d.school news

We've Moved

We have an awesome new website and have moved our blog (including previous content and comments) over to the new server. So if you're dying to download the Bootcamp Bootleg, need to hack a Z-rack, or just want to keep up with what's going on at the d.school then head on over there. If you want to update any links or RSS feeds, here are the must-have web addresses all spelled out:

• main website: http://dschool.stanford.edu/
• d.news blog: http://dschool.stanford.edu/blog/
• RSS Feed: feed://dschool.stanford.edu/feed/

We will not be adding any new content to this site and eventually will be shutting it down.

Taking it home, part 2: passion, permission and prototyping

Passion, Permission and Prototyping

We just wrapped up a Design Thinking Bootcamp with 37 executives from around the globe. A few came from start-ups, others from large corporations. We even had a few folks from governmental agencies. Despite the difference in organizational backgrounds, one thing was on almost all of our participants’ minds: “How do we make design thinking work back home?”

Anticipating this question, we finish up the program with a section we call, “Taking it Home.” For this class, we were fortunate to have several alumni from previous programs share their thoughts with the group. There was too much to capture so I wanted to highlight three things that I took away from our guests.

Passion

You’ll need passion. If you don’t have it, don’t expect to get far with your innovation efforts. The creative process is ambiguous and unpredictable. It doesn’t progress in a linear fashion. We heard of instances with significant business outcomes directly linked to design thinking. To me, that sounds like a silver bullet. But it’s not the case. Even with demonstrated business success, design thinking can still be a tough sell. But that didn’t seem to slow down the folks on our panel. They were so driven to create change that they found a way to make things work. They were totally committed. And let’s face it, like any long-term relationship the commitment is going to be a lot more fun if you’ve got the passion to go along with it.

Permission

So about permission, here’s the thing… don’t ask for it. Just start doing. Permission is a way of protecting yourself. It places you within the structure or your organization. It keeps you from putting your job at risk. All good things. But there are two problems with permission. First, it takes time. That’s time when you could be building things and learning. The other issue is that it requires you to argue for a process, an inherently amorphous thing. I’d rather use something concrete to help make my case. Of course, I’m not saying go bet the farm on design thinking. Start small. Maybe that means doing something on your own time. Maybe it means finding a project no one cares about or finding creative ways to work without an additional budget. Use those initial projects to get your feet under you. Once you have more confidence, you can take on some of the bigger projects.

Prototype

And finally, prototype! Getting permission is one way to minimize risk, but prototyping is another. The added benefit is that a prototype also helps you learn along the way. One of the participants in my group, prototyped her PowerPoint decks using post-it notes. (A tip from Duarte Design). You can also prototype the way you run a meeting, or connect with users. (Try buying someone coffee instead of a focus group?) Think of a prototype as a way to learn quickly with minimal risks.

As I said, there was plenty to take away, but those three seemed worth highlighting. A huge thanks to our Bootcamp alumni panel: Kaaren Hanson from Intuit, Doug Dietz from GE Healthcare, Bonnie Simi from JetBlue, and Stanford Professors Bob Sutton and Bernie Roth.

-- Tom Maiorana

Research as Design Resource Packet

On Saturday, April 2nd researchers from departments all across Stanford came together and explored the intersection between research methodologies and design thinking.  After exploring similarities and differences between these two approches the thirth six participants used design techniques to reframe and prototype their research. 

Here is the resource packet that covers the design thinking elements + worksheets used in the workshop:

Download RAD Resource Packet

 

(participants warmup for a brainstorm at the Research as Design April 2nd workshop)

 

 

Open vs. Closed Prototypes

Tom Maiorana is a Principal Interaction Designer at Intuit, as well as a Lecturer here at the d.school. He shared this insight on prototyping gleaned while he was co-teaching a workshop with Innovation Catalysts, a group of design thinking leaders and evangelists at Intuit.

Yesterday, while observing teams in our prototyping workshop, we noticed that the prototypes fell into two basic categories: open and closed. An open prototype is most common. It’s something which you hand over to the user and allow them to have a direct experience with the artifact or scenario. A closed prototype is one which the user is present, but doesn’t interact directly. (Watching a skit, a concept demo or a video are all examples of a closed prototype.)

So why does it matter? Because the methods you use to prototype will affect the types of feedback you’ll be able to get from your prototype. And each one has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Open prototype

An open prototype is one that involves the user in a direct way. It is typically something you could hand over to a user. With some minimal framing, “Okay, imagine you are a 21 year old about to purchase a car, this is a smart phone, start using it, and tell me what you would do.” From there you’ll hand over the prototype and allow the user to stumble through the process of using it. When you notice any pauses, confusion, delight, etc, you want to probe deeper on what is going on for the user.

When to use:

• Whenever possible. Almost. With the exception of prototyping a Point of View, if you can give a user enough context for an open prototype, do it.
• When you are testing specific features or functions.
• When the experience is visceral.

Tips for Open Prototypes:

• The principals of prototyping apply here, but here a few additional things to keep in mind.
• Frame up the prototype, then let go.
• Get creative to involve the user for complex scenarios. (What if they are a puppet master? etc.)

Example:

• Prototyping the Emergency Room Experience.

Closed prototype

A closed prototype is an experience that users watch, but won’t interact with directly. The lack of direct user interaction can make it harder to learn from a closed prototype. But it can also be quite effective. For instance, if you are prototyping a scenario that is too complex for the user to participate in a meaningful way, a closed prototype might be a better option. 

However, if you use this kind of prototype, it’s critical to keep the demonstration short so that you can spend as much time drawing out the user’s thoughts and feedback. If you only have a limited time with a user, it’s better to skimp on the demo and spend time talking to the user. (Hint, if the user is leaning back, you’ve probably got a closed prototype.)

When to use:

• When your concept is in a very early stage.
• When showing users how to experience the prototype would be too time consuming or confusing.
• When you want to experience the prototype yourselves. (As a team, etc.)
• When an experienced team member can give feedback. (Someone who will know what to look for, typically someone who has some experience prototyping.)
• When you have time to engage the “user/viewer” in a conversation.
• When you are prototyping a Point of View.
• When you can’t be in the same place as your users. (A video and phone call can work.)

Tips:

• Keep it short. The insights will come out in the discussion. Not while you are acting out the prototype.
• Get good feedback. That means, find out why they think your idea might suck.
• Frame it up. Let the users/viewers know that this isn’t a child’s dance recital. Brutal is good.
• Make sure one team member is dedicated to watching the user, not the demo. They will need to pick up on body language that the presenters/actors won’t be able to notice.
• Try getting them to participate. After they’ve seen it work, see if they can go “off script”.

Examples:

• Storyboards, Skits, Videos.
• Adaptive Path’s Aurora browser concept is a great example. 

Thanks to my fellow Intuit colleagues Rachel Evans, Wendy Castleman and Suzanne Pellican, who led the Innovation Catalyst Training and sparked the idea for this post.

Taking it home, Part I: doing and teaching

One of the most exciting things for us at the d.school is hearing how folks who we've interacted with are spreading design thinking in their own organizations.

That said, we were positively giddy to see folks from agile software development shop Carbon Five adapt our one-hour introduction to design thinking challenge and run it themselves with their own team. Carbon Five is known for nimble, efficient development for both large companies and early-stage start ups. They already use some of the principles of design thinking in their software development process, but they're interested in applying design thinking principles more broadly--working on what to build, not just how to build it.

A team from Carbon Five who'd spent some time with us at the d.school took what they learned and brought it home, running a design thinking bootcamp for their whole team. You can read about their adventure here.

At another exciting node in the d.network, graphic designer Christopher Simmons--principal at MINE--used another version of the wallet experience at California College of the Arts. He teaches a graphic design class there, and had his students dive right in on the first day with an experience in the broader world of design thinking. You can see more about his experience here.

Thanks for sharing, guys!

Stories like these are spinach to our inner Popeye, so please drop us a line if you got one you'd like to share.

Spring d.school class info session

Swing by the d.school on Thursday at noon for lunch and info session on Spring quarter classes. Teaching teams will be on hand to answer questions and chat. Two new classes are on tap:

Design for change: Poverty in America

and

Collaborating the future: Launching large scale sustainable transformations

We'll bring the food, you bring the questions!

Around the interwebs...

Lots of good readin' has been popping up recently, we thought we'd share a few interesting links.

Bill Moggridge, a former d.schooler who's now the head of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, has a new-ish blog with some fantastic stuff. The video interviews with Jimmy Wales and Neil Stevenson are worth a watch.

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist in the business world and prolific blogger, had an interesting post on the idea of "Square inch anthropology" that might be interesting for needfinders to noodle on. His whole blog is worth checking out.

@carlygeehr uncovered this amazing prototyping materials site, when you need more than popsickle sticks, tin foil, and marshmellows.

Finally, students in our d.leadership class got a crash course in teaching design thinking this weekend. On their second day of class, they taught a workshop for 100 folks who were interested in design thinking. One of the learnees, a Stanford post doc who's working with d.school startup WorkerExpress, reflected on the experience. We'll be hearing more from those crazy d.leadership kids soon.

If you've run across some good design thinking/innovation related news lately, feel free to share it in the comments section.

Two million people using d.light

Social enterprise d.light design, a company that started in our Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class, recently hit an important milestone: two million people around the world are using their solar-powered lanterns.

That represents a tremendous global impact, as d.light’s customers often don’t have electricity and lack access to safe, affordable sources of lighting.

Just over three years after the founders finished graduate school at Stanford and raised initial seed funding, d.light has grown to a 70-person multinational corporation with four international offices and distribution in over 40 countries around the world. These are significant milestones for the company, but their ambitions—to reach 100 million people by 2015—are even bigger.

Four of the five co-founders of d.light—Sam Goldman, Ned Tozun, Xianyi Wu and Erica Estrada--met in the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class in the fall of 2005. While the initial challenge was to develop a product related to water needs in the developing world, the team was more compelled by the need for lighting that they saw during a trip to Myanmar. The families they spent time with were using candles, which produce unhealthy fumes and present a serious fire danger. What the team saw isn’t uncommon: throughout the developing world, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and must rely on dim and dangerous kerosene lanterns or candles for light. During three months of initial prototyping, the team created a safe, affordable solar-powered lantern.

Solar lighting solutions for the developing world have been around for years, but the design thinking instilled by Stanford’s d.school has played a key role in allowing d.light to differentiate their products from the competition. The emphasis on customer-centric design has resulted in solutions in which every single aspect has been vetted and approved by potential customers, from the functionality to the design to the price. This ongoing feedback loop has also informed d.light’s second-generation product line, ensuring that customers continue to access the latest technology at the best possible price.

Deeply understanding their target markets and a value for constant innovation have also served the d.light team well in expanding marketing and distribution. Reaching extremely remote rural families in developing countries is extraordinarily difficult, but d.light has achieved unparalleled success, thanks to a strong network of diverse distribution partners and creative distribution strategies, such as recruiting rural entrepreneurs to serve as d.light sales representatives in their own communities.

“The passion and the design thinking initially forged at the d.school continue to drive the culture and mission of d.light,” said d.light CEO Sam Goldman. “Solar lighting is just the beginning; we see ourselves as a provider of renewable energy in the developing world, and we’ll continue to expand our product solutions and distribution networks in the coming years.”

You can read more about d.light here, in an article and video by fellow d.schooler and journalist Priyanka Sharma.

2010 Bootcamp Bootleg is here!

In what's becoming a holiday tradition at the d.school, we're releasing an updated version of the Bootcamp Bootleg, a working document that captures some of the teaching we impart in our "Design Thinking Bootcamp,” course. The guide outlines each mode of a human-centered design process, and describes a number of methods which may support your design thinking throughout the process.

We've updated the bootleg with new methods that students found useful this year.

The key to the bootleg is to take it out and make it your own! If one method isn't working for you, toss it. If it works, pass it along to another design thinker. We’re excited to hear how you've applied what you find in the bootleg.

Download the bootleg now.

Food for Good

A year ago, a group from PepsiCo came to the d.school to see how design thinking might apply to a new social business initiative they had begun to develop called Food for Good. They had already piloted a mobile summer feeding program but wanted to explore other avenues to bring healthy foods to inner city neighborhoods while creating a sustainable source of jobs.  Partnering with our Design Thinking Bootcamp class, students took on inner city nutrition as their final design project.

Several student teams developed prototypes around making fresh produce convenient, affordable and viable in inner-city neighborhoods.

This summer, Food for Good built on the insights student teams uncovered in the Bootcamp class.

“One of the biggest benefits of being a Bootcamp partner was learning the design thinking methodology. We’ve subsequently applied the approach to many of our ongoing innovation challenges,” said Matt Smith, Assistant Project Manager with Food for Good. “As soon as we got back from Stanford, we sat down with folks in South Dallas and shared the insights that the Bootcamp students had identified. Then we quickly put together a prototype and began testing.”

The Food for Good team engaged one of the neighborhood’s best-known cooks, hosted an event that included discussions about recipes and ingredients, and then offered kits for sale that included the recipes and fresh produce. “The discussion was really engaging and everyone enjoyed it, but no one wanted to buy the kits! It was a great learning experience; it was clear where we had missed the mark and we turned around a new prototype the next day,” Smith said.

Dozens of iterations later, six franchise-style produce stands are up and running as a test of the model’s viability. One of their key learnings from several rounds of prototypes is evident in how the produce is sold. Rather than pricing fruit and veggies by weight, everything is bundled and sold for $1—for example, 4 apples for $1 or a bunch of greens for $1. “One of the things we learned is that our customers shop with strict budgets and have to make a lot of mental calculations to decide whether they could afford to purchase something. When you sell apples for $1.39 a pound, the customer has no idea how many apples they’re going to get or how much they’ll be charged. But when you bundle them in $1 bags, you offer a clear value proposition,” Smith said.

The produce stand is just one of the ideas Food for Good is developing. Their mobile summer feeding program in Dallas and Chicago offers free breakfasts and lunches to children who are eligible for free meal programs during the school year, but who don’t normally have access to those same free meals during the summer. Nationally, 19 million children receive free or reduced lunch during the school year, but only 2 million of them receive meals during the summer. The problem is mainly a logistical one; meals are easily distributed during the school year, but when students are at home during the summer, many can’t access the free meal program. Partnering with Central Dallas Ministries, PepsiCo used its product distribution expertise to deliver more than 290,000 meals in Dallas this summer. They also piloted the program in Chicago with Catholic Charities, serving more than 30,000 meals. PepsiCo is looking to scale the program further next summer.

“As a team, our goal has always been to learn by doing,” Smith said. “Rather than designing the perfect solution, we wanted to begin making a difference quickly.  We had some success with the mobile feeding program but wanted to explore new territories. With design thinking, we’re able to prototype business models faster and more efficiently. It has had a huge impact on our ability to innovate quickly.”

Winter/Spring Classes Pitchfest is Nov 4 at 5:30PM

Calling all Stanford University Graduate Students!

Come to the d.school at building 550 for an info expo and pitchfest about our Winter and Spring offerings on the evening of Thursday, November 4, from 5:30 - 7:30PM

Preview classes of interest to you for 2011. We'll have a succession of elevator pitches of all the upcoming classes (that we know about), followed by an expo breakout with the teaching teams for you to learn more about specifics.

See you there!

 

User Testing with Kids: Lessons from the Field

Successful user testing requires a delicate balance of focus and openness - that was one of our greatest takeaways from the classes we took last year at the d.School (d.Bootcamp, d.Media, and the LDT d.Seminar, all awesome). Throughout the process of creating Motion Math, our learning game for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, we’ve user tested our game with kids with a narrow set of questions in mind while trying to maintain a beginner’s mind, open to all their explorations. What a user does with your product is more important than what they say; this is especially true with kids, who are not always able to articulate their experiences.  With Motion Math’s release this week on the App Store (http://bit.ly/motionmath), we wanted to share five key take-aways from dozens of rounds of user testing with kids aged 6-14 in homes and schools, starting with the humble paper prototype shown here.

1. KIDS GRASP TECHNOLOGY

One danger with creating educational games is that we all have some common sense about how to teach; this intuition can blind us to the ways that kids (and especially today’s digital natives) are different. To take one striking example, many young kids now expect all screens to be touchscreens; we’ve heard from many parents that their young children now pinch and tap the TV!  

Adults are more articulate about what they want in an interface, but often struggle in ways that kids never do; we’ve learned to be wary of adding features that adults ask for.  A great example is text instructions - kids get the symbolic hints whereas adults often prefer explicit language.

Also, kids are fantastic bug finders! If you want your game to be played upside down, sideways, and in ways you never intended, give it to a child. We encourage this creative testing by asking students to find bugs. In the rare ;-) cases that they do, we reward them with a collection of hand-picked bug stickers.  It's charming to watch them wear around a sparkly bug sticker on their shirts as a badge of their technical prowess.

2. THE DEEPER YOU LOOK, THE MORE COMPLEX YOUR SUBJECT MATTER
We decided to tackle fractions in our first game: we knew it was notoriously difficult for many learners, but didn’t comprehend its complexity before talking to kids. The fact that 1/2, 50%, 0.5, and 3/6 all mean the same thing is odd; at the same time “1/2” is very different from “1/2 of 2.”  Fractions can mean a distance on a number line, selecting parts of a group, parts of a whole, breaking something into parts, and many other physical metaphors, and competence in one metaphor doesn’t necessarily mean understanding (or even awareness) of another. For example, when first exposed to fractions in the classroom, kids don’t necessarily come home and start converting measurements in the kitchen. Games are unique device to show patterns among concepts because the game environment can be constructed in a way that surfaces these relationships.  As we start on new math topics, we’ll assume there are more wrinkles in the idea than we expect; the challenge is to surface this complexity and demonstrate patterns while preventing beginners from being overwhelmed.

3. SHOW, DON’T INSTRUCT (AND ITERATE!)
The part of our game that has undergone the most profound change is the introduction.  Even when testing our original paper prototype, we realized our unique game interaction would require some explaining: our game doesn’t rely on the more common interaction of tapping, but rather tilting.  In addition to novel gameplay, we also introduce a new form of educational content: placing a bouncing fraction-star on a number line. It’s potentially overwhelming.

Initially, we wrote carefully-crafted instructions: "Move the fraction star to the right place on the number line by tilting."  We added italics on the last word to really drive home the game mechanic, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. One day of classroom testing proved we had perhaps the most useless sentence ever written. Most kids didn’t read the instructions;  even those that did forgot them as soon as they moved to the next screen.  Words failed.  After many attempts and revisions, we settled on the current version: we introduce tilting by putting the player on an empty screen with nothing but a bouncing star and targets to land on. Some adults get confused, but 95% of kids immediately explore the device and figure it out.  Only after the game interaction has been mastered do we introduce the idea of a star holding a fraction.  We find some validation for this approach from education pioneer Maria Montessori, whose “auto-educating apparatuses” were designed to allow children to individually explore concepts deeply by leveraging their senses. “This makes it possible for the child to work by himself, and to accomplish a genuine sensory auto-education, in the visual perception of form,” she wrote. Our users are now able to understand the application controls without verbal clarifications.

4. MULTIPLY THE MOTIVATION
One second grader struggled to make it past the first level, and we expected her to stop playing. Instead, she bragged to her friend: “I got 6 stars!” and immediately played again. Minor bits of motivation can maintain engagement, so we kept adding different forms of feedback:  progress stars for each correctly solved problem, a cumulative score, new level indicators, bonus effects, and a game-over indication of overall progress – presented as a fraction, naturally. Different levels of positive feedback motivate learners at different skill levels.  At the same time, we didn’t want to create a game that overly congratulated our players or made victory too easy: that’s why we’ve made the last few of our 24 levels quite difficult.

5. DOUBT YOUR OWN AWESOMENESS
After working for many months, our natural bias was to love our game, and it was easy to go into user testing inclined to hear affirmation.  When we go into classrooms and the teacher announces that we are App developers testing a new game, the kids get very excited and put themselves on best behavior. (The Hawthorne effect is the psychology term that describes this phenomena.)  In general, we must remain skeptical about our customers’ reactions to the game despite their praise and enthusiasm.  More telling are the subtle indications of their liking, such as picking to play our game again rather than other iPhone games on the same screen. When a kid presses "Play Again" without asking for permission, they are showing real engagement.  They have found the game easy enough to begin, but they also believe that they could improve over their last performance, and when they play again over and over they are in a state of flow: continuous engagement.  This is an ideal state for maximal learning and enjoyment.

Just hanging out with children reminds us of our important role in maintaining their excitement about learning. With focused observation and questioning, and letting go of our own biases, user testing can provide the feedback and inspiration to create great learning products.

– Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein are 2010 graduates from the Learning, Design, and Technology program at the Stanford School of Education and Co-Founders of Motion Math. Their first game, a bouncing star fractions game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, was a finalist for the Sesame Street Workshop Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Innovations in Mobile Learning Prize. Motion Math can be purchased here for an introductory price of $.99. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal's Tech blog.

你好設計!

Design Thinking, at first a creative spark in Taipei, is now spreading through all of Taiwan thanks to students and faculty at National Taiwan University. 

Last September, d.school alum Hendrick Lee along with Design Thinking Bootcamp graduates Bowei Lee and Rebecca Kuei created a design thinking workshop for students at NTU.  They brought in d.school designer Adam Royalty, Jump designer Bruce King-Shey, and d.school alumni Jim Ratcliffe and Ben Grossman-Kahn to help plan and facilitate the effort.

Over the course of three days, NTU undergrads and graduate students learned design thinking by redesigning a multitude of experiences for the elderly.  Some groups focused on insights around the need of elderly to contribute in meaningful, unique ways while other groups explored what it might be like to create a bus where youth consult the elderly on modern topics.

The workshop could not have happened without the dedication and hardwork of many of the amazing NTU TAs.  These students are poised to lead design thinking in Taiwan.  As an example, two TAs are driving the Design for Change Taiwan contest.

Since the workshop, students from across Taiwan founded the NTU design thinking group.  They are working on presenting design challenges and competitions that will inspire students to design solutions for problems ranging from bicycle safety on campus to empowering indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan. 

mobile + africa

A contingent of d.school students recently returned from Kenya, where they spent two weeks working with Nokia Research Africa, and the University of Nairobi, developing health-related mobile applications. The trip was the culmination of months of work in connection with a new class at the d.school, “Designing Liberation Technologies,” which will be offered again in the coming academic year. 

“Designing Liberation Technologies” is (at least in its current iteration) an experiment in remote, user-centered design. Starting in April, Stanford d.school students from a diverse array of disciplines – including computer science, medicine, business, law, education – worked with computer science students at the University of Nairobi to identify the design needs of health care providers and low-income mobile phone users in Kenya. The students then developed prototypes of mobile applications to support delivery of health services in urban areas. In August, a group of students travelled to Nairobi to meet with NGO partners, test prototypes, and advance plans for the future.

It may seem surprising, but mobile phones are practically ubiquitous in Kenya, as in many other parts of the developing world.  Although relatively few Kenyans have heavy-duty, feature-rich smartphones like the iPhone, Kenyans make very sophisticated use of the technology available to them. For instance, it is not uncommon for Kenyans to own multiple SIM cards and swap them in and out of their phones as necessary to take advantage of favorable in-network and off-peak pricing structures.

In development and technology circles, it is now widely recognized that the adoption of mobile phones represents a sea change in the communications and computing capacity available to developing world populations. Call it “ICT4D” - that’s “information and communication technologies for development".

Amazingly, some emerging technologies that have been slow to take hold with consumers in the U.S. are already thriving in the developing world. Take mobile banking in Kenya: in 2007, Kenya’s dominant telecom Safaricom launched M-Pesa, an SMS-based payment system that enabled subscribers to deposit, send, and withdraw money from their pay-as-you-go mobile account. Less than two years later, by 2009, nearly 40 percent of the adult population in Kenya held an M-Pesa account, and the user base is still growing strong today.

M-Pesa was originally intended to be a tool for making safe and secure remittance payments from, say, an office worker in Nairobi to his family in the countryside, but M-Pesa has done more than revolutionize remittance payments. By replacing cash, M-Pesa has solved a nagging security problem that chilled all kinds of financial activity in Kenya - including savings.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of Kenyans do not hold a brick-and-mortar bank account in their name, and M-Pesa is quickly taking the place of cash-stuffed mattresses. According to a recent study by several American economists, three quarters of M-Pesa users it to save money, and many M-Pesa users say it is the most important savings tool they have.

Building on the insight that Kenyans are using M-Pesa to save, one of the three teams set out to build a better, user-centered mobile savings tool. Jacaranda Health, an NGO that delivers vehicular-based prenatal care and delivery referrals to pregnant mothers in underserved areas of Nairobi, was a natural partner. As it turned out, Jacaranda lacked a sustainable source of funding to support delivery of its services, and the d.school team had already spent much of the spring designing a savings tool for expectant mothers.

“Drawing on our own experiences, we observed that mothers are uniquely prone to put aside money for their children, and with the on-the-ground support of the University of Nairobi students and Nokia we confirmed that Kenyan women tend to be more invested in savings schemes than men,” explained d.school student Eva Hoffmann, ’11, a joint product design and human biology major.

To test their designs and learn more about the financial lives of low-income Kenyans, the d.school team led two days of interviews, discussion groups, and prototyping sessions with mothers in Nairobi. The activities led to some unexpected insights – for instance, that women are saving with a surprising degree of financial sophistication and discipline. Saving for pregnancy is a top priority for many mothers – and even though they may not have advanced tools such as dedicated savings accounts (or savings accounts at all, for that matter), they have found workarounds such as keeping paper ledgers of their M-Pesa activity to ensure that money they intend to spend on pregnancy is set aside.

To supplement general research about financial behavior, the team had the rare opportunity to do co-designing workshops with the mothers, having them compose texts they’d like to receive from a savings service and discussing specific features of the plan that would be most useful for them. Employing d.school techniques, the end users were able to dream up their own technology, and the d.school team is working with Jacaranda Health to translate these ideas into an actual service.

Other d.school teams that travelled to Nairobi worked on mobile-based solutions to pharmaceutical counterfeiting and water shortages. Team Pill Check designed a project to connect malaria patients with up-to-date information about drug availability and pricing; they spent their time on the ground researching the drug supply chain and talking to distributors to assess the viability of their idea. Meanwhile, team m-maji (‘mobile water’) met with water suppliers to chart out the next steps for their project, an electronic information system that will allow residents of the Kibera settlement to identify clean water sources in their community. The idea was met with enthusiasm from both vendors and buyers, and the team members, with technical help from the University of Nairobi, are getting ready to start programming their system.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the class was the relationship that was developed with the University of Nairobi: the students and staff have been invaluable partners in everything from initial needsfinding through interview translation and programming support. In early September, the d.school will return the favor, and host several of the Kenyan students for a week-long crash course in design thinking, and tours of several Silicon Valley companies.

--Authors David Rizk, a law student, and Eva Hoffmann, a joint Human Biology and Product design major, are both students in the d.school's Liberation Technology course.

d.school launches 2 new lines of d.search

The HPI -- Stanford Design Thinking Research Program announced the list of research projects it will support this year.  Two of d.school projects on that list will significantly push the effort to measure the impact design thinking has on d.school students:

Design Thinking Assessment Metric for Use in Education
(Shelley Goldman, Maureen Carroll, Leticia Britos, Zaza Kabayadondo, Adam Royalty)
This research will focus on creating assessment metrics for teachers of design thinking to use with their students.  

Developing a Design Thinking Evaluation System
(Bernard Roth, Adam Royalty)
This project aims to evaluate how students who experience design thinking apply the methodologies and mindsets learned to their studies and/or professions.

By incorporating the findings of this work, the d.school will be able to better evolve its education practice to maximize the impact it makes.

How are you using design thinking?

 

d.school Alum Signo Uddenberg is using what he learned in Design for Extreme Affordability to tackle a new project in Tanzania this summer. An engineering master's student studying sustainable design and construction, he's the co-founder of a start-up incubator for innovative farming projects developed locally in Tanzania.

The 2Seeds network, which started in 2009, launched a summer program with seven recent grads headed into the field in Tanzania this summer. Signo drew on what he'd learned in d.school classes in order to create a design thinking bootcamp of his own for his summer team, tailored to the 2Seeds project. Like a lot of folks, Signo had doubts about whether he was qualified to step into a leading/teaching role. Here, he talks a bit about how his experiences in Extreme Affordability, and Prof. Jim Patell, nudged him into "bias toward action" mindset.

The 2Seeds co-founders are a great example of a radically diverse team:  Stanford MBA James Meeks developed the idea with Edward Komba, the Canon for the Anglican Diocese of Tanga. Sam Bonsey, who's majoring in African history at Harvard joined a bit later, about the same time Signo brought his engineering and construction background to the project.

Their goal is to reverse the rural brain drain in Africa: bright, ambitious young people head to the cities to seek opportunities, while farming practices remain stagnant. 2Seeds currently supports three projects that seek to amplify small, successful experiments initially developed by local farmers in Tanzania. You can read more about them here.

As always, we love to hear what our d.alums are doing in the world, so drop us a line and let us know how you're using design thinking.

How to hack a z-rack

An icon from the earliest days at the d.school, the "z-rack" is a mindful hack that has literally transformed the way we work.  Scott Doorley and George Kembel originally modified garment racks to create inexpensive (and plentiful) dry-erase surfaces to facilitate and capture the process of being visual with ideas.  The z-racks unintentionally became excellent tools for partitioning and creating team spaces.  They have become core tools in creating our teaching landscape.

Check out this guide to how you can create them for your own space.

Working through partners, getting to market faster

The Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class has launched several internationally known start-ups (including Embrace, Driptech and D.Light.) But main route for student teams to get their life-changing products into the hands of people in the developing world is by working with NGO partner organizations.

Working with partners is the quickest way to market: it eliminates the need to create a business model and distribution infrastructure, so that students can focus on getting the best possible product to people who need it.

Professor Jim Patel, who founded the class, and Erica Estrada, who teaches the class and directs our Social Entrepreneurship Lab, discuss why this is such a critical route-to-market for students in the class:

One team that’s in the process of handing off its product to a partner for distribution is Drinkwell, a team from the 2009 Extreme class. They worked on how to add micronutrients to food, an unsolved challenge in places where food is processed in tiny batches without standardized equipment. Their partner, Project Healthy Children, was interested in enriching grain with some of the same essential micronutrients that are used in the U.S. and Europe.

The Drinkwell team went to Rwanda for a needfinding trip during their class to look for a place—like a local grain mill—where they might be able to add micronutrients to the food supply. But they found that the small grain mills, often run by a single person in a hut, used varied equipment and didn’t lend themselves to a standardized delivery of nutrients. In order to find another way they might intersect with the lives of people in the village, the students spent days with a woman from the village, noting where she went and what she did every day. They created a sort of a heat map where she spent time, and found that every day she made two trips to the village well. “That got us thinking that we might be able to do something with water,” said Brian Ng, a member of the team.

The team developed a simple device that can attach to a manual village pump, which doses a precise amount of water-soluble iron into the drinking water. Iron helps reduce anemia, a common but serious health problem. By the end of the school year, the students had a rough working prototype; they wanted to see it through to market but without dropping other projects and jobs.

“We knew this was something that could have a real impact on people’s lives, and when you’re in a place like this and you tell people you’re going to do something to help, they believe you and they trust you. We didn’t want to let them down,” Ng said. “But at the same time, there were other things that we wanted to be able to do.”

The students struck a balance. For the last year, the original team—as well as other volunteers and employees who joined after the class—have continued to work on the product. With the support of Project Healthy Children, the DrinkWell team hopes to deploy a pilot program in multiple locations in Africa in the next six months.

“It’s really important to have this avenue,” said Ng, who’s one of the founders of WENG Motors. "It allowed us to be able to move this forward, because a start-up wasn’t a route that was feasible for us at this point. Working on this has impacted everything I do: it’s given me a different lens on every other project I’ve worked on. It’s an incredibly impactful class.”

Design Thinking Reaches New Heights in Education

(Teachers demonstrate a prototype that helps connect millenniala)

Last week teams from the Henry Ford Learning Institute went through a 4 day design thinking workshop. HFLI believes in public schools in public spaces and currently has four schools across the country in public places such as the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and at an old Powerhouse in Chicago.  The K-12 Lab has worked with HFLI to integrate Design Thinking into their curriculum for the past 3 years.

As part of that ongoing effort, we offered professional development to leadership teams spanning all of their campuses.  The workshop kicked off with a two day challenge that helped deepen their knowledge of design thinking. These educators raced around the Bay Area interviewing millennials (born 1980-1991) at Google, Intel, Apple, Togetherville, to name a few, in an effort to redesign how companies attract and develop the next generation workforce.  One group, while driving back from an interview, elicited more information by calling friends, and by posting probing questions as their Facebook statuses. During the 20 minute car ride they got over 15 hits!

The final two days focused on how to bring these methods home.  The teachers tested prototypes of design thinking activities like the empathy skitch (spelled correctly) where students create observation scenarios for their peers with impromptu monologues, that clue onlookers into the inner thoughts and feelings of a participant.  The students that these teachers are returning to have already worked on problems like collaborating with homeless shelters, to develop ways to help homeless people transport their belongings.  The teachers are excited about bringing more design thinking techniques to their classrooms and further raise the impact their students are making.

Training Teachers in Design Thinking

(teachers testing anxiety buster prototype on a student)

The K-12 Lab hosted the 4th Annual Summer Teacher Training in design thinking.  We had a diverse group of educators from around the world with a breadth of experience ranging from kindergarten, to high school, to administration to non-traditional education such as museums and afterschool programs.  We challenged participants with the question: “how to improve the physical and emotional safety of youth in our communities?”  With the help of the ZAP! Camp students they prototyped innovative ideas such as a “Mountains and Mentors” camp and an online community that helps youth discover their passions. 

On the final day we had a fabulous “Panel of Doers” who shared their experiences implementing design thinking in their schools, which inspired a series of productive working sessions.  We are really looking forward to seeing how the participants in the Teacher Training Class of 2010 are able to transform education in the coming year!

-- Co Barry

Cooking with Space: Sweet Solutions

We get a lot of questions about collaboration spaces at the d.school (check our Facebook page for a recent example from a K-12 teacher who'd toured our space and wanted to know more about the tool we affectionately call a "sugar cube").

One constant about our space is that our needs are continually changing, from day-to-day and class-to-class.  A key to serving that flexibility is leveraging tools that make transitions from thinking-to-doing, from sitting-to-standing, as quick and easy as possible.  One perennial performer that we lean on regularly is literally a building block within our learning environments: the foam cube. 

These deceptively simple artifacts function not only as dynamic seats, but also as great tools for quickly building prototypes that otherwise would be difficult to achieve with heavier building materials.  People can literally imagine and create most any environment on-the-fly.  The success of the cubes in action has guided us toward an attitude of creating highly malleable spaces.

Here are the details on our "sugar cubes".  If you incorporate them into your space, ping us back with the who/what/when/how of your activities, so that we can keep learn with you. 

d.school K-12 Lab and Stanford School Redesign Network Team up to Teach 150 Education Leaders

                 Tamer Abu-Dayyeh, School Redesign Network at Stanford University

The d.school held a crash course in design thinking for 150 school district leaders from across California (Oakland Unified, Los Angeles Unified, and Pasadena were three of the 10 districts represented).  Their experience with us was part of a three day workshop hosted by the Stanford School Redesign Network's Linked Learning initiative and Connect Ed, that aims to make education more relevant to youth by creating student learning opportunities within their communities.

The d.school portion took the participants around the design thinking block by running them through a 50 minute design challenge and two 20 minute discussions on the d.school space and the mindsets embodied within it.  With an initial understanding of the process in place, they were then challenged to gather empathy on people related to one of the 5 key focus areas provided by Linked Learning.  From there the educators picked a composite character that represented a particular person and challenge within their district and brainstormed solutions for that challenge.  Finally the district teams sketched out prototypes and testing plans to implement upon their return home.  All this in 5 hours, including the biggest paper, scissors, rock tournament the d.school has ever seen (see picture above). 

Seeing the group work was inspiring.  Many participants were calling students or teachers on the phone throughout the process to continue to gather stories and insights about the particular topic they were tackling. One high school student said, "show me you care, and I'll show you what I know." Participants were eager to gain empathy and were struck by working in a human-centered way.

The energy in the room and spirit of working prompted some onlookers to say, "I wish the people in charge of my school district growing up would have been this into working creatively."  The K-12 Lab is excited about continuing to support the SRN work as they look to make a huge change in education.

Zero to Revenue in Six Weeks

Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta brought an idea to into our Launchpad class this quarter: why is the experience of mobile news browsing so bad? Both experienced IPhone developers and design thinkers, they set out to see what a user-driven experience might look like on a new platform, the IPad. Six weeks and dozens of cycles through the design process later, they released Pulse, which allows users to customize what sources they want to see news from, while offering a rich, interactive visual experience. Three weeks and more than 50,000 downloads later, it's the #1 paid app in the IPad's app store. During his speech at Monday's World Wide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs demoed it, calling Pulse "a wonderful RSS reader."

One key to their success has been the ability to make user-driven lemonade out of constraint lemons. How? They took the fact that they didn't have dedicated office space and turned it to their advantage, making downtown Palo Alto cafes their programming home base. Given the newness of the IPad, fellow patrons were curious about what they were up to. They turned those interactions into a chance to get a ton of on-the-spot user feedback, which they poured back into the design of the app.

How might you turn a constraint to your advantage?

Design thinking towards a new, more engaged journalism

2008 Knight Journalism Fellow Andrew Haeg took our Bootcamp class two years ago. Now he's back at American Public Media in Minnesota, applying a design-thinking approach to his work. He shares reflections with us below.

Twenty journalists stand in a small wooded clearing behind a community day care center in St. Paul. There are no deadlines today. No assignments. No "newshole" to fill. Just questions to ask and people to meet in a historically diverse and challenged neighborhood called Frogtown.

The journalists listen intently as residents step forth to talk affectionately of their neighborhood, Frogtown.

Soon, the scribes and producers break up into teams and spread out into the community.  It's gorgeous, 80 degrees, and we've got our walking shoes on.

This day-long experiment is part of a larger initiative to combine old-fashioned beat-the-streets reporting with the latest networked technologies. It’s also the latest effort in a budding campaign, early and imperfect, to apply design thinking to journalism. Both are what I hope will become a widespread, concerted response to the disconnections that have imperiled journalism and distanced journalists from the public they serve.

The reality of the modern journalist is, in practice, not that far off from any other cube-farm denizen: Work the phones, stare at your computer, crank out the copy. It’s not a stretch to blame the feed-the-beast, factory model of production for the commodifying of news, rising distrust among the public, a distancing of journalist from community, not to mention thin business models based on cheap traffic instead of rich engagement.

But take a moment and empathize with the modern journalist: She is under extreme pressure to ask questions she knows someone will answer succinctly and by deadline. There’s little time to wonder why, or ask why not, or to ponder the broader question: so what's really going on? There are shows to produce, stories to write, newsholes to fill. And surely we media consumers’ appetite for the new and novel is voracious. But yet, I suspect that (though they’d have a hard time articulating it if asked) extreme users among us (news junkies, constant listeners and the uninterested and disengaged) suffer from a certain information malnourishment.

So, here’s the design thinking challenge: how might we combine on-the-ground reporting with networked technologies to create awesome, revelatory journalism?

Seems a tall order. But we have the raw materials at hand. For the past seven years, we at American Public Media have been building a new form of journalistic audience engagement known as the Public Insight Network. The PIN, as we know it, is a way of doing journalism, and a way of thinking about journalism. Sources in the Network receive queries from journalists and Public Insight analysts targeted to them
based on demographics, past responses, interests, etc. All responses flow into a database, enabling better query targeting down the line. Even seven years old (eons in Internet years), and with 85,000 sources around the world, the PIN is in its infancy. Twelve newsrooms are Public Insight partners, and we expect to have implemented the Network in 30 by the end of the year—with prospects for substantial growth and technical development on the horizon.

With solid, adventurous work here, we can rapidly prototype and iterate new approaches to engagement and news coverage that make the best use of resources like the Public Insight Network, Hacks/Hackers, and the leadership of newsroom visionaries around the country, to purposefully meander (the design thinker’s drunken walk) towards a new age of engaged journalism.

And then there are news leaders—like design thinking aficionado John Keefe, senior executive producer at WNYC in New York, or Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Miami Herald, or Jonathan Weber at the new Bay Citizen, and principals the Knight Foundation, which funds our work as well as hundreds of journalism innovation initiatives around the country—who recognize that engagement is the key to the future of journalism, and who are doing the spadework so that a new/old kind of hyper-engaged journalism can take root. And there are fascinating new ventures like Hacks/Hackers (led by former Stanford Knight Fellow and d.school alumni Burt Herman) and an abundance of barcamps that are bringing journalists and programmers together to dream up new techno-social ventures to create more relevant, enticing forms of journalism.

But the success or failure of this work turns on how we answer a single question: How are we meeting the information needs of people, of citizens, and of our democracy? To adequately and rigorously explore this question, we need to deploy armies of design thinking ninjas to conduct in-depth interviews, to patiently observe people in their native habitats, so we can understand what it is we’re missing from our information diets. What’s the gap between what we say we get from the news, and what we demonstrate that we get from the news by what we do? What deeper set of needs does news serve, and how might we reinvent how we produce journalism to serve those needs? On a societal level, where is the evidence of information gaps, and how might we fill those?

-- Andrew Haeg
   Editor, Public Insight Network
   American Public Media

K-12 Lab Impacts Young Makers at this Year's Maker Faire

Once a year, inventors, makers, and creative souls from the Bay Area and beyond converge on San Mateo for Maker Faire- the worlds largest DIY event. (Think Burning Man meets County Fair meets Revenge of the Nerds). For the second year in a row, the K-12 lab was there to represent the d.school and teach design thinking! This year, the booth was centered in the Young Maker's hall, and participants were asked to take the "Designer Challenge". Using a mad-lib style Point-of-View framework, the kids who participated randomly chose a user (Sponge-Bob, Cookie Monster, Cinderella, a Mom, a Policeman, etc) and an action (Baking a cake, going to the moon) and brainstormed solutions to help their user accomplish that action. After choosing their favorite brainstorm idea, participants cycled to the prototype table and built a model of their design!

It was great to see kids engaging a introductory taste of the design process, and inspiring to see how quickly "Human (or Muppet) centered design" clicked with them! As one fourth grade girl told her brother who tried to join her at the prototyping table, "You can't start here- you have to get a user first and make something for them!". Another design that stood out came from a 6 year old girl who was trying to design a better way for Obama to go to the moon. In her own words, "I'll build an earth friendly spaceship that runs on pieces of chicken to help Obama go to the moon". On the back of the spaceship was written, "Yes we Can".

Design Thinking: Yes we Can!

Participants: Ben Grossman-Kahn, Ricardo Flores, Tony Schloss, Tiffany Tseng, Rachel Kalmar, Evie Kalmar

 

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d.2.0

What an amazing d.school Opening Day we had last Friday in our beautiful new building! We've taken a few days to recover from the madness and excitement of scaling our first peak, but the glow has not yet worn off. From the intense energy of the re-boot camp in the morning, the emotion and beauty of the afternoon's new founding moment and pinning ceremony, to the humor and celebration of Hasso Plattner's toast, the whole day was momentous and marvelous.

Bob Sutton's eloquent blog post captured a lot of the highlights.

A big thanks to everyone who came, and who sent us their best wishes and congratulations. For those who couldn't make it, or who haven't met us yet, we can't wait to see you at the next mountaintop!

The Better Alternative

Students at Northwestern University are organizing a design challenge you can enter, The Better Alternative Student Challenge.

Being sustainable doesn't have to mean making sacrifices. Make conserving water easier, more intuitive or more appealing than wasting it. Submit a 2 minute video presenting your idea. Our judges are Bruce Mau, Chris Flink from IDEA, Elizabeth Gerber, Don Norman and Cindy Tripp from P&G. There are three $1000 prizes for the best ideas, and the deadline is June 1st.

RED Lab brings Design Thinking to Research

The Research in Education and Design Lab (RED Lab) brought design thinking to the largest education research conference in the world, AERA. The RED Lab, a multidisciplinary group dedicated to understand how people learn design, is comprised of faculty, staff, and graduate students from the Stanford School of Education, the d.school, and Developmental Biology.

School of Education Professor Shelley Goldman and d.school K-12 Designer Adam Royalty ran a fast paced design challenge at the Design and Technology business meeting. By connecting with this network of fellow design researchers, we hope to create a thriving community of education design researchers.

Later in the conference, the RED Lab presented a poster documenting its effort to create a robust design thinking rubric, based on a performance based task following a three week math unit that incorporated design thinking principles. Many inspiring conversations followed and we look forward to collaborating with the design thinking research community.

 

NO Sustainable Products Today?!

There are NO truly sustainable products today!  This was a somewhat surprising declaration coming from business leaders in the sustainability arena like Adam Lowry of Method and Andy Ruben of Wal-Mart.  In the May 4 Sustainable Abundance Mini-Conference they were joined by Bob Adams of  IDEO and Albert Straus of Straus Family Creamery in discussing the fact that our entire industrial system is built on the assumption of infinite resources and must be radically redesigned to achieve sustainability.

A few of the key take-aways from the conference were:

Increased transparency is a reality for companies whether they like it or not and will drive greater focus on sustainability.  This is simply a result of today’s communication technologies and the trend will continue to accelerate.

To understand the sustainability of a product you have to take a whole-system view.  Andy showed a vivid example of a can of tomatoes.  The tomatoes were grown and canned in California but the metal for the can came from Korea, the spices came from Indonesia, and when you finished mapping the journey of every element, lines spanned most of the globe.

Through design and innovation it is possible to simultaneously improve product performance and sustainability.  Adam discussed Method’s revolutionary new laundry detergent that is smarter, easier and greener than conventional detergents.  Customers love the innovative new pump bottle and super concentrated formula that radically improves the laundry experience.  This is an important step forward, but Adam is quick to point out that a fully sustainable laundry solution would eliminate bottled detergent entirely.  Because disruptive change of this magnitude would be resisted by detergent manufacturers and customers alike we will have to get there in steps.

The short term focus of Wall Street makes it difficult to maintain the focus required to achieve breakthroughs in sustainability.  Method and Straus are both private companies and believe that enables them to be pioneers.

There was a spirited debate between Andy of Wal-Mart and Albert of Straus regarding whether sustainable and low-cost can co-exist, particularly in the food category.  Straus Family Creamery is a small, family-owned, organic creamery producing high quality dairy products with milk sourced from their own dairy and from two other local, family dairies.  Their focus on sustainability extends to all aspects of the operation. Straus enjoys strong and growing demand despite higher costs and higher prices than dairy products from the factory farming sector.  Andy acknowledged that a big company like Wal-Mart is somewhat baffled by how to source from small suppliers like Straus.  Looks like the challenge of sustainable food will have to be tackled in another conference.

-- Debra Dunn

How are you using design thinking?

There’s nothing we love more at the d.school than hearing how alums are sharing and spreading this way of working.

 

Joaquin Tirado Escobosa, a member of our 2009 bootcamp class, is bringing design thinking to the company he works for in Mexico. Sigma Alimentos is Mexico’s largest maker of processed meat and dairy products, and Joaquin is charged with sussing out innovation possibilities.

 

He started by running the wallet exercise with 10 colleagues from the processed meat division. The session generated so much excitement that he was asked to do a two-hour session with a multidisciplinary team including marketing, operations,  purchasing, and human resources people.  

 

“I was thinking: How am I going to do this with so many people in such a short time?” Joaquin said, before quickly coming up with the idea to video tape interviews with the kinds of customers Sigma Alimentos wants to develop new cheese products for: like his sister, a working mom.

 

“At first, people thought I was completely crazy for asking them to prototype something in 8 minutes, but it was great because they came up with some great ideas and really deep insights.”

 

One challenge has been convincing senior colleagues that spending time to develop empathy for customers would be worthwhile. “They feel like, ‘Come on, we already do marketing research,’” Joaquin says. One of the responses he’s found that resonates with his colleagues is anecdotes about how design thinking is working for bigger companies like Procter and Gamble or Bank of America.

 

What challenges are you finding as you try to bring this way of working into your organization? What's been working for you? Send your stories to theredphone@dschool.stanford.edu.

 

DIY student group designs for America

A student group that started at Northwestern University has been using design thinking in their local communities, looking for opportunities in the everyday lives of their neighbors. Design for America was started by undergraduates at Northwestern working with Liz Gerber, a former d.schooler who’s now a professor of Mechanical Engineering. The idea has spread to Dartmouth and Cornell.

“Students on campus tend to live in a bubble, it’s the same here at Northwestern as it is at Stanford. There are so many problems facing the people in the neighborhoods right around us, but we rarely get out to see that,” says Mert Iseri, a Northwestern student who helped found the chapter there. “We want to bring students together who are interested in using design thinking to create change in their own back yards.”

Mert’s interest in Design for America peaked when he went home to Turkey for winter break and realized he could use design to help solve an ancient problem:

If you’re interested in starting a chapter here at Stanford, or at another campus, contact designforamerica@gmail.com.

Design for America is also hosting a contest for designs that make conserving water easier than wasting it. The deadline is June 1, and the best ideas will win $1,000.

Check out their website, www.thebetteralternative.org, for more information.

Tour the new d.building

We are fiercely proud of the d.school's Environments Collaborative, which is just putting the final touches on our new building. Led by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, the group and its collaborators designed the d.school's new space in Building 550. Since the d.school began five years ago, we have moved about every 18 months. The new space, which is intended to be a longer-term home, draws on five years of prototyping concepts for how collaborative teams might work together in four very different buildings. 

"A few years ago (in the Sweet Hall days) we were trying to design our spaces to encourage students to move and change things," Scott Witthoft said. "Now we find that those lessons have been learned - d.schoolers do all kinds of crazy things with the tools we give them - and we have had to design in a few more constraints to make Buiding 550 work well." 

Check out the video above for a quick virtual tour of our space, and some of the learnings that got us where we are now. 

Now that building 550 is open, the Environments Collaborative will continue to learn from the way our space is used, and develop new prototypes for leading-edge innovation spaces. Scott and Scott will also hit the road to share some of their learnings and engage others working with space in similar, and hopefully radically divergent ways.

Reinventing 5th Grade

The K-12 Lab’s ongoing efforts are focused on engaging students and educators alike in design thinking, a methodology that can reunite families, solve community crises, and empower a generation. Because the K-12 Lab believes that students are more engaged and achieve greater learning when they have the opportunity to be innovative, creative, and collaborative, teachers become a key change agent in creating these opportunities.

Teachers and administrators who attend K-12 workshops at the d.school dive deep into the design thinking process. Participants work on real world design challenges and create design thinking activities that get tested with kids. The real payoff in exposing teachers to such immersive, transformational experiences, happens when they take design thinking back to their schools.

Marcy Barton, a fifth grade teacher at Corta Madera Elementary School in Portola Valley, California, innovated a groundbreaking Integrated Exploratory classroom last year. Instead of teaching her students about 16th century explorers with textbooks, she engaged them with a hands-on design project: Build a sailing vessel with limited materials that can carry 30 grams of weight. Through the design process of constructing a 16th century sailing vessel, students learned far more than standards-based social studies and science concepts. The results? A young crop of budding inventors who, when faced with moving precious cargo across a stormy wading pool, successfully discovered new friends and new talents.

She produced this video to share how her students approached the design challenge and the role it played in her curriculum.

Embracing Design Thinking: Reworking POV Pays Off

Developing a strong point of view can be one of the most challenging points in the design process. At the d.school we teach the creation of point of view statements after empathy work and as part of the define phase of the design process. Developing a point of view (POV) is what forces students, and designers alike, to become very clear about the their user, his or her needs and the insights they’ve gained about them through needfinding. A simple formula is USER + NEED + INSIGHT = Point of View.

Now that the d.school has a growing number of alums out in the world doing great work we've begun to cull their stories to highlight how the design thinking process contributed to their success. One of the first stories we followed is that of Embrace. Embrace began as a class project in Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability and is now a non-profit based in India. Developing a POV was particularly challenging, and their decision strongly shaped the future of their project.

We've used this video in classes to illuminate the power of POV and found it to be an effective tool. Try it with your team or in your class and let us know how it works.

Bill Moggridge to lead Cooper-Hewitt

If you've seen some mopey faces around the d.school recently, it's probably because it's dawning on us that we'll no longer have the pleasure of Bill Moggridge's company. But our loss is most definitely a gain for the design community on a national scale, as Bill is headed to New York to lead the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. 

Bill has had a key role in shaping what the d.school is today, both as a teacher and as a design thinker.

“He’s one of the most designerly people I’ve ever known,” says Bernie Roth, our acting faculty director. “If you were to take a group of people on a long hike, and you finally come to a bench where you can sit down, everyone else would sit down, exhausted. But Bill would be thinking about the design of the bench. It’s really his life. Someone like that is not replaceable for us. But his move to Cooper-Hewitt is a great thing for the design community as a whole. He’s always been a statesman of design, and this role really just formalizes and expands what he’s always been doing.”

Before leaving this week for New York, Bill chatted with us about some of his goals for Cooper-Hewitt, and his thoughts on the four levels of design.

Bill's tenure comes as Cooper-Hewitt is transforming it's physical space with a complete renovation of the Andrew Carnegie Mansion, the museum's home. He’ll also be working to transform Cooper-Hewitt’s mandate to provide resources and leadership for the design community.

We're so grateful that Bill has been a part of the d.school since the beginning, but we're even more excited to see what the next chapter holds.

Space as a Teacher, Space as a Tool

Here at the d.school we're just two weeks away from the big move to our new, bigger, more permanent home in the Peterson building. It’s going to be the fourth home for the d. in four years, so this is a chance for us to synthesize a lot of what we’ve learned about the physical environment impacts collaboration.

We’ve been fielding requests from far and wide about how we create space that supports collaborative teams working on creative challenges. One of the interesting domains where our learnings are being applied is in game design. NYU Polytechnic invited the co-directors of our Environments Collaborative for the inaugural lecture in their Transformative Speakers series. Students and faculty there are interested in applying frameworks and ideas developed by our Environments Collaborative to the development of a new Game Innovation Lab, the first phase of an overall campus transformation.

Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft shared lessons learned at the d.school as we've moved from our first 900-square-foot building in 2005 through two other buildings and on to our new, 14,000 square-foot home.

"What we've really thought about is: how can we make a space that allows people to transform it?" Scott Doorley told the audience in New York. "If you let people modify a space, it changes the posture of the poeple in the community from having or getting a space, to making a space. You have to make sure you leave room for transformation to happen, otherwise it won't."

After the lecture, Scott and Scott led a workshop where NYU students and faculty worked space prototypes:

 

Stay tuned for more hacks, frameworks, reflections and ideas from the Environments Collaborative crew.

Redesigning Philanthropy

 

Last week we were thrilled to have the chance to share the design thinking process with three of the nation’s most influential philanthropic organizations: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

 

The foundations are collaborating on solving a critical failure point in community college education: nearly 60 percent of students languish in the long developmental math sequence that they must pass in order to move on to a four-year college.

 

More than two dozen folks from all three foundations working on the community college issue joined us for a one-and-a-half day intensive workshop. Every time Our Short-Format Program team designs a workshop, they look for a juicy analogous challenge: a problem that participants can connect with, but that isn’t too close to their day-to-day focus. In this case, the challenge we designed was increasing blood donation by graduate students.

 

We were absolutely floored by the passion, depth and agility of these teams. Just 24 hours after their first interviews and observations, they’d presented their prototypes and were working on an even bigger challenge: how to take the design thinking process back to their own work.

 

“So often, policy fails because it doesn’t work for the people who are the end users,” says Vic Vuchic, a Hewlett Foundation funder and graduate of Stanford’s Learning Design and Technology master’s program. “My hope is that design thinking can help us to have empathy for students and teachers, and really connect with their needs so that we can develop innovate solutions that have a huge impact.”

Design of Objects --> Design of (Almost) Everything

Prof. Bernie Roth, one of the d.school's founders, spoke at the International Conference on Engineering Design last year. He shared his story of transforming from an engineer who thinks about objects, to one who thinks about people.

IDEO's Climate Change Video Challenge

 

If you've got a vision for what a human-centered sustainable future might look like and a video camera, you could end up hanging out at IDEO* with a check for $3,000.

IDEO and DESIGN 21 just launched a video challenge as part of its Living Climate Change Initiative. The initiative was launched last fall with a goal of extending the dialogue beyond policy and politics and toward inspiring, human-centered scenarios that create new possibilities for business and society. “Living Climate Change is an open invitation to designers and non-designers alike to think creatively about an issue that impacts us all,” says Jennifer Leonard, IDEO designer and co-editor of Livingclimatechange.com. “Our hope is that it will stimulate the kind of dialogue that creates community, supports optimism and inspires new choices.”

The video contest is open to anyone, and the judging panel will include our own David Kelley. 

* for a half day deep-dive workshop

 

Prototyping emergencies with a glass of water

 

Two students in our Transformative Design class came up with a fantastic way to prototype an emergency room situation that they couldn't test with real users. 

Shuqiao Song and Carey Lee were prototyping ways to make people feel less anxious while waiting to be seen in the emergency room. Patients often wait with no idea of how long it will be before they'll be helped, no information on how many people are ahead of them, or how their wait is being affected by urgent trauma cases that must be bumped to the head of the line. Shuqiao and Carey came up with a chart for waiting patients that showed how many people were ahead of them, and updated as urgent cases reshuffled the queue. They wanted to test two particular aspects of their prototype: "Would knowing your place in line be beneficial (versus not knowing anything at all)?" and "What are the effects of being de-prioritized when someone else has a more urgent situation? (such as the arrival of a prioritized ambulance trauma patient)".

But they couldn't test the prototype in a real emergency room without wading through layers and layers of red tape. So instead, they created an analogous situation: they rounded up friends and gave them several glasses of water, then controlled their access to the bathroom as an emergency room might control a sick person's access to a doctor. Their solution was a success, but it really highlighted the value of an ingenious analogy when testing a prototype. You may not be able to get to actual users, but you can find (or create!) a situation with a similar emotional impact.

Why Design Matters

d.schooler Diego Rodriguez wrote a great piece for Business Week on why design matters, and why companies and organizations should think of it as a process rather than an aesthetic. Diego's blog, metacool, is also a must read if you're interested in how design thinking is applied in the real world. 

Cross Cultural Design

Nearly 20 students from China are working with Stanford students at the d.school this week as part of a joint project in cross-cultural design.

The project kicked off with a workshop here at Stanford this week, then Stanford students will travel to Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing for a second workshop during spring break. This is the second year that cross-cultural design has been offered as a class at Stanford and PKU, it has expanded to include students from CAFA, one of the oldest and most respected fine arts schools in China. 

Throughout spring quarter, students from China and the US work together to tackle real-world design projects with corporate and NGO partners. Students from all three schools take a cross-cultural design class at their home university, then work with students from the other schools on team projects. The theme of the class this year is health and well-being, a rich topic for cross-cutural learning and collaboration. 

And, of course, what would a d.school class bonding experience be without Play-Doh? Students paired off to design new ways to eat each other's favorite foods, then shared their results:

 

Embrace at TED

Check out Embrace CEO Jane Chen's talk at TEDIndia:

The Embrace team started as part of the d.school's Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability class in 2007, where they developed an innovative infant warmer than costs less than 1% of a traditional incubator. Now a non-profit company, Embrace is piloting the product in India before rolling it out throughout the developing world.

d.fellows recomissioning

The fellows are at the heart of the growing, thriving d.community--which means that their roles are always evolving. We're excited to announce new d.roles for two fellows from last year, as well as the launch of new directions for our current fellows.

2008-2009 Fellow Erica Estrada, who co-founded D.light as a student in Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, is heading up a new Social Entrepreneurship lab at the d.school. The goal of the lab is to provide support and a community for entrepreneurs who are using design thinking to create social good.

Scott Witthoft has become co-director of our Environments Collaborative. He's currently designing and building prototypes for new learning environments in the Peterson building, where the d.school will be moving in March.

Our current fellows, Thomas Both and Jeremy Utley, finished teaching the Design Thinking Bootcamp class last month. It's our bedrock class for students, and our foundational teaching experience for d.fellows. The content of the Bootcamp class is always being refined, but Thomas and Jeremy worked with Dave Baggeroer to reinvent the teaching team model for the class. In the past, bootcamp has been the full-time responsibility of as many as 12 teaching team members. In keeping with the d.school's focus on scaling up, this year's bootcamp team prototyped a networked approach, where a leaner teaching team draws on a wide network of design thinkers to present content in their area of expertise. The result? An overwhelming success, both in the student experience and in our learnings about how the networked approach can work.

“We learned that if you want to excel, you have to have a diversified teaching team of individuals who compliment one another,” Jeremy says. “It wasn’t a function of any single person’s efforts as much a harmonization of the skills on the team."

Jeremy, a GSB graduate who worked at the Boston Consulting Group before discovering the d.school, will  now turn his focus to deepening our work with short-format programs and external partners.

Thomas, a 2008 graduate of the Joint Program in Design, spent a year exploring several aspects of design before coming to the d.school as a fellow. He interned in the engineering group at Smart Design consultancy, launched a product he designed, and had a piece of his art shown in a gallery. Post-bootcamp, Thomas is working on collecting and curating design thinking curriculum and making it sharable. He’ll also be looking creating processes for sharing teaching content.

“I think we’re really lucky as teachers at the d.school because the students who come here want to be here, and they’re really excited about learning the process,” Thomas says. “We have the opportunity to teach them something that’s potentially game-changing for them. It can change the way they go about their work, or even their life path. It’s exciting to think about how we can do that for a larger audience.”

Congrats to the fellows on their new roles!

Wired on Failing Early & Often

Wired Magazine's January issue is a survey of one of our favorite topics: failing early and often. Several of the stories highlight the value of a diverse team in creating breakthroughs (a.k.a. radical collaboration.)

In case you don’t have time to read the whole issue, here’s a highlight:

"The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions... the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves... These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism."

Steelcase Collaboration

Our Environments Collaborative, led by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, is hard at work on the Peterson building, where the d.school will be moving in March. It will be the fourth home the d.school has had in five years, and it's more permanent than our previous way stations. It's a chance for us to implement what we've learned so far about creating flexible, collaborative learning environments--at a higher resolution than we've been able to achieve in the past. 

Just like everything we do at the d.school, we've used design thinking throughout our approach to the new building. That means putting together the broadest, most multi-disciplinary group of collaborators we can find. One of those collaborators has been Steelcase. Dave Shipman, Chief Designer for the furniture maker, was hanging out in our prototyping room last week. We talked with him about the new building, and collaborating with the d.school:

d.school in the NYT

Stanford's d.school was featured in a NYT article on Sunday that looked at how business schools are broadening their thinking.

The human-centered focus of design thinking has its roots in the School of Engineering, but we welcome students from every part of campus because we believe the most innovative ideas come from multidisciplinary teams. GSB students and faculty have been early and enthusiastic adopters of design thinking.

Lately, we've seen a surge in d.school/GSB collaborations:

• George Kembel, our executive director, was invited by the business school to spend a few hours with their Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities (s356) class last week. Students in the class--who form their own teams and create real-world startups--were eager to participate in design thinking exercises.

• The d.school is also working with the b.school on prototypes for design thinking case studies, starting with a collaboration in Professor Jennifer Aaker's Power of Social Technology class last week.
  

• The Customer-Focused Innovation executive education program, a joint offering from the GSB and the d.school, thrived this year despite difficult economic times.
  

We're looking forward to more collaborations in the future!

Welcome Back: d.school Up and Humming Again

We have just wrapped up our first week back after Winter Break.  The d.school building and our classes are back in full swing.  'Extreme Affordability' has already completed their first mini-design-project to get students warmed up: the Monsoon Challenge -- build a device to capture the most rain water.  One student group's effort here:

Other classes are charging ahead too.  'Transformative Design' looks at how design can inspire and motivate behavioral change.  'Creative Gym' is a weekly workshop in which students can develop more of their creative side through the activities in class.  'Prototyping Change in Entreprenurial Firms' looks at applying the design process to organizational practices.

You can learn more about these and the other courses we offer here.

The Bootcamp Bootleg is Here!

 The d.school Bootcamp teaching team has curated a loose collection of the methods, modes and mindsets that Bootcamp students found most useful this quarter. The Bootcamp Bootleg is intended for people who've already had an introduction to design thinking, but who need some refreshers as they head out to tackle real-world challenges. The teaching team curated the collection by leveraging the work of many predecessors, drawing from material developed by d.school teaching teams and folks throughout the design world over the last five years. 

The key to the bootleg is to take it out and make it your own! If one method isn't working for you, toss it. If it works, pass it along to another design thinker. If you find a variation that works for you, tweak it and then tell us about it.  We’re excited to hear from you.

Happy d.thinking!

UPDATE 12/2010: A revised edition of the bootleg is now available -- with a dozen more methods and updates throughout.  Get it here.

 

>Download the Bootleg

 

The Bootcamp Bootleg by Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at info@dschool.stanford.edu.

Design For Giving Contest Winners Announced, Grants, Mentorship Program, and Research Starts!!

 

The girl in the picture above is part of a growing design thinking movement in India. Although her school is in a Mumbai slum, she took part in India's first design for social change contest.  Using a simple design-thinking framework, she worked with her classmates to develop lesson plans to teach the parents of slum children how to read and write.  And she just is one of the thousands of children who participated in this year's Design for Giving contest. 

The collaboration between the d.school's K-12 Lab and the Riverside School has been an incredible source of learning and inspiration for folks who are passionate about the potential of design thinking in schools across the world. This year, we worked together on the Design for Giving Contest— a competition that challenged children across India to imagine and implement solutions to social problems that concern them. Our challenge was to develop a simple yet compelling design thinking framework that schools across India could adopt. In the end, we asked children to do three things: Feel, Imagine, and Do. 

We were amazed by the flood of responses to this simple challenge—we received almost 1,500 entries in nearly a dozen languages. Now, we are thrilled to announce that the winners of India's Design for Giving Contest have been chosen. 

 

The winning entries came from a diversity of schools: from remote Nagaland and rural Rajasthan to major urban centers such as Hyderabad. Students took on a range of issues—from alcoholism in villages to the lack of basic teaching aids in preschools. Now that the winners are announced, we are launching the second phase of the project— building the design thinking movement in schools across India. To meet these ends, we are focusing on support, mentorship, and research. 

Support: The top 100 winning entries are now eligible for challenge grants from Disney. To qualify for the grants, the students must go back into the community and gather feedback on their projects. The teams will use this feedback to redesign their projects to increase impact and sustainability.

Mentorship: Any school that participated in the contest can take part in a design mentorship program that pairs student teams with professionals from the growing design community in India.  Indian design firms such as Elephant Design and Idiom have generously offered to pair up with schools to take their projects to the next level. 

Research: Harvard's GoodWork Project has taken up a research project involving the participating schools. The research focuses on the factors that drove participation: What are the qualities of schools and school leaders that took part, and how can we encourage and support these factors?

Next week, the K-12 lab's Adam Royalty and Jim Ratcliffe will join forces with IDEO's Sandy Speicher at Riverside School in Ahmedabad to design ways to help schools across India dive more deeply into design thinking. We welcome your thoughts, so put on your design thinking hats and get in touch!

Read descriptions of some of the winning entries here: Download.