Our Story
The Emergence of
Design of Thinking™
Visionled Global’s history is based upon work across art, design, trend forecasting, product development, manufacturing and industry. Our way of working was always hands-on. Ideas were developed through making, experimenting, observing, questioning and responding to what emerged.
During a period when Diana had stepped away from her design business and returned to painting she unexpectedly gained a different insight.
She began simply, playing with poster paint on large sheets of paper. Without a predetermined outcome, Diana experimented with writing, movement, colour and sound - allowing the brush to move, while thoughts and words flowed.
The painting became more than an image.
The act of making is a way of discovery through the particular way of creative expression, the mindset of the artist. The painting experience is more than making an image. In our approach, it is a way of thinking through play and mark-making.
This experience informed a new approach to working with people. Creative activities, reflective practices and carefully framed questions are ways to engage participants more deeply in their own thinking and application when working on group projects, forming ideas and innovation.
The approach was brought into in-house design projects, where people from different areas of an organisation, transdisciplinary groups, could step outside familiar ways of working, explore the nature of a challenge and rethink possibilities together.
The emphasis was on engagement, connection, immersion and experience — bringing people into the process so they could notice how they were thinking, what they were assuming and what might become possible when they approached something differently.
This is Design of Thinking™.
The Shift into the
Fabric of Awareness
Diana’s art-based creative practice continued alongside her work with Design of Thinking™. (DoT). When Diana relocated to Japan, she initially delivered DoT programs with in-house business groups.
Living and working in Japan also created an opportunity to experiment, introducing different kinds of experiences. Holding small DoT workshops in a local community hall in Tokyo brought together people from different professions, cultures, ages and backgrounds.
Away from the structure of an organisational setting, the workshops became more open-ended. The creative activities, conversation, inner refelction, observation and questions revealed something beyond the original intention of the DoT work: she invented new group and one to one workshops to promote and support what happens when people are given the space to notice their own way of thinking, perceiving and responding.
This became an important turning point.
The most powerful decisions you will ever make begin deeper. From the inside out.
In a world that demands constant output, that self gets layered over. The Fabric of Awareness; is designed to move through those layers with precision and with care, returning you to the source of your most meaningful connection, to yourself.
You begin in the part of you that holds your true conviction, your clearest vision - the layer of self that knows before the rational strategy comes forward. The people who lead from that place do not just respond to the world. They shape it.
The outer world you want to create starts with the inner world you are willing to meet.
You are a creator. Every world you have built began with you.
The creative process becomes a mirror for the participants. What you discover in the studio shifts how you work and play outside it.
Over time, Diana’s own inquiry also expanded. Longstanding practices of yoga, meditation and breath work, plein air sketching, together with her study of neuroscience, human dynamics and the relationship between mind, body, and heart deepened her interest in awareness, not simply as an idea, but as something that can be experienced.
This led to a different way of working with groups and individuals.
The workshops gradually shifted from how we think to how we become aware of how we think, feel, perceive, play, respond and to what brings us to connect with our inner world, our innate knowing.
This is not about seeking to change people, engage self improvement, provide answers or direct participants towards a particular outcome. We create environments in which people can pause, observe and inquire and make meaning. It is an inquiry from the ‘inside out’. From our inner knowing, perception and intuition, to the outer world.
These activities allow space to reveal something more to ourselves.
The creative activities are the way of opening that space.
The body is also part of the inquiry.
Questions are a way of noticing rather than finding the right answer.
And awareness is the foundation from which new understanding could emerge.