It has long been demonstrated that teaching design methods and design skills is insufficient to ensure academic and professional success for industrial design students. These two legs should be balanced with the third leg of a design mindset. Students are often expected to learn the required mindset implicitly through their studio projects, internships, and other work. We assert that for students to grow properly into professional designers, a design mindset needs to be clearly defined, explicitly taught, and built into a real-world studio project to reinforce their learning through application and reflection. In this paper, we demonstrate our intro course takes students through twelve mindsets, what we call design attitudes: be playful, reignite curiosity, exercise child’s eye, question assumptions, increase empathy, seek inspiration, creative confidence, cultivate collaboration, accept critique, embrace ambiguity, relish risk, and fail forward. We share teaching strategies for each design attitude and demonstrate how application and empiric experience of each attitude positively impacts their final design concepts. The studio project intentionally requires the students to leverage these design attitudes because the design space is completely foreign to the students. We collaborate with the Toyota Mobility Foundation as we design solutions for users with lower-limb differences to enable an active lifestyle.