


Quick wins for building empathy with visitors: 4 hacks inspired by School Retool
Museum professionals are the "designers" of the visitor experience, and the key to developing an engaging and human-centered experience is understanding the people for whom you are designing. These quick wins, adapted from the School Retool fellowship, are things you can do next week to build deeper empathy for visitors.

5 Reasons Why Design Thinking is Good for Organizations
This guest post is from Maureen Carroll, Ph.D., the Founder of Lime Design and a lecturer in Stanford University’s d.school and Graduate School of Education. In doing hundreds of innovation workshops, she has discovered five compelling reasons why design thinking is good for organizations.

Becoming human through human-centered design: reflections from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
In this guest post, Rachel Griner, an independent strategy and innovation expert who served as an Executive On Loan to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, explores how human-centered design can be an expression of humanity.

Activating the museum with design thinking: stories from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the country, began a design thinking process in 2013 to find new ways to enhance museum visitors’ experiences.

Empathy as the starting point for innovation
One of the core principles of design thinking is its focus on human values at every stage of the process. And empathy for the people for whom you’re designing is fundamental to […]

Breaking assumptions with empathy
Over and over, one of the big lessons in design thinking seems to be don’t assume—discover directly. The insights gained from talking directly to users informs our understanding of their needs, which in turn makes all the difference between spinning one’s wheels and developing solutions that people can actually use. And prototyping and iterating along the way provide constant check-ins and mechanisms for adjustments.