May 2025: GDTA Spotlight with Arne van Oosterom
Join Arne van Oosterom for a powerful GDTA Spotlight session on 3 essential mindset shifts for the future: curiosity, adaptation, and relationships.
In our session held via zoom on April 7th, 2022 at 4:00 pm (CEST) / 10:00 am (EDT), we welcomed our speakers Lynne Martin, Strategic Lead for Design for Business at V&A Dundee, and Annie Marrs, Lead Officer at UNESCO City of Design Dundee. Lynne and Annie talked about “Entangled Values: The Power of Networks”.
How might we recognise and amplify shared values in a way that grows and nourishes our communities? What do mushrooms and museums have in common? Strategic Lead for Design for Business at V&A Dundee, Lynne Martin, explored these topics and shared the ambitions for Design for Business in the future, together with Annie Marrs, Lead Officer at UNESCO City of Design Dundee.
Lynne Martin, Strategic Lead for Design for Business at V&A Dundee
With a background in business support for Scotland’s creative economies, Lynne has witnessed first-hand the transformational effect design thinking can have on communities, businesses, and individuals. It’s her mission to make design thinking and its benefits accessible to everyone committed to solving problems and driving positive change in Scotland. In her creative practice she tinkers about with the Scottish folk tradition through performing folk songs and storytelling and she’s always up for chats about heritage, storytelling, music and all things Scotland.
Annie Marrs, Lead Officer, UNESCO City of Design Dundee
Annie Marrs is the Lead Officer with Dundee’s UNESCO City of Design designation. As the UK’s first and only UNESCO City of Design, Annie and her team work to use design to improve the lives of people who live in Dundee. Annie’s role has included delivering the biannual Dundee Design Festival, coordinating local and international exhibitions to showcase Dundee’s design talent, and collaborating with international partners in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Passionate about the role that culture, creativity, and design places in developing vibrant successful places to live, Annie’s previous work has included delivering Dundee’s Cultural Strategy through a partnership approach and she is an expert in the repurposing of underused city centre spaces for cultural and design activity.
Join Arne van Oosterom for a powerful GDTA Spotlight session on 3 essential mindset shifts for the future: curiosity, adaptation, and relationships.
On April 30th, 2024 Prof. Jeanne Liedtka from University of Virginia shared the insight from her most recent book, The Experimentation Field Book: A Step-by-Step Project Guide, co-authored with Natalie Foley, David Kester and Elziabeth Chen, published in February, 2024.
In our January 2026 GDTA Spotlight, Ricardo Ruffo (Founder & CEO of Echos) explores how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping Design Thinking — from crafting outputs to stewarding intelligent systems.
Discover how AI can expand imagination, accelerate experimentation, and help teams reframe problems in entirely new ways.
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.
At the GDTA Spotlight session on April 26th, 2023, we welcomed Dr. Linda J. Hickman, Associate of the London School of Economics. She talked about “Design Thinking for Startups.”
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.
Design Thinking has been reshaping the minds of many students and professionals globally for the past 20 years and is fast becoming the winning mindset that drives innovation and solutions to complex problems of our time. The mindset has seen major support from academia and professional networks with some great expansion over the years.
In our session held via zoom on Mai 12th, 2022 at 3:00 pm (CEST) / 09:00 am (EDT), we welcomed our speaker Mugendi K. M’Rithaa, Professor of Industrial Design at Machakos University. Mugendi talked about “Empathy and Community: Human-Centered Design in Afrika”
On June 27th, 2023 we welcomed Vindhya Umapathy, Design Thinking Lead at CMR University (Bangalore, India). She spoke on the topic of “Fostering Design Thinking Mindsets amongst University Students“.
In this session, Jeanne Liedtka, United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia – Darden School of Business, discussed her upcoming book “Experiencing Design: The Innovator’s Journey”.
After 16 years of running projects using Design Thinking, teaching it, living it, Arne came to some important conclusions. During this session he shared these moments of clarity and darkness and left participants optimistic, energised and proud to be part of the Design Thinking movement.
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.
In our session held via zoom on March 10th. 2022, from 9:00 – 11:30 am (EST) / 3:00 – 5:30 pm (CET) via Zoom, we collaborated with the IEEE Standards Association and Vienna University of Economics and Businesss to talk about “Value-Based Engineering in Design Thinking”. For more information about the event, agenda and speakers please visit the GDTA Spotlight Special website. […]
In this session, Dr. Assaf Krebs, Dr. Yigal David, and Daniel Altman of GDTA member institution Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art talked about: “Intermediate spaces – Two perspectives on engineering, design, Design Thinking, and life itself. From Sound Engineering to Human Surfaces”.
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:
“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.