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.

New d.school Fellows for 2008-2009!

Introducing the d.school Fellows for 2008-2009, Erica Estrada, Joel Sadler, Scott Witthoft, and Corey Ford. After an extensive process of applications, multiple interviews, meet-and-greets, and heart-to-hearts, we are so pleased and proud to announce all four of our new fellows for this coming year, chosen from a crowd of truly amazing candidates.

In the past 24 hours, we have wrested a two-sentence biography from each of them, and you can read them below. Congratulations and welcome to the team!

Erica Estrada is from Texas if she's in California, and from California if she's in Texas. A Stanford Mechanical Engineering and Design for Extreme Affordability alum, she's spent the past year traveling the world with her trusty travel sheets, lighting up unnelectrified villages with LED lights as a product designer and co-founder of d.light design.

Joel Sadler came from a childhood building potato cannons in Jamaica to a mechanical engineering degree at MIT where he fell in love with design and the power of human-centered creation. After a making vow to avoid cold weather he has since explored design in various industries, including in medical devices and consumer electronics. For the last year he has been pursuing a masters degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford.

Scott Witthoft arrived in California by way of Tucson, AZ, St. Louis, MO, and most recently Austin, TX. Beyond understanding the magic of Thursdays and Saturdays, Scott spent his time in the field of forensic structural engineering.

Corey Ford loves a good story, adventure, creativity, and his wife. Before Stanford business school, Corey led the production of 17 films for the PBS public affairs series FRONTLINE, where each film allowed him to continually quench his desire to discover the world by immersing him in new subjects (from terrorism to the music industry), sending him on adventures (from riding around with gang cops in LA to tracking down a mountain lion), and introducing him to people from all walks of life (from interviewing a struggling truck driver to taking a dead drop from a high level government official on a dark DC street corner).

Recent Raves on K-12 Efforts from Inter*Action

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.

The d.school goes (even more) global! Prof. Bernie Roth receives honorary doctorate in Paris

Although Bernie might tell you that the most interesting thing about this picture is the wonderful artwork and decoration on the walls in the background, we beg to differ. While the rest of us were making our ways home for the Thanksgiving holiday, Bernie Roth was suffering though those embarrassing moments in a doctoral degree presentation when the presenter spends 10 or more minutes enumerating all of your excellent qualities and fantastic discoveries before bestowing important honors on you.

Jean-Claude Guinot, of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie–France's premier scientific University, which bestowed its honorary doctorate on Bernie on Nov. 21–says of Bernie, "This great mind is not only incredibly modest, he is also a sharp-eyed humanist, who weighs up the consequences of technological developments for society." Bernie's honors have stemmed from a career of revolutionary work in kinematics and robotics begun some time ago, which has generated entirely new disciplines and work for a whole host of scientists and engineers.

Prof. Guinot also described Bernie as "an exceptional teacher who has the ability to pass on his knowledge and enthusiasm, not only in his usual role as a professor, but also by devising innovations to aid problem resolution through modern creative concepts." For those of us who have had the opportunity to work with Bernie and his modern creative concepts, we think his next honorary degree may stem directly from there.

Extreme Affordability Returns

Jim Patell and David Klaus, instructors of Entrepreneurial Design for
Extreme Affordabilty, recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia.  They
spent a week in the country meeting with the partners that will be
sponsoring design projects for the upcoming Winter-Spring course.
This year's projects will be in the areas of irrigation, cooking,
agricultural harvesting tools, devices for the disabled, and local
manufacturing operations.  For more information about the course and
this year's partners, check out extreme.stanford.edu.

d.school adventures around the world

Current d.school fellow David Klaus recently returned from a summer in Africa and Asia, where he set up partnerships for the coming year's Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class. In the winter and spring, the d.school will be partnering with several of these organizations to design products and services for the world's poor. The list of potential projects is more diverse than ever, including irrigation products for rural farmers, wheelchairs and prosthetics for victims of war and disease, energy solutions for affordable (and sustainable) lighting and cooking, new tools for the care of livestock, "entrepreneur kits" to help street children generate income, and innovative business models to help the poor access credit, to name a few. During the summer, David kept a travel blog with more details on the partnerships, and a whole bunch of entertaining stories about his adventures as a designer in the developing world. You can check it out at dpklaus.blogspot.com.

VPs of Design

d.school Associate Consulting Professor Perry Klebahn (who in his other day job is the CEO of Timbuk2) is mentioned in this article about design for business in BusinessWeek:  Wanted: VPs of Design

A B-School All-Star at the d.school

Our very own Bob Sutton was named by BusinessWeek to their "B-School All-Stars" list.  BusinessWeek calls it "... a look at 10 B-School professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond the halls of academia."

Also, check out the related article in BusinessWeek: Powerful Profs

Way to go, Bob!

d.light wins the DFJ Venture Challenge!

Great news from the d.light team! This group of d.school alumni from last year's Design for Extreme Affordability class have taken their project the next step, starting a company around their d.light product. Yesterday, they got a huge boost, winning the DFJ Venture challenge to the tune of $250,000. Congratulations!

Why the d.school Works

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

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