This is a Prototype: Daniela Marzavan

Host Doug Powell caught up with his guest for this episode, Daniela Marzavan, in the middle of an eight-week design road trip through Europe with her partner and two children—she’s calling it the Traveling School of Design Thinking.

Based in Portugal, Daniela, is a self-described “pracademic”, fluidly straddling the line between design practice and design education. Daniela is fluent in seven languages and puts many of those languages to use in a practice that takes her across Europe and around the world working with universities, startups, scaled enterprises, NGOs, and governments, infusing these organizations with design thinking, innovation, and human-centered ways of working. Daniela is the co-author of the new book Creativity for a Sustainable Future, which seeks to harness the power of creativity as a driving force for positive change in complex environmental, social, and economic problems.

Doug and Daniela covered a lot of territory in this discussion, including Daniela’s refreshing perspective on the trends she is seeing in the global regions she’s working in—trends that don’t always match what we see in parts of the design industry dominated by North American tech companies.