Portland Design Thinkers

About Portland Design Thinkers (PDT) PDT is a community of creative problem solvers advancing human-centered design literacy through high-quality events, lively conversation, and practice-based development. We're made up of all kinds of people: practitioners who use human-centered design methods and mindsets every day, designers and researchers, design strategists, Agile scrum leaders, urban planners, and many more who use or appreciate Design Thinking. One way to define design thinking is that it is a mindset, approach, and set of tools and techniques for problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design. Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based. This means it focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself. Design thinking is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity, and rationality to meet human needs and drive business success. Typically, we meet monthly, mostly virtually, and occasionally in person. Our monthly meetings, announced through MeetUp, may be webinar-style, or interactive and focus on some topic of interest to our community. But we're about more than just meetup events. You can find information about our upcoming events as well as links to recordings of past events on our website PortlandDesignThinkers.com. We have an active, private Slack workspace – it is a thriving online discussion space for all things design thinking. Please join us there -- https://bit.ly/2JuQ2V6. We also have a private LinkedIn group. Please join us there as well – https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13997019/. PDT is a volunteer-run organization. We rely on sponsors and donations to help us offset these costs. If you or your organization is interested in sponsorship opportunities, please contact Deb Mrazek (dmrazek@curiate.co ).