Lisa Kay Solomon is an educator, author, and social entrepreneur who designs environments, experiences, and classes to help people expand their futures, adapt to complexities, and build civic fellowship. She is a designer in residence at the Stanford d.school in California, where she focuses on bridging the disciplines of futures and design thinking, and a lecturer at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. At the d.school, she has created experiences including “Vote by Design: Presidential Edition” and “The Future’s Happening” to help students learn and practice the skills they don’t yet know they need. Her Stanford course “Inventing the Future” exposes students to practices of applied imagination, strategic foresight, immersive worldbuilding, and creativity.
Lisa is the co-author of the books Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation (Wiley, 2016). In 2021, she launched The Futures Series at the Stanford d.school, which brought diverse futures thinkers from around the world to share and democratize future-shaping practices, and she initiated the professional development program “Afro-Rithms in Classrooms” with the National Writing Project.
Lisa was named one of the Interaction Design Association’s Women of Design 2020, and in 2022 was named to the Thinkers50 Radar List, which identifies emerging management thinkers poised to reimagine the future of business and leadership.