Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey

In daylong hackathons, design thinking seems deceptively easy. On the surface, it involves a set of seemingly simple activities such as gathering data, identifying insights, generating ideas, prototyping, and experimentation. But practiced at a superficial level, even great design tools don’t go deep enough to create the shifts in mindset and skillset that are required to achieve transformational impact. Going deep with design requires more than changing the activities of innovators; it involves creating the conditions that shape who they become. Individuals become design thinkers by experiencing design.

Drawing on decades of researching design thinking and teaching it to people not trained in design, Jeanne Liedtka, Karen Hold, and Jessica Eldridge offer a guide for how to create these deep experiences at each stage of the design thinking journey, whether for an individual, a team, or an organization. For each experience phase, they specify the mindset shifts and competencies that need to be achieved, describe how different personality types experience different kinds of journeys, and show how to fully leverage the diversity of teams. Experiencing Design explores both the science and practicalities of design and includes two assessment instruments for individual and organizational development.

Ultimately, innovators need to be someone new to create something new. This book shows you how to use design thinking to make this happen.

Jeanne Liedtka is a faculty member at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. Her Columbia Business School Publishing books include Designing for Growth: A Manager’s Toolkit (2011) and Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector (2017).

Karen Hold is the founder of Experience Labs, an innovation consulting firm. She is also the director of DT:DC, a design thinking community in Washington, DC, and a visiting professor at École des Ponts Business School in Paris, France.

Jessica Eldridge is a consultant working at the intersection of educational equity and purposeful innovation. She is the founder of Spark Strategic Solutions and is a specialist in design thinking, innovation management, and cross-sector collaboration.