Design Thinking in the Wild: Lessons from Teaching Non-Designers

13 years. Thousands of students. One big shift in how I think about Design Thinking.

After teaching Design Thinking to general-education college students for over a decade (many with zero design background) I started noticing patterns that completely changed how I run workshops and lead teams.

In this fast-paced, 1-hour remote session for UX professionals, I’ll share what teaching outside the UX bubble revealed, and how you can apply it immediately in your own work.

We'll cover:

• My #1 tool for generating A-ha insights fast, consistently, and on demand
• Why teams abandon Design Thinking (and each other) halfway through the process
• How to leverage AI to support shrinking UX teams without losing rigor
• FlashFrame™ — an AI-enhanced, rapid Design Thinking method for deeper, faster insights

Whether you facilitate workshops, lead cross-functional teams, or feel like Design Thinking has started to stall in practice, this session will give you practical tools—and a fresh perspective—to move forward.

About our speaker:
Tahari Julander is a UX educator and Design Thinking facilitator with more than 21 years of teaching experience. He draws on his early career as a kitchen designer, where he learned to translate human behavior, constraints, and emotional needs into functional solutions. This foundation continues to guide his UX practice today. Over the past decade, Tahari has taught thousands of general-education college students the Design Thinking process, gaining rare insight into how teams generate meaningful ideas and where they get stuck. His work now focuses on bringing clarity, flow, and AI-enhanced methods to UX teams and workshops.

What to expect:
* Networking, meeting people, making friends and allies, finding a mentor.
* Meetup will send a reminder email with the link on the day of the event.
* Also, you can find the Zoom event link on the event page and join.

Agenda
Program, Questions and Answers, Announcements, and Door Prize

By attending this event in person or online, you consent to be photographed, filmed, and/or otherwise recorded. You grant Fiesta for the Mind, dba UX San Antonio, unlimited license to use and publish your appearance, voice, and name in recordings of this event and marketing materials for our organization.

You agree to abide by UX San Antonio’s code of conduct.

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