Min Liu just graduated from Stanford
at the end of the winter term. Those of us at the Stanford d.school
were lucky to have her as a student in our "Clicks-n-Bricks" class
during her last term at Stanford, which among other things, did a
project for Wal-Mart focused on fueling their sustainability efforts. I
wrote a couple of posts about the class, including one describing the great group dynamics on our teaching team (which
included Debra Dunn, Liz Gerber, Michael Dearing, Alex Ko, and Perry
Klebahn), but Min just put-up a post that has more information about
what it is like to take a d.school class than any other place I know.
Check out her new post on Why the d.school Works.
Check it out, it not only has opinions, it has a couple videos from our
class field trip to Wal-Mart.com. Our students were invited to present
their work to a big group of Wal-mart.com employees after presenting
their projects -- and having them evaluated -- by 7 or 8 Wal-Mart
executives plus our teaching team the prior week. The first video is
of Carter Cast (CEO of Wal-Mart.com) and I setting the stage for the
presentations and the second is of Min's group doing their presentation
on how to get Wal-Mart.com employees more engaged in their
sustainability efforts.
Min was kind enough not to talk about all the mistakes we made as a
teaching team, as we worked under massive uncertainty and time
pressure. Things came out well in the end, but the creative process is
usually pretty bumpy, and this class was no different. Here are some of
the nice things Min said:
The class gave me the breadth to do hard out-of-the-academic element
projects. For example, designing a sustainability project within a
large organization can't solely rely on theoretical foundations of
organizational behavior. My team and I interviewed the Walmart.com
folks, talked to various individuals outside Target and Whole Foods who
were passionate or apathetic about green, developed a point of view for
our subjects, and came up with a cool solution based on our
observations and prototypes. And like no other department I've
experienced, we got access to the d.school 24-7 and free food and
drinks all the time......
Personally, my last quarter at Stanford was the best because I learned
that the process of doing what I love (finally!) is so much better than
living up to some abstract expectation even though it is, by
convention, the best. Sure, the realization was a good part done by
myself outside of the d.school, but it was d.school's welcoming,
innovative, and incubative environment that helped me realize that the
riskier and gutsy-er a path is, the better.
Of course, Min's comments warm our hearts. It is the kind of thing
that keeps us going when all seems dark and messed-up, and why we are
lucky to work at place like Stanford that allows us to do such crazy
things, to take risks in our teaching and research, just as we press
our students to do in their projects.
written by Professor Bob Sutton
