d.school news

The Edible Balloon; d.school eats nouveau!

On Friday May 30, the d.school hosted Chef Ben Roche, of Moto Restauraunt in Chicago, for an interactive design exchange. He showed us the edible balloon technique, and aliens landing on our plates. The participants responded with levitating food, popsicle dinner, marshmallow-cayenne surprise, and a brand new take on the prairie oyster, among other nouveau eats. Chef Ben kept telling us he wasn't a designer. We beg to differ. Stay tuned for more Design Exchanges from the d.school.

d.school is Developing Ambidextrous Tendencies

Congratulations go out to the readers, writers, and staff of Ambidextrous Magazine, which launched its ninth issue "Developing" last night with a party hosted by the d.school. It also happened to be the first really big gathering in our new space at Building 524. We think it was 'the joint,' and we predict a few more fiestas before our final move to the Peterson building eighteen months from now.

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

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

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

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

Creating Infectious Engagement Conference, May 1

Where the Rubber Band Meets the Road

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

Splash Landing! Extreme Affordability hits the water running.

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

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

Congratulations to the K-12 Lab!

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

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

Agile Aging, Mobile d.school

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

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

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

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

Winding up the Quarter...with a Twist

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