In a discussion with GDTA President Uli Weinberg, Ricardo Ruffo and Reinaldo Campos from Echos Innovation Lab in Brazil shared how they are creating online Design Thinking learning experiences between Australia and Brazil.

In our talk on February 20th, 2024 four educators from SNS Insitutions Coimbatore, India shared their insights on Design Thinking in education starting with K12 to PhD in several streams. SNS had recently crossed 25yr mark with nearly 14K + student fraternity and nearly 37k+ alma mater. The Design Thinking Framework is applied to improve the quality of teaching methodologies to increase student engagement. For this to come true, one measure introduced is 3P Culture: Purpose, Process, People.

How passion, collaboration, and persistence turned an idea into a thriving business. Born from one of the first cohorts of the D-School Potsdam, Dark Horse defied the odds to become a sustainable business venture.

At our GDTA Spotlight session on May 23rd, 2023, we welcomed Guido Caicedo, Executive Director of i3lab, Dr. Sharon Guamán-Quintanilla, Academic Coordinator, and Isabel Alcívar, Lecturer and Design Thinking Facilitator. They discussed about “Turning freshmen into DThinkers.”

Michael Lewrick, bestselling author of The Design Thinking Playbook and AI and Innovation, leads an inspiring session exploring how Artificial Intelligence is transforming Design Thinking practices worldwide.

Transform with Design presents examples of creative organizations across industries and geographies, and recounts the stories of how they adapted design thinking to build their innovation capabilities. Written by leading industry experts and design-thinking scholars, the book features ten anecdotal experiences by professionals who detail the implementation of design thinking as it unfolded for them. Contributors share how they navigated the many barriers and obstacles they encountered along the way and describe their experience from early beginnings to the present, revealing valuable lessons for anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation.

In our last session on June 28th, 2022, at 3:00 pm (CEST) / 09:00 am (EDT), we welcomed our speakers Prof. Dr. Falk Uebernickel, Professor for Design Thinking and Innovation Research at Hasso Plattner Institute, and Dr. Danielly de Paula, Senior Researcher at Hasso Plattner Institute.

At our GDTA Spotlight session on January 18th, we were welcoming our speakers Isabella Stranger, Gastón Roca and Yael Gitman from D-School Chile. They talked about how the first Latin American D-School came to life at the very core of a Chilean University, what they have built in 3 years of history, and what challenges they are hoping to tackle next.

In 2022, the Global Design Thinking Alliance (GDTA) set out to celebrate Design Thinking coming of age, as well as the discipline’s global expansion.

“Design Thinking is not Enough” – Design thinking has taught a generation of innovators to empathize, ideate, prototype, and test. It has reshaped classrooms, organizations, and how we talk about change. And yet despite decades of user-centered design, we are still failing to meaningfully shift many of the systems we care most about. In this provocative presentation, Agnes Kwek shares the reasons why “great ideas” fail to scale and pilots don’t stick. Drawing on her own experiences of large-scale systems transformation in the public sector, she reframes design thinking as a powerful but incomplete tool. Complex challenges are not user problems; they are system problems. Agnes will share how to design with systems rather than against them. This talk challenges participants to expand their role from problem-solvers to system-shapers. Design thinking set the direction. Systems thinking shows us how to get there. Agnes has over 20 years of career in the Singapore Administrative Service, with a focus on large-scale system transformation. As CEO and founder of MindTheSystem, she has trained over 800 senior executives in managing complex systems. She is based in Paris.

At our online session on May 18, 2021 Matt Parkinson, Professor and Director of The Learning Factory, College of Engineering at Penn State University, and Jessica Menold, Assistant Professor of Engineering Design at Penn State University, talked about the Design Thinking process that contributed to the development of a new university building, dedicated to Design Thinking and prototyping.

Join us for a free session of the GDTA Spotlight on Tuesday, June 18th at 9.00 am SAST / 7.00am GMT for “Connecting the African Design Thinking Community: An Emergent Learning Network” with Jenni van Niekerk!

At our GDTA Spotlight session on July 29th, Hoda Mostafa and Reham Niazi from the The American University in Cairo as well as Richard Perez, Phuthehi Masilo and Lucille Roberts from the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at UCT talked about “Building a global virtual d-school: Co-creation and collaboration”.

On Tuesday, May 21st we held a free interactive 60-minute session with Maria Stashenko & her team form Design Thinking Center Asia. After a brief introduction everyone played a round of their game live online:

On September 12th, 2023 we welcomed our speakers Jessica Menold, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Design and Innovation and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and also Dr. Matt Parkinson, Professor of Engineering Design and Mechanical Engineering at Penn State University.

The Global Design Thinking Alliance, in collaboration with the IEEE Standards Association and Vienna University of Economics and Business, invited you to the GDTA Spotlight Special Edition “Value-Based Engineering in Design Thinking,” which took place on March 10th, 2022, from 9:00-11:30 am (EST) / 3:00-5:30 pm (CET) via Zoom.