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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.
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.
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.
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.
