Design Thinking 101

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