A few themes emerged during this week's talks: the need to stretch our design practices; how we define success; and destabilizing traditional design approaches.

Here are just a few of the takeaways we gained from the Conference.

On stretching our design practices

“Build the practice of play. When was the last time you thought about building playful practices into your design?”

— Grace Hwang, Partner Director of Mixed Reality Design & UX Research at Microsoft

“Design should be a little bit hard with a manageable level of anxiety. Questioning whether it’s as good as it can be is really, really important. For me, if it doesn’t feel a little hard, I’m not working hard enough.”

— Christopher Doyle, Founder of Christopher Doyle & Co.

On that thing called “success”

"The truth is, that success has always been something where it doesn’t matter how much you scream it — you have to define it on your own terms.”

— Alex Center, Founder of Center

“You cannot compare yourself to others. But you can compare yourself to an internal system of benchmarks that you’ve created for yourself.”

— Adam J. Kurtz, Artist and Author

On destabilizing traditional design approaches

“I like to bring different things into the classroom, like looking at African typography and the way colour is used in different cultures. I look at destabilizing some design methods and methodologies; I look at things like Bauhaus in terms of what is considered “good design.”
— Angela Bains, Assistant Professor and Strategic Director at TransformExp

“It’s still the loudest who get the most. We, as designers, must design for everyone instead of designing for the privileged few.”

— Sean Carney, Chief Experience Design Officer at Philips

And one final, overarching message...

“It's not what you produce. It's why you make it.”

— Jennifer Kinon & Bobby C. Martin Jr., Founding Partners of Champions Design

Click here for the main takeaways from Week 1 of DesignThinkers Virtual.