Design Thinking 101

Welcome to the Design Thinking 101 podcast! I'm Dawan Stanford, your host. Today I'll be interviewing Tony Hu, who is the academic director at MIT’s Integrated Design and Management Master’s program. We’ll be talking about how Tony discovered design, human-centered design’s impact on students, and MIT’s unique program combining design and engineering management. We start our episode during Tony’s high school career, with his passion for writing. He started on the journalism team and edited the school newspaper. Additionally, he was interested in gadgets - this was during the Sony Walkman era. Tony was interested in working on a similar technology at the time. His father was an engineer and was a big influence on Tony’s career. He heard MIT was the route to take if he was serious about engineering, so he applied and was accepted, to the dismay of his journalism teacher. While at MIT, Tony studied transistors and Maxwell’s equations, which was not an enjoyable experience for him. He stuck through the course and