In this episode we’re speaking with designer, educator and thought leader Per Axbom about his book “Digital Compassion as a Driver of Innovation”. As someone who’s been on the leading edge of UX and digital design for the last 15 years Per talks about the need for designers

to recognize and understand the negative impacts that digital design can and does have on people. He also shares both insights and tools to break through the willful ignorance of many organizations.

In this episode we’re speaking with John Mortimer who works with public sector organizations in the U.K. and Sweden to help them reinvent their work and redesign their systems. We talk with John about why it feels like it’s so difficult to innovate in public organizations and the impact that the current paradigm of New Public Management has on inhibiting change and improvement. John discusses the many challenges on the personal level for those engaged in the public sector as well as the need to work at a systemic level to actually change things for the better.

In this episode of Innovation Explorers we’re speaking with the provacative Maria Giudice, who founded the design shop Hot Studio and worked as global design director for Facebook and Autodesk. Maria talks about her new book “Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World”, a follow up to her 2013 book “Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design.” Maria shares with us her strategies for breaking through the friction of inaction and mediocrity and how changemakers, innovators and designers need to be smart about navigating a system in which they may be seen as a foreign element. And she notes that in order to be a change maker, you have to be optimistic about the future.