Design Thinking 101

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