David Dunne Writer. Educator.
Professional Badass.
I’m currently available for consulting engagements.
Biography
Above my desk hangs a large, black-and-white photograph. A group of rectangular stone houses faces a roiling, stormy sea. The houses stand grey, wet, rocksolid; the waves attack with ferocious energy. It looks as if the immovable object has finally met the irresistible force.
This is Blackrock, the coastal border village in Ireland where I grew up. In Winter, fierce easterly winds carry a Siberian chill across the Irish Sea, occasionally whipping up a froth of angry waves, flooding Main Street and driving residents indoors to huddle by turf fires with mugs of strong tea.
As if suspended by a thread, a seagull hangs above the water, white against the leaden sky. Buffeted by the gale, it floats in liminal space between land and sea, part of both but belonging to neither, in the eye of the storm.
I often feel like that seagull, a creature of two worlds, a borderer. To be a borderer is to live like a bird in a storm, caught in restless in-betweenness. It exposes you to other realities; if you are open to it, it shakes and re-shapes your sense of place, your convictions, your values.
I love to write about people like me, people who straddle different worlds. Border people, caught between opposing forces.
My guiding lights have always been thoughtfulness and creativity. I began my career with Unilever in London, UK—selling soap in Notting Hill, managing advertising in Camden Town. Eventually disillusioned with the corporate world, I switched careers to become an educator. Now an award-winning professor, I teach students around the world about innovation and design.
I have a Ph.D. in Management and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. My book Design Thinking at Work is about the tensions creative people face in business and government, and I am working on a book about life on the Irish border. I live in the forests of British Columbia, Canada, with my wife Carol Ann.
Discover more about David and his thoughts on embracing design.
Design Thinking at Work is David’s newest non-fiction work that explores the ways in which innovative organizations can tackle their wicked problems.
