Design Thinking specialist: empathy is one of the most important skills you can have

Doreen Lorenzo, from University of Texas, also explains why the hell it is still so hard to embrace change

“Begin Again” is one of those movies that surprisingly hide one or two nifty scenes. In this Knightley/Ruffalo context that happens when she (Keira) is singing at some small pub stage and he (Mark) imagines instruments to fill up the music and, well, the big picture.

Assistant Dean of the School of Design and Creative Technologies at University of Texas (UT), Doreen Lorenzo evokes this exact same effect. When she starts to talk, your imagination promptly remodels the whole place into a whopping and refined conference room adorned with that TED red logo — no matter where you are.

Good for her, because the theme she has chosen to pursue demands a great sales pitch. In March 2016 Lorenzo was appointed Director of the Center for Integrated Design at UT and started this project with the idea that every undergraduate on campus should learn Design Thinking. “If they learned and practiced it in school, it would not be something foreign to them in the workplace. It would just be how things are done”, she told me a few weeks ago.