d.school news

Executives, It's Independence Day. Design Thinking Bootcamp Now Open for July

NOW OPEN! d.school Executive Education Program - this July

Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation offers executives the chance to learn design thinking — a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to product, service, and business design. We believe that innovation is necessary in every aspect of business, and that it can be taught. We invite you to join us here at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, affectionately called "the d.school," for an experience that will enhance your ability to drive innovation in your organization.

As a participant in Design Thinking Boot Camp, you will be part of a small multidisciplinary team and work through a hands-on innovation challenge from start to finish. You will walk away from the workshop with a strong understanding of the key tenets of design thinking and be able to execute them at home. You will learn:
How to Use Observation to Develop Deep Consumer Insights
How to Use Rapid Prototyping to Reduce Risk and Accelerate Learning
How to Drive Towards Innovation, Not Just Incremental Growth
How to Empower Your Employees To Be Innovative
We invite you to learn more about the program and apply here.

All Hands on Duck!

A great article in BusinessWeek about Winter Quarter's Business Process Innnovation project to fix Timbuk2's broken all-hands meetings. Congratulations to the BPI students and teaching team, and some very big kudos to Perry Klebahn for letting the playground into the principal's office!

Creating Infectious Engagement Conference, May 1

THE d.school IS NOW RECRUITING 2008-9 FELLOWS

*Are you interested in a superb opportunity to teach and lead innovation at Stanford?
*Are you passionate about design thinking?
*Do you want to collaborate with world-class faculty and designers?

We are looking for people like you!

This is an exceptional opportunity for fellows to develop innovation leadership skills,
contribute to the design thinking movement, and to help build one of the most outstanding
new organizations on campus. D.school fellows will leave Stanford as members of an inspiring
network of leading industry and academic design experts with the confidence, experience, and
skills to make a unique and lasting impact on the world.

• Applications are NOW AVAILABLE on the d.school website
• Meet d.school fellows past/present to find out more: April 2nd, 6pm or April 3, 11:30am (RSVP)
• Applications DUE Monday, April 7th
• INTERVIEWS April 14-25th
• Positions will be ANNOUNCED by Wednesday, April 30th

Where the Rubber Band Meets the Road

Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week is off and running! Last year's Innovation tournament featured the ubiquitous Post-it. You can find the winners here. And you can still sign up for this year's tourney, featuring the lowly, yet powerful rubber band. Get a team together and snap out some value if you dare!

Recent Raves on K-12 Efforts from Inter*Action

Take a look over at Stanford's Inter*Action publication, a quarterly that focuses on Stanford's "myriad efforts in multidisciplinary research and teaching." The Winter 2008 issue has a great story on the Nueva School Innovation Lab project taken on by the K-12 Lab this past summer. And in general, Inter*Action always has the kinds of stories that are right up our alley, about people from different disciplines taking on the challenge of radical collaboration.

A Cool Drink of Water

We came across the winner of the Specialized "Innovate or Die" pedal-powered machine competition today on YouTube's front page. (We hear tell that team member Eleanor Morgan is a graduate of Stanford University's ME Design Program.) This idea is a beauty, really worth a long look. For that matter, all the entries are worth a peek.

Splash Landing! Extreme Affordability hits the water running.

Have you ever tried to catch a monsoon? As 41 aspiring designers learned this weekend, it's not as simple as you think. Especially when you impose rules that mimic resources in the developing world, where catching rainwater is a serious necessity. Facing their constraints, eight competing design teams scrounged for materials all over campus and fashioned a group of highly unorthodox rainwater collector designs. 

The weekend-long "monsoon collection" competition was the inaugural design project of the d.school's Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class. As simulated monsoon rain showered down on the improvised designs, the teaching team gave a muddy lesson in the value of prototyping. At the end of the three-hour event, some monsoon catchers lay in ruins while others surprised the judges with their fantastic performance and brilliant innovations. The judges awarded prizes not only for best performance, but for outrageous visual appeal, team spirit, elegance, and sheer guts. The competitors left soaking wet and speckled with mud, but eager to get back to the studio, designing products to help the world's poor.

Congratulations to the K-12 Lab!

The d.school's K-12 Learning Lab has won their first grant to bring design thinking into the public schools! The $75k grant will fund pilot work with East Palo Alto Academy Elementary School (EPAAES) and lay the groundwork for engaging schools nationwide. Lab Director Susie Wise, School of Education Professor Shelley Goldman, and d.school Interim Faculty Director Bernie Roth collaborated on the grant. It underwrites work to create design challenges for East Palo Alto Academy students and to study how kids learn through design. In addition to hands-on work with kids the grant will also support paying teachers to attend design thinking workshops in Summer 2008.

The grant comes from the University-wide K-12 initiative being led by Kenji Hakuta and Helen Quinn.

Agile Aging, Mobile d.school

In late December the d.school took it show on the road - well, the sidewalk - and worked with the Stanford Center on Longevity to brainstorm potential areas of focus for the Center's Mobility project. The Mobility project brings together an interdisciplinary group to address how to increase and preserve mobility as people age in order to maintain a better quality of life.  The brainstorming session was led by George Kembel and Kerry O'Connor from the d.school, and initiated by Anne Friedlander, director of the Mobility Project, and one of the Teaching Team members for this quarter's Agile Aging Course. They covered potential areas for innovation that included how to address disease, economic factors, psychological factors, environmental factors and political factors that converge in order to limit mobility.  From the hundreds of ideas that were generated during the brainstorm, the advisory board narrowed the potential areas of focus down to two dozen. Over the upcoming months the SCL will work to direct its resources to the most promising and novel initiatives that will reside within the diverse disciplines here at Stanford. 

New K-12 Course for Winter Announced! Designing to Learn

Course: Designing to Learn
Units: 2-4
Tentative Time: Tuesdays 9:30-10:50

The d.school's K-12 Lab has organized their ongoing endeavors at the Nueva School and East Palo Alto Academy into a small course for the Winter Quarter, and are looking for Stanford students with an interest in K-12 design thinking education who haven't yet heard about the opportunity. They are seeking motivated people who want to learn more about design and its applications to K-12 contexts. Participants will have the opportunity to work directly with middle school students in East Palo Alto and Hillsborough. The course will provide a forum for students to discuss the potential for design and design thinking in education with fellow students and industry and educational leaders. If you are interested in participating, please email Ugochi Acholonu at (acholonu at stanford dot edu) for a syllabus and application information.

Winding up the Quarter...with a Twist

The d.school headed into the Winter break with a wonderful wind-up, dancing! We took our inspiration from the the d.school bootcamp. The students have spent many weeks in deeply immersive sessions on ramen noodles, sustainable fast food, and morning radio, so we thought we'd continue the immersive experiences by bringing the whole d.school community a one-night Salsa club complete with lessons to make us experts in minutes. It was a great evening–more than one d.schooler learned that collaboration at close range can be both risky, and rewarding!

The d.school goes (even more) global! Prof. Bernie Roth receives honorary doctorate in Paris

Although Bernie might tell you that the most interesting thing about this picture is the wonderful artwork and decoration on the walls in the background, we beg to differ. While the rest of us were making our ways home for the Thanksgiving holiday, Bernie Roth was suffering though those embarrassing moments in a doctoral degree presentation when the presenter spends 10 or more minutes enumerating all of your excellent qualities and fantastic discoveries before bestowing important honors on you.

Jean-Claude Guinot, of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie–France's premier scientific University, which bestowed its honorary doctorate on Bernie on Nov. 21–says of Bernie, "This great mind is not only incredibly modest, he is also a sharp-eyed humanist, who weighs up the consequences of technological developments for society." Bernie's honors have stemmed from a career of revolutionary work in kinematics and robotics begun some time ago, which has generated entirely new disciplines and work for a whole host of scientists and engineers.

Prof. Guinot also described Bernie as "an exceptional teacher who has the ability to pass on his knowledge and enthusiasm, not only in his usual role as a professor, but also by devising innovations to aid problem resolution through modern creative concepts." For those of us who have had the opportunity to work with Bernie and his modern creative concepts, we think his next honorary degree may stem directly from there.

Cooking with Gas

During the week of November 11th, the d.school hosted an executive education program in conjunction with the Graduate School of Business. The participants of “Customer Focused Innovation” spent the mornings in lectures at the b-school, and the afternoons immersed in design thinking at the d.school.

Nearly forty executives from a diverse group of companies spread across four continents took on the timely challenge of redesigning the gas pump experience for ARCO brand service stations. After a teambuilding warmup competition changing the tires on a NASCAR racer, participants went deep into interviews and observations on site at gas stations—some gaining access to interviewees by washing their windshields as they pumped! For the next two days the executives synthesized all of their notes and observations into a working point of view, brainstormed, prototyped, and showed their ideas to real users in order to iterate their designs.  Finally they got to show off their teamwork to high-level representatives from BP, who evaluated the refined prototypes declaring, “It's really humbling that in four days you can describe what our customers think.  We have been working there for 20 years.”

For bigger, better information on the whole shebang, check the stories in it at out Bob Sutton's Work Matters blog.

Radio Redesigns

On a Wednesday evening, a small group of design thinkers made history
within the cozy walls of the Product Design Loft.  The innovators were
students from the d.school's Experiences in Innovation and Design
Thinking class (affectionately nicknamed Bootcamp).  Their capstone
project was a joint collaboration with New York Public Radio (WNYC)
and several other radio affiliates to redesign the sound of morning
news radio.  In a few months, WNYC will launch a new radio show that
will redefine the face of news radio, and their secret weapon is
design thinking.
     The final presentations were a particularly memorable collection
of skits, videos, and reenactments that demonstrated the hidden needs
of people that have not yet been reached by public radio.  The
resulting ideas for news radio were bold yet actionable, and the radio
executives that gathered in the Loft--including the presidents of WNYC
and Public Radio International--gave the teams a standing ovation for
their ideas and their enthusiasm.  In the next few months, WNYC will
weave these new ideas into their plans for the show, and when it
launches in the spring, you may turn on the radio and hear morning
news in a way you've never before experienced.  When you do, remember
that it all started here.

Extreme Affordability Returns

Jim Patell and David Klaus, instructors of Entrepreneurial Design for
Extreme Affordabilty, recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia.  They
spent a week in the country meeting with the partners that will be
sponsoring design projects for the upcoming Winter-Spring course.
This year's projects will be in the areas of irrigation, cooking,
agricultural harvesting tools, devices for the disabled, and local
manufacturing operations.  For more information about the course and
this year's partners, check out extreme.stanford.edu.

Winter d.school Classes for Stanford Students

This Winter the d.school is offering 5 amazing class options for Stanford students. Have a look at the incredible range of them! We're looking forward to an incredible quarter.

Design for Agile Aging
(MED 279Y; CS 379Y; HumBio 131)
TTh 3:15-5:05, 4 units per quarter
Limited enrollment via application at http://hci.stanford.edu/agile/ 
Applications available on Nov. 5, 2007. Due by Nov. 25.
Maintaining mobility is critical to successful aging. Impaired mobility limits daily activities and independence. For individuals who are already mobility-impaired, or are at risk of becoming so, small improvements in mobility can dramatically improve quality of life. This two-quarter interdisciplinary course sequence is designed to explore innovative ways to integrate computer and device technologies with behavioral and social interventions to maintain and enhance mobility in seniors.  In project team, students draw upon perspectives from Computer Science, Design, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Medicine to develop interventions that will address the potential of people to maintain vitality and mobility as they age.  Students need not take both courses, although students must take the Winter course in order to enroll in Spring.
Teaching Team:
    Anne Friedlander, Stanford Center on Longevity
    Carol Winograd, Medicine and Human Biology
    Terry Winograd, Computer Science
    Paul Yock, Medicine and BioDesign

Transformative Design
(ENGR 231)
MW 5:30-7PM, 3-5 Units
Designed products have always had tremendous impact on individual, social and cultural behavior. This project-based course investigates how interactive technologies can be designed to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will be structured around interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change in domain such as weight-loss, energy conservation or safe driving; accompanying lab sessions will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for interaction prototyping. Students will work in teams to create functional prototypes for self-selected problem domains for the final project.
Teaching Team:
    Bernard Roth, Mechanical Engineering Design Group, d.school
    Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, Cultural and Social Anthropology
    Wendy Ju, d.school
    Bill Moggridge, IDEO

K-12 Learning Lab Independent Projects
Times and Units Flexible
The K-12 Learning Lab has major projects with the Nueva School, East Palo Alto Academy Charter School and the Henry Ford Learning Institute. We’re building spaces, courses, and partnerships to bring design thinking to young people. We are looking for students who want to bite off parts of the projects and work on them independently. The overall team will meet together every other week to share learnings and prototypes.
Lab Director:
     Susie Wise, d.school

Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability
(OIT 333/334;  ME 206A/206B)
MW 10-11:45AM, Th Lab 7-9PM
4 Units, registration in both Winter and Spring quarters required
Limited enrollment via application available at extreme.stanford.edu
Applications available on Nov. 5, 2007. Due no later than Nov. 16.
Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability is a two-quarter project course in which graduate students design comprehensive solutions to challenges faced by the world’s poor. Students learn design thinking and its specific application to problems in the developing world.  Students work in multidisciplinary teams at the intersection of business, technology, and human values.  All projects are done in close partnership with a variety of international organizations.  These organizations host student fieldwork, facilitate the design development, and implement ideas after the class ends.

The first quarter of the course (Winter 2008) immerses students in the fundamentals of design thinking.  Students learn the design process experientially as they are coached through a number of fast-paced design projects, culminating in a real-world project with local partners.  In parallel, the course gives students a background on business, technology, and development, and an introduction to our international collaboration partners.  By the end of the quarter, students will form teams and begin their capstone spring quarter project.  The second quarter (Spring 2008) is devoted to developing comprehensive solutions to these design challenges.   Teams will develop empathy with all stakeholders so that they can develop a solution that fits into the culture, aspirations, and constraints of their target users.  Teams will iterate on their designs and business models through a rapid sequence of prototyping and testing.  Students also will interact with entrepreneurs who have launched ventures in the developing world, including several alumni from the class.  The final deliverable is a product or service framed in a comprehensive implementation plan including the business model, the technical innovations, the cultural rationale, and the appropriate next steps.  The course culminates in a professional presentation to the international partners and a panel of industry experts.

Teaching Team:
        Jim Patell, Graduate School of Business
        Dave Beach, Mechanical Engineering
        David Klaus, d.school

Innovation in Complex Organizations
(MS&E 282 A, B)
Th 3-6PM,  3 Units, Enrollment limited to 12, Letter grade only
The purpose of this course is to offer students a chance to pause, discuss, and integrate design thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format.  This centerpiece of this small seminar will be three or four “live” case studies where, executives from large, complex organizations come to class and describe their efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation.  Past cases have included Google AdSense, P&G, NASCAR, Method Home, and General Motors.  They will describe how their organizations screen and move along promising ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that journey.  Student teams will analyze each case and provide recommendations to the executives, who along with the teaching team, will judge the work.  The final project will be a general analysis and set of recommendations about this vexing organizational problem. This course is co-sponsored by the d.school and STVP (Stanford Technology Ventures Program).
Teaching Team:
        Robert Sutton, Management Science & Engineering
        Michael Dearing, d.school

Business Practice Innovation (BPI)
(MS&E 287)
WF 3:30-5PM
3-4 Units, Letter Grade, Enrollment Limited to 12, No Auditors
Treating Business Practices as Prototypes. In this small, team-based, multidisciplinary class, students will work in dyads or larger teams.  They will apply the design process to specific practices (like talent management, organizational design, and communication with external stakeholders) in organizations that may include a software firm, a professional services firm, and an airline, and treating the targeted practices as prototypes.  The course will provide hands-on experience in collaboration and design, in the context of tackling real problems in real businesses.
Teaching Team:
        Debra Dunn, d.school
        Kris Woyzbun, IDEO
        Robert Sutton, Management Science & Engineering

Innovation Lab Opens

The d.school's first major venture in the world of K-12 education opened this week at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. Called the Innovation Lab, the project is a 3500 square foot space where students in the K-8 school will develop their design thinking skills. The project cycle was rapid with needfinding in April and May, conceptual prototype in June, and full-scale prototyping at Sweet Hall in July. July's prototype sessions brought 20 kids a week to campus and deeply informed everything from how to brainstorm with 1st graders, to how high to build the tables. The team also conducted a 3-day teacher workshop with Nueva faculty where teachers reported they rediscovered the importance of play and one was quoted as saying, the Innovation Lab, "is not just a space, it's a movement."

The project was led by Scott Doorley, Alex Ko, Kim Saxe, and Susie Wise and included the design of the space, furniture, curriculum, and program. Coaching support and prototype development will continue through the school year and work to take the curriculum to Stanford's East Palo Alto Charter School has already begun.

Thanks to the amazing K-12 lab members who made it happen: Ugochi Acholonu, Cathy Chase, Rich Crandall, Jonathan Edelman, Elysa Fenenbock, Karin Forssell, Hillary Freeman, Yuseke Miyashita, Maryanna Rogers, Adam Royalty, Andrew Salverda, Sandy Speicher, Daniel Steinbock, Andrew Taylor, Scott Witthoft, and Natalie Wozybun.

d.school adventures around the world

Current d.school fellow David Klaus recently returned from a summer in Africa and Asia, where he set up partnerships for the coming year's Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class. In the winter and spring, the d.school will be partnering with several of these organizations to design products and services for the world's poor. The list of potential projects is more diverse than ever, including irrigation products for rural farmers, wheelchairs and prosthetics for victims of war and disease, energy solutions for affordable (and sustainable) lighting and cooking, new tools for the care of livestock, "entrepreneur kits" to help street children generate income, and innovative business models to help the poor access credit, to name a few. During the summer, David kept a travel blog with more details on the partnerships, and a whole bunch of entertaining stories about his adventures as a designer in the developing world. You can check it out at dpklaus.blogspot.com.

VPs of Design

d.school Associate Consulting Professor Perry Klebahn (who in his other day job is the CEO of Timbuk2) is mentioned in this article about design for business in BusinessWeek:  Wanted: VPs of Design

A B-School All-Star at the d.school

Our very own Bob Sutton was named by BusinessWeek to their "B-School All-Stars" list.  BusinessWeek calls it "... a look at 10 B-School professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond the halls of academia."

Also, check out the related article in BusinessWeek: Powerful Profs

Way to go, Bob!

d.light wins the DFJ Venture Challenge!

Great news from the d.light team! This group of d.school alumni from last year's Design for Extreme Affordability class have taken their project the next step, starting a company around their d.light product. Yesterday, they got a huge boost, winning the DFJ Venture challenge to the tune of $250,000. Congratulations!

Infectious action at the d.school

Earlier this quarter, and after just two weeks of work, CIA-KGB students launched their solutions to help Mozilla attract and retain users of Firefox.  Actually, it wasn't really two weeks -- it was eight working days and four weekend days.  As you'll see by clicking through on the URL's, below, each team of four students accomplished an incredible amount of work.  When was the last time you went from zero knowledge in a subject area to putting something real and working in to the world in just two weeks?  While working the equivalent of three or four other full-time jobs?

Here they are -- check 'em all out!

My eBay Fox

Firefox Got Your Back

Underdog

Firefox 4 Life

PuckFox Cup

Everyday Hero

It's important to note that these were only a launch and not a final deliverable.  We've been tracking the progress and performance of each project over the entire quarter.

mini-conference alert: Creating Infectious Action through Social Enterprise

How might one apply design thinking to create infectious action through social enterprise?

As part of the CIA-KGB class being taught at the d.school, we'll be holding a "mini-conference" next week, and you're invented to attend.  We only call it "mini" because it's not a full-day event.  However, as you can see below, the speaker roster is simply amazing.

Here are the speakers (in order of appearance):

• Jim Fruchterman, Founder & CEO, Benetech
• Dennis Whittle and Mari Kurashi, Co-Founders, Global Giving
• Jessica Flannery, Co-Founder, Kiva.org

In addition to getting to hear each of these people speak about creating infectious action through social enterprise, we'll also be treated to a panel discussion with them moderated by CIA-KGB teaching team member Debra Dunn.  And, this being the d.school, we'll retreat afterward to the lobby for some heated discussion about design thinking, as well as some tasty drinks and snacks.

This year's CIA-KGB mini-conference is focused on the domain of social enterprise because this year's class will be embarking on a five-week design project on behalf of Global Giving.  Last year's conference talked more generally about creating infectious action, and was a blast.  Hope to see you there!

logistics:

Creating Infectious Action through Social Enterprise
Thursday, May 3
3:30 - 6:45
Hewlett 200
Stanford University

free of charge, but bring your brain

2007 David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design

THE d.school IS NOW RECRUITING 2007-8 FELLOWS

* Are you interested in a superb fellowship opportunity at Stanford?
* Are you passionate about design thinking?
* Do you want to collaborate with world-class faculty and designers?
* We are looking for people like you!

This is an exceptional opportunity to develop your innovation
leadership skills, contribute to the design thinking movement, and
help build one of the most outstanding new organizations at Stanford.

* Applications DUE Wednesday, April 11th
* INTERVIEWS April 16-20th
* Positions will be ANNOUNCED by Friday, May 4th

Details are in the application .

Bruce Nussbaum on Design Thinking & the d.school

BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum has written some very thought-provoking posts recently about the state of design, design thinking, and education.

In his first post, Bob Kerrey Gets Innovation Right at The New School and Parsons, he says that "Design thinking is seen as the integrative solvent that brings together the programs through a powerful methodology that solves a myriad of problems. It's the same perspective as Stanford has in its new d. school -- the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design."

And then there's his second post, Are Designers The Enemy of Design?  It's definitely worth a read, and is very though provoking.  In it he makes a distinction between the world of design and the world of design thinking.  We'd love to hear what you think of it, either in the comments section on this blog or at Bruce's own blog.

Attention Stanford students! Apply for these Spring d.school courses now

All of us at the d.school are excited about two upcoming courses to be taught Spring Quarter.  Each of them requires an application, so we wanted to take a minute to highlight them (and their application deadline) here.

Software Design Experiences: application due March 5

CS447 (also ME325) is a unique opportunity offered by the d.school. SAP co-founder, Hasso Plattner, along with Professor Terry Winograd, and SAP Executive Vice President, Zia Yusuf will bring their unique perspectives to the class. Interdisciplinary student teams will apply design thinking and user-centered methodologies to the full software system and lifecyle, including its construction, distribution, and the social and organizational implementation.

Students will develop composite software prototypes that explore real-world opportunities for city governments to better serve its citizens. Students will engage with city officials from Palo Alto and Mountain View and leading industry experts to co-create real systems on industrial-strength platforms, In addition, the class will travel to Atlanta to attend SAP’s Sapphire event, where 15,000 participants from both the business and technical worlds come together with SAP experts, customers, and solution providers to discuss best practices and learn about the future of enterprise software.

Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB): application due March 9

This small and intense project-based class is built around two team efforts to “spread” positive behavior, which will be bolstered by exposure to, and coaching from, industry experts and academics. The first project will be an initiative done with Mozilla, the second a project focused on building the user base of a social venture called Global Giving that runs an online marketplace connecting donors with social entrepreneurs globally.  A limited number of summer internships with Global Giving will be available to CIA-KGB students who wish to continue creating infectious action in that domain.

The teaching team behind CIA-KGB brings a wealth of academic and real-world experience to the course.  The instructors are Michael Dearing, Debra Dunn, Diego Rodriguez, and Bob Sutton (who will be a guest instructor).  The course assistant is Kris Woybun, who was part of the inaugural version of CIA last year.  Project teams will also benefit from the coaching of Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn.

Learning how to become a better design thinker will be a major focus of this course. Students will apply the “build to think” philosophy of the d.school and create prototypes of everything from viral marketing campaigns to entire businesses. While there will substantial helpings of theory delivered throughout the quarter, this is a course for people who want to get their hands dirty, to get out in the world and do things.

Course applications can be found on the respective class websites above.

      

Why the d.school Works

Min Liu just graduated from Stanford at the end of the winter term.  Those of us at the Stanford d.school were lucky to have her as a student in our "Clicks-n-Bricks" class during her last term at Stanford, which among other things, did a project for Wal-Mart focused on fueling their sustainability efforts. I wrote a couple of posts about the class, including one describing the great group dynamics on our teaching team (which included Debra Dunn, Liz Gerber, Michael Dearing, Alex  Ko, and Perry Klebahn), but Min just put-up a post that has more information about what it is like to take a d.school class than any other place I know. Check out her new post on Why the d.school Works. Check it out, it not only has opinions, it has a couple videos from our class field trip to Wal-Mart.com.  Our students were invited to present their work to a big group of Wal-mart.com employees after presenting their projects -- and having them evaluated -- by 7 or 8 Wal-Mart executives plus our teaching team the prior week.  The first video is of Carter Cast (CEO of  Wal-Mart.com) and I setting the stage for the presentations and the second is of Min's group doing their presentation on how to get Wal-Mart.com employees more engaged in their sustainability efforts. 

Min was kind enough not to talk about all the mistakes we made as a teaching team, as we worked under massive uncertainty and time pressure. Things came out well in the end, but the creative process is usually pretty bumpy, and this class was no different. Here are some of the nice things Min said:

The class gave me the breadth to do hard out-of-the-academic element projects. For example, designing a sustainability project within a large organization can't solely rely on theoretical foundations of organizational behavior. My team and I interviewed the Walmart.com folks, talked to various individuals outside Target and Whole Foods who were passionate or apathetic about green, developed a point of view for our subjects, and came up with a cool solution based on our observations and prototypes. And like no other department I've experienced, we got access to the d.school 24-7 and free food and drinks all the time......

Personally, my last quarter at Stanford was the best because I learned that the process of doing what I love (finally!) is so much better than living up to some abstract expectation even though it is, by convention, the best. Sure, the realization was a good part done by myself outside of the d.school, but it was d.school's welcoming, innovative, and incubative environment that helped me realize that the riskier and gutsy-er a path is, the better.

Of course, Min's comments warm our hearts.  It is the kind of thing that keeps us going when all seems dark and messed-up, and why we are lucky to work at place like Stanford that allows us to do such crazy things, to take risks in our teaching and research, just as we press our students to do in their projects.

written by Professor Bob Sutton

Min Liu just graduated from Stanford at the end of the winter term.  Those of us at the Stanford d.school were lucky to have her as a student in our "Clicks-n-Bricks" class during her last term at Stanford, which among other things, did a project for Wal-Mart focused on fueling their sustainability efforts. I wrote a couple of posts about the class, including one describing the great group dynamics on our teaching team (which included Debra Dunn, Liz Gerber, Michael Dearing, Alex  Ko, and Perry Klebahn), but Min just put-up a post that has more information about what it is like to take a d.school class than any other place I know. Check out her new post on Why the d.school Works. Check it out, it not only has opinions, it has a couple videos from our class field trip to Wal-Mart.com.  Our students were invited to present their work to a big group of Wal-mart.com employees after presenting their projects -- and having them evaluated -- by 7 or 8 Wal-Mart executives plus our teaching team the prior week.  The first video is of Carter Cast (CEO of  Wal-Mart.com) and I setting the stage for the presentations and the second is of Min's group doing their presentation on how to get Wal-Mart.com employees more engaged in their sustainability efforts. 

Min was kind enough not to talk about all the mistakes we made as a teaching team, as we worked under massive uncertainty and time pressure. Things came out well in the end, but the creative process is usually pretty bumpy, and this class was no different. Here are some of the nice things Min said:

The class gave me the breadth to do hard out-of-the-academic element projects. For example, designing a sustainability project within a large organization can't solely rely on theoretical foundations of organizational behavior. My team and I interviewed the Walmart.com folks, talked to various individuals outside Target and Whole Foods who were passionate or apathetic about green, developed a point of view for our subjects, and came up with a cool solution based on our observations and prototypes. And like no other department I've experienced, we got access to the d.school 24-7 and free food and drinks all the time......

Personally, my last quarter at Stanford was the best because I learned that the process of doing what I love (finally!) is so much better than living up to some abstract expectation even though it is, by convention, the best. Sure, the realization was a good part done by myself outside of the d.school, but it was d.school's welcoming, innovative, and incubative environment that helped me realize that the riskier and gutsy-er a path is, the better.

Of course, Min's comments warm our hearts.  It is the kind of thing that keeps us going when all seems dark and messed-up, and why we are lucky to work at place like Stanford that allows us to do such crazy things, to take risks in our teaching and research, just as we press our students to do in their projects.

written by Professor Bob Sutton

Learning as we go: Reflections on Fall Quarter

Professor Bob Sutton has written an interesting post about teaching and learning at the d.school during the Fall 2006 quarter.  Here's an excerpt:

We just wrapped-up our d.school class Clicks-n-Bricks: Creating Mass Market Experiences. When I walked in the door on Friday night after our teaching team went out to celebrate, the first thing I said to my wife was “That just might be the best team I will ever be on in my life.” The other team members were Michael Dearing, Debra Dunn, Liz Gerber, Perry Klebahn and Alex Ko.

We continue treat d.school classes as prototypes, as an opportunity to learn about teaching, design thinking, teaching design thinking, teaching lifelong learning, and ultimately the d.school itself.  You can read the rest of Bob's post here, and please let us know what you think using the comments feature below.

Next:  A Big Move, and Winter Quarter!

Innovation "boot camp" class next quarter

Experiences in Innovation and Design Thinking

Immersive experiences in innovation and design thinking, blurring the boundaries between technology, business, and human values.  Explore the tenants of design thinking including being human-centered, prototype driven, and mindful of process in everything you do.

Topics include design processes, innovation methodologies, need finding, human factors, rapid prototyping, team dynamics, storytelling, and project management.  Hands-on projects, in-class exercises, and guest lectures.  Rich in frameworks and methods that support breakthrough thinking.  Students and faculty collaborating from all areas of the university including business, earth sciences, education, engineering, humanities and sciences, law, and medicine.  Preparation for leading real world innovation and for advanced d.school courses. 

what you need to know: Limited enrollment.  Application required.  Deadline and details below.

Students last year said:

• "I learned more about innovation in a week at the d.school, than I did in a year in my other classes"
• "You think you are coming to a take a class, but you leave with a higher self-awareness and a commitment to personal growth"
• "This space has a change-the-world energy.  It makes me want to think out loud"

Details:

Number: ME 377
Title: Experiences in Innovation and Design Thinking
Days: MW 1:15-3:05
Room: Sweet Hall, 2nd floor
Instructors:

• Alex Kazaks 
• Alex Ko
• David Kelley
• George Kembel
• Scott Doorley

And many interesting guests!
Units: 3
Grading: Satisfactory/No Credit

Application details:

If you are a Stanford graduate student with an interest in changing the world, please apply to be a part of our class and community.  To apply, please email the following to  dschoolbootcamp2007@lists.stanford.edu:

• Your coordinates: Include Name, Email, Phone, Degree Program, and Year in Program
• Three reasons you why you want to take this class and what you hope to contribute (less than 200 words)
• An 8 1/2 x 11 page in a standard digital format (Word, pdf, jpg, etc.) of any content to help introduce yourself
• Your resume

APPLICATIONS DUE NO LATER THAN THE END OF THE FIRST CLASS SESSION (3:05pm January 10th, 2007)
Email applications to dschoolbootcamp2007@lists.stanford.edu   
Class list will be announced by midnight after the first class

Early applications will be given preference

Picking up design thinking, Ambidextrous releases issue #5

Congratulations to the folks at Ambidextrous Magazine! The first issue of a new volume has hit the newsstands and internet, and a launch event is in the works for December 14.

An early project of the d.school, Ambidextrous is an independent, student-run design magazine that takes a broad view of the nature of design. (To see how broad, take a look at Wendy Ju's pictures of where they stand in the continuum between the pragmatic and romantic accounts of design.) Among some great tips on dating and a mechanical dissection of record players, Issue 5 "Picking Things Up" also includes interviews with d.school faculty member Bernie Roth, silicon valley design luminary Hartmut Esslinger of frog design, needfinding expert and Stanford professor Michael Barry, and a back page by our own Larry Leifer.

Customer-Focused Innovation

The d.school and Stanford's Graduate School of Business recently teamed up to teach an executive education course called Customer-Focused Innovation.  The experience of the course was designed to pair theory and action in a way that would help participants be able to know and do upon returning to their respective organizations.  As Bob Sutton talks about the class:

We became quite enamored of this idea of “clean” innovation models for the morning sessions and the “messy” process of doing creative work for the afternoon sessions. We liked this approach was that it models how effective organizations do innovation: traveling between rigorous (if somewhat sanitized) theory, evidence, and case studies and the (more messy) challenges of actually identifying, developing, and trying to test real ideas with real customers

Read more about the class -- and all the talented people who made it happen - on Bob Sutton's blog.

Perry Klebahn heads for Timbuk2

Always focused on walking the walk, one of our very best thinkers and doers, Perry Klebahn will be heading up Timbuk2 in the very near future. We'd go on and on, but Bob Sutton has already said it better. We're looking forward to reaping the knowledge rewards of Perry's latest endeavor.

A family of design thinkers - Aravind Eye Hospitals

The d.school had a fantastic group of vistors from Aravind Eye Hospitals, based in Madurai, India, this morning. An amazingly ambitious and successful non-profit whose mission is to eliminate unnecessary blindness, Aravind has achieved a measure of efficiency in opthalmic surgery unheard of in more resource-rich nations. With no outside funding, they have innovated the process and products involved in cataract surgery to such a degree that they have reduced the cost of cataract surgery to $10 per patient, and they perform 5% of all these surgeries in India with less than 1% of all the opthalmic resources there.

They are also adept at exporting and sharing their unique knowledge of efficient and innovative surgical techniques and hospital management processes with residencies, workshops, partnerships, and publications.

We at the d.school were so excited to be able to meet with them and share ideas about how human-centered approaches to important problems can produce tremendous innovations with a positive and lasting global impact.

Check out Pavithra Mehta's film "Infinite Vision" as well, which tells the story of this amazing institution and it's founder.

Designing Interactions: A new book of interviews by Bill Moggridge

Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome.

Moggridge and his interviewees discuss why a personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.

The entire book is available as dowloadable chapters online, but the printed copy is a beauty.

Roger Martin Speaks at Stanford on November 2, 8PM

Roger L. Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and one of the best writers on design thinking today is the guest on November 2, for the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design. Please join!

November 2nd 2006
8:00pm
Building 260 - Room 113.
Stanford University
The closest visitor parking lot to the lecture rooms is beside Landau Economics building. Here is the link for the map:
Google's map
Stanford's visitor parking map

What is Designing for Sustainability?

What is Designing for Sustainability?
a d.school Mini-Conference Fall 2006

Thursday, October 26, 2006
3:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Hewlett 200

Come join the students and faculty of MSE289 for a mini-conference on designing for sustainability. The conference is officially part of the d.school course, Clicks-n-Bricks: Creating Mass Market Experiences, but this session is open to all.

Thought leaders in sustainable design are featured speakers, including:
· Debra Dunn, former senior executive at HP in charge of sustainability
· Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart's VP of corporate strategy and sustainability
· Bob Adams, IDEO

Topics we will cover include:
· What is designing for sustainability?
· What are leading companies and organizations doing in this space?
· What's the real deal behind Wal-Mart's commitment to sustainability?
· What are some alternative views?
· How can you put sustainable design into practice in your work? Do you want to?

Roger Martin on the push-pull of the viable vs. the reliable

"A valid process... flows from designers' deep understanding of both user and context, and leads them to ideas they believe in but can't prove."

In October's Fast Company, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto writes about "Tough Love," the need for business to "outimagine the competition" by incorporating design thinking into their innovation process.

d.school and D-Schools

The October 9, 2006 BusinessWeek has an article featuring d.school students' Mozilla projects as the lead-in to an exploration of the new landscape of great design schools.

Bob Sutton on brainstorming in BusinessWeek

In the September 25, 2006 issue of BusineessWeek's quarterly Inside Innovation section, Bob Sutton lays out the ground rules for great brainstorming.

Design thinking meets medical schools

“one of the fundamental changes happening in medical schools across the nation.” - Philip Pizzo, dean of Stanford's School of Medicine

Stanford Magazine on adding a more human-centered, hands-on approach to learning earlier in the educational experience of future doctors.

Diego Rodriguez and John Maeda on innovation and simplicity

A good fireside chat hosted by 37signals. Check it out.

Information Week on Infectious Action

Information Week ruminates on the wide swings of fortune in the online infectious action arena. Our favorite quote from Bob Sutton...

This "messy" approach to packaging and selling products is exceedingly distressing to traditional marketers, Sutton says. "They base their whole professional lives on the theory that you can analyze and analyze and analyze, and if you analyze enough, you can make the perfect decision," he says. That's simply not the case on the Web. "You have to throw something on the wall and see if it sticks," he says, adding, "failure sucks, but instructs."

Words to live by.

Creating Infectious Action brings design thinking to HipHop

The Stanford Daily covers CIA's project on infectious action for HipHop.

Sir Ken Robinson at TED

A TED talk that needs no introduction. Everyone must watch.

d.school teams tackle Bike Safety

The Stanford Daily reports on Experiences in Design Thinking student teams applying newly sharpened design thinking skills to the issue of bicycle safety on campus.

d.news

We believe the d.school is more than a place. It's a community of people and a state of mind. We believe there's something special about this design thinking thing. We believe being good design thinkers means being human centered, prototype driven, and mindful of process in everything we do. We believe it's more than a good way to approach big problems. For many of us, it's a way of life.

The d.news broadcasts what's happening in the world of design thinking--at the d.school or well beyond. We bring you to ideas, events and people that are pushing the borders of this revolutionary way of doing and being.