David Kelley on Fast Company

Good read. Take a moment and read it all.

A Designer Takes on His Biggest Challenge Ever | Fast Company: "Some students seem a little mystified, as they twirl noodles around their chop sticks. What does a 'ramen experience' have to do with design? Better packaging? Curlier noodles? Adding a cute little forky thing to the cheap staple of dorm rooms everywhere?

Kelley, a lanky guy with a bald head, a Groucho Marx mustache, and a heartland-bred affability, tackles the mystery head on: 'I was sitting at a big dinner in Pacific Heights recently, and I told my hostess I was a designer. 'Oh,' she said. 'So what do you think of my curtains?' ' That, Kelley says, is not where we're going.

'You're sitting here today because we moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers,' he continues. 'What we, as design thinkers, have, is this creative confidence that, when given a difficult problem, we have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before.'"