Imaginuity’s first Design Thinking event was a huge success! As you may know, this past Thursday Imaginuity facilitated a special Design Thinking session with co-presenters and panelists from Toyota, Southwest Airlines, AT&T and Sabre. The evening was graciously hosted by the Plano Chamber of Commerce. We had a standing room only crowd and both the presenters and panelists were fantastic. They did a great job explaining Design Thinking as well as demonstrating how their companies are using Design Thinking to solve complex business problems of the day.

Imaginuity Executive Creative Director, Tim Langford gave a pithy and entertaining presentation on the history of Design Thinking and an overview of the process and how it works. In addition, to being informative, his presentation included cameo appearances by Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, and Brad Pitt as well as a fly though from Sputnik.

Tim was followed by Toyota’s Tom Buttine who heads up their U.S. Design Thinking team. Tom delved into how Toyota is using Design Thinking to solve supply chain issues that were bogging down the process of ordering vehicles and getting inventory to the right dealerships across the country. Tom’s team redesigned an order and demand process for Toyota’s team of business analysts. In a nutshell, the new process has enabled analysts to accomplish in 30 minutes what used to take weeks. True to the Design Thinking process, Toyota has harnessed its power to develop quicker and more thoughtful outcomes and solutions.

The evening concluded with a lively panel discussion moderated by Imaginuity’s President & Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Corbett Guest. In addition to fielding questions from Corbett, the panel also took questions from the audience. The distinguished panel included the above mentioned Tom Buttine, Heather Figallo, Sr. Director, Innovation, Design & Entrepreneurship at Southwest Airlines, Brian Sullivan, Director Design Strategy at Sabre, Adrienne Guillory, Sr. Lead UX Researcher & Design Thinking Facilitator at AT&T, and Thomas Bennedsen, Human Centered Design Innovation and Strategy at Southwest Airlines.

The collective brainpower of the panel provided the audiences with key insights into how their organizations are leveraging Design Thinking on a daily basis to develop multiple humancentric solutions to both internal and external problems. They also shed light on how Design Thinking can be used across organizations of all sizes.

The evening was quite a success and we are already thinking about our next Design Thinking event. In the meantime, if you would like more information on Design Thinking and how it can help your organization, please contact me directly at ghooker@imaginuity.com