Fast Company has a nice article this month about a recent exercise in design thinking experienced by the staff of New York's WNYC.
Executives from WNYC and PRI spent some time hanging out at the d.school learning about design thinking by doing design thinking. The fruits of their new skills and approach are documented here:
Startup Radio Show The Takeaway Recreated the Morning Edition
Take a look over at Stanford's Inter*Action publication, a quarterly that focuses on Stanford's "myriad efforts in multidisciplinary research and teaching." The Winter 2008 issue has a great story on the Nueva School Innovation Lab project taken on by the K-12 Lab this past summer. And in general, Inter*Action always has the kinds of stories that are right up our alley, about people from different disciplines taking on the challenge of radical collaboration.
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.
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.
The d.school's first major venture in the world of K-12 education opened this week at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. Called the Innovation Lab, the project is a 3500 square foot space where students in the K-8 school will develop their design thinking skills. The project cycle was rapid with needfinding in April and May, conceptual prototype in June, and full-scale prototyping at Sweet Hall in July. July's prototype sessions brought 20 kids a week to campus and deeply informed everything from how to brainstorm with 1st graders, to how high to build the tables. The team also conducted a 3-day teacher workshop with Nueva faculty where teachers reported they rediscovered the importance of play and one was quoted as saying, the Innovation Lab, "is not just a space, it's a movement."
The project was led by Scott Doorley, Alex Ko, Kim Saxe, and Susie Wise and included the design of the space, furniture, curriculum, and program. Coaching support and prototype development will continue through the school year and work to take the curriculum to Stanford's East Palo Alto Charter School has already begun.
Thanks to the amazing K-12 lab members who made it happen: Ugochi Acholonu, Cathy Chase, Rich Crandall, Jonathan Edelman, Elysa Fenenbock, Karin Forssell, Hillary Freeman, Yuseke Miyashita, Maryanna Rogers, Adam Royalty, Andrew Salverda, Sandy Speicher, Daniel Steinbock, Andrew Taylor, Scott Witthoft, and Natalie Wozybun.
Earlier this quarter, and after just two weeks of work, CIA-KGB
students launched their solutions to help Mozilla attract and retain
users of Firefox. Actually, it wasn't really two weeks -- it was eight
working days and four weekend days. As you'll see by clicking through
on the URL's, below, each team of four students accomplished an
incredible amount of work. When was the last time you went from zero
knowledge in a subject area to putting something real and working in to
the world in just two weeks? While working the equivalent of three or
four other full-time jobs?
Here they are -- check 'em all out!
It's important to note that these were only a launch and not a final deliverable. We've been tracking the progress and performance of each project over the entire quarter.
BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum has written some very thought-provoking posts recently about the state of design, design thinking, and education.
In his first post, Bob Kerrey Gets Innovation Right at The New School and Parsons, he says that "Design thinking is seen as the integrative solvent that brings together the programs through a powerful methodology that solves a myriad of problems. It's the same perspective as Stanford has in its new d. school -- the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design."
And then there's his second post, Are Designers The Enemy of Design? It's definitely worth a read, and is very though provoking. In it he makes a distinction between the world of design and the world of design thinking. We'd love to hear what you think of it, either in the comments section on this blog or at Bruce's own blog.
Congratulations to the folks at Ambidextrous Magazine! The first issue of a new volume has hit the newsstands and internet, and a launch event is in the works for December 14.
An early project of the d.school, Ambidextrous is an independent, student-run design magazine that takes a broad view of the nature of design. (To see how broad, take a look at Wendy Ju's pictures of where they stand in the continuum between the pragmatic and romantic accounts of design.) Among some great tips on dating and a mechanical dissection of record players, Issue 5 "Picking Things Up" also includes interviews with d.school faculty member Bernie Roth, silicon valley design luminary Hartmut Esslinger of frog design, needfinding expert and Stanford professor Michael Barry, and a back page by our own Larry Leifer.
Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome.
Moggridge and his interviewees discuss why a personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.
The entire book is available as dowloadable chapters online, but the printed copy is a beauty.
"A valid process... flows from designers' deep understanding of both user and context, and leads them to ideas they believe in but can't prove."
In October's Fast Company, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto writes about "Tough Love," the need for business to "outimagine the competition" by incorporating design thinking into their innovation process.
