Design Thinking 101

I’m joined by Fred Leichter, the Founding Director of the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity. We’ll talk about what Fred learned and led design during his 25-year career at Fidelity Investments, how he’s applying that experience at Claremont Colleges, and the promise and potential of human-centered design and design thinking in undergraduate education. In 1996, Fred worked on designing Fidelity’s first website, which was a huge breakthrough in the industry. He was in the right place at the right time as the industry transformed, so he was able to see a major paradigm shift happening, and observed that design was at the center of it. In 2006, Fred discovered design thinking. From there, he took on a broader role as the chief experience officer at Fidelity, and used design thinking as the essence of what he did. In a large organization, Fred explains, the natural organization is to use the existing silos within the business. This looks something like passing something from market research