and his colleagues are working on to bring a design icon back to life. As you may have guessed, Nathan came to design from an engineering perspective. Going through a project to assist a woman with rheumatoid arthritis helped Nathan discover that, for him, human-centered design is more interesting than doing mechanical analysis on a computer screen. He changed his major, and continued his studies through a masters program. He points out that he’s not departing from the work of his forefathers so much as emphasizing a different part of the same process. In our conversation, you’ll hear about a time that Nathan was in grad school. He, along with a team of all men, were working on a project a

I’m excited to speak with Rebecca Horton, a designer, coach, and long-time colleague and friend. In our conversation, we’ll talk about how to coach and lead design teams, some design thinking methods she has found valuable, and how design thinking and coaching converge. Rebecca has always been interested in design, but believed as she grew up that you had to pick a discipline within design (such as being an interior designer, graphic designer, or fashion designer). In her early teenage years, she was fascinated by fashion design, and was captivated by runway shows on TV. She later went to college for political science and public policy because it was practical and pragmatic, and picking a specific design discipline didn’t appeal to her. After college, she discovered the design thinking field, which had the language to explain what she had been craving, and doesn’t force you to choose between disciplines. She returned to school, started her own practice, and worked in the corporate design world. In our convers

Artemio “Arty” Rivera, a former designer at 3Pillar Global and current UX Lead at Capital One as well as a leader at Design Thinking DC, joins me today to talk about the learning experiences that grew his career, his insights from applying design thinking, and much more.   When Arty was a child, he started sketching spaceships, aliens, and dresses. Later, as a teenager in 10th grade, he did a personal project in which he learned to make a website and got his first serious taste of technological design. In college at Stanford, he stumbled into the product design program at the d.school. Upon learning that he could do engineering and sketching in on major, he switched to studying product design.   After graduation, he found a job in DC working as a UX designer. In our conversation, you’ll learn about how the beginning of his career went, and some of the early challenges and achievements he experienced. His first lesson, he explains, is how hard it is to convince an organization that designers and developers nee

Today’s guest is the remarkable Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy. Indi was a founder at Adaptive Path, and is one of the design field’s leading visionaries on how we develop an understanding of what people are trying to accomplish, and how to represent it in ways that support innovation. Indi’s background is in computer science, in which she has a degree from Cal Poly. In our conversation, she explains how her time there contributed to her learn-by-doing philosophy, as well as her interest in understanding what goes through people’s minds. She’ll also dig into what it means to research problem space, what practical empathy is and how to use it, and how to develop and maintain an understanding of how people think as an ongoing basis for Indi is focused on the same thing she’s been focused on all her life, but with a changing vocabulary around it: understanding the problem space. As you’ll hear, she tries to pull the problem space further and further away from the solution space to cr

Natalie Foley joins me to talk about her design thinking and learning journey, and how she became the VP and COO at Peer Insight. We’ll also talk about the design process, some of the key methods that drive her work, and a pathway that organizations can use when developing their own internal design thinking capacity. Natalie talks in this conversation about what to do when you work with people who are user-centered and able to handle the ambiguity involved in design thinking. Her job as COO, she explains, is to give a guardrail or enough structure to enable people to be successful, without giving so much direction and structure as to stifle the process. She also emphasizes the value of small teams. You’ll hear that Natalie’s emotional journey to where she is now involved coming out of her undergrad experience feeling pretty smart and thinking that with every year of experience, she would get smarter. Stumbling on design thinking opened her eyes to a new perspective: she doesn’t have to be right, because her c