Krista Donaldson: Designing Products That Change the World

Krista Donaldson uses design to fight jaundice, create prosthetic limbs, and solve some of the developing world's most vexing problems. This is why we selected Donaldson as our 2014 ALVA Award winner, a special prize presented by Behance in partnership with GE to recognize remarkable serial inventors. In this 99U talk, she offers a peek into her team's design process for getting complicated medical treatments to all corners of the world for a price anyone can afford. Chief among her advice? Talk to your customers. Then talk to them again. And use all that feedback to iterate and, when needed, drastically shift your design process. "We want closure on our projects...but people and society and technologies change. You want to be okay with the ambiguity." About Krista Donaldson Krista Donaldson is the CEO of D-Rev and has worked in international development, product design and engineering for more than 15 years. As D-Rev’s CEO, Krista has led the design and scaling in emerging markets of Brilliance, radically affordable treatment for babies with jaundice, and the ReMotion prosthetic knee, now worn by over 5,500 amputees. She has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the 50 designers shaping the future and the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer. Prior to D-Rev, Krista was an economic officer at the US Department of State where she worked on economic policy and the reconstruction of Iraq’s electricity sector, and as a design engineer at KickStart in Nairobi, Kenya. A native of Nova Scotia, Krista holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Krista Donaldson uses design to fight jaundice, create prosthetic limbs, and solve some of the developing world’s most vexing problems. This is why we was selcted as the 2014 ALVA Award winner, a special prize presented by Behance in partnership with GE to recognize remarkable serial inventors.

In this 99U talk, she offers a peek into her team’s design process for getting complicated medical treatments to all corners of the world for a price anyone can afford. Chief among her advice? Talk to your customers. Then talk to them again. And use all that feedback to iterate and, when needed, drastically shift your design process. “We want closure on our projects…but people and society and technologies change. You want to be okay with the ambiguity.”