d.school news

Biodesign Fellows Complete d.Bootcamp

The eight 2009 Fellows from the Biodesign program completed their d.school Bootcamp today.

The Fellows came in with the energy and desire to learn the d.school design process, and to see how it could augment their own innovation methods.  They worked through a process of gaining empathy, synthesizing information to build a strong point of view, ideating, prototyping, and testing those prototypes with users.
Through the completion of a design project to redesign an aspect of the Stanford campus exercise experience, they practiced the whole process firsthand.  The workshop culminated in two well-crafted presentations showing their process through the project and their results.

Over the next year the Fellows will work with professionals in the Medical Center to generate innovations in the cardiovascular space.

Congratulations on the work the Biodesign fellows did and the engagement they brought to the workshop.

Arts Intensive Teams Noodle on Ramen Experience

Let me give a testimony to what Stanford undergrads can do when we have their undivided attention. We are blown away. The Arts Intensive students are massively engaged. After a week of design thinking skills-building culminating in a one-minute movie festival, they’ve launched into their first major team project, redesigning the instant ramen experience. We’ve done this project before, but always as a solo experience, and it’s fantastic to see the kind of energy that teams bring to it.

They met their teams on the train to San Mateo, walked to the mystery launch site (the delicious ramen restaurant Himawari!), and got their challenge. They dove right in with an intense exploratory conversation with the owners, servers, and patrons over lunch. The students then fanned out across San Mateo to observe and engage strangers in needfinding interviews. Follow the action on Twitter at #darts09.

d.school Arts Intensive Underway

Undergrads finally have a toe in the door at the d.school! Thanks to the Stanford Arts Intensive Program, we've got 16 students and two assistants jamming on design thinking skills and projects for two and half weeks just before the start of Autumn quarter classes. We couldn't be more thrilled. It's a small start, but let's just say we see the seeds of greatness here....

NSF takes over the d.school! (for a few days...)

The d.school is thrilled to be hosting the final of four NSF funded workshops on Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Education. Highlights so far include an inspirational talk by David Kelley, introduction vehicles with Tina Seelig, and how to get into high security hospitals with just a paper name tag by Bernie Roth. See if you can spot a few interesting name tags above. More pics at flickr.

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.

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.

Cooking with Gas

During the week of November 11th, the d.school hosted an executive education program in conjunction with the Graduate School of Business. The participants of “Customer Focused Innovation” spent the mornings in lectures at the b-school, and the afternoons immersed in design thinking at the d.school.

Nearly forty executives from a diverse group of companies spread across four continents took on the timely challenge of redesigning the gas pump experience for ARCO brand service stations. After a teambuilding warmup competition changing the tires on a NASCAR racer, participants went deep into interviews and observations on site at gas stations—some gaining access to interviewees by washing their windshields as they pumped! For the next two days the executives synthesized all of their notes and observations into a working point of view, brainstormed, prototyped, and showed their ideas to real users in order to iterate their designs.  Finally they got to show off their teamwork to high-level representatives from BP, who evaluated the refined prototypes declaring, “It's really humbling that in four days you can describe what our customers think.  We have been working there for 20 years.”

For bigger, better information on the whole shebang, check the stories in it at out Bob Sutton's Work Matters blog.

Customer-Focused Innovation

The d.school and Stanford's Graduate School of Business recently teamed up to teach an executive education course called Customer-Focused Innovation.  The experience of the course was designed to pair theory and action in a way that would help participants be able to know and do upon returning to their respective organizations.  As Bob Sutton talks about the class:

We became quite enamored of this idea of “clean” innovation models for the morning sessions and the “messy” process of doing creative work for the afternoon sessions. We liked this approach was that it models how effective organizations do innovation: traveling between rigorous (if somewhat sanitized) theory, evidence, and case studies and the (more messy) challenges of actually identifying, developing, and trying to test real ideas with real customers

Read more about the class -- and all the talented people who made it happen - on Bob Sutton's blog.

A family of design thinkers - Aravind Eye Hospitals

The d.school had a fantastic group of vistors from Aravind Eye Hospitals, based in Madurai, India, this morning. An amazingly ambitious and successful non-profit whose mission is to eliminate unnecessary blindness, Aravind has achieved a measure of efficiency in opthalmic surgery unheard of in more resource-rich nations. With no outside funding, they have innovated the process and products involved in cataract surgery to such a degree that they have reduced the cost of cataract surgery to $10 per patient, and they perform 5% of all these surgeries in India with less than 1% of all the opthalmic resources there.

They are also adept at exporting and sharing their unique knowledge of efficient and innovative surgical techniques and hospital management processes with residencies, workshops, partnerships, and publications.

We at the d.school were so excited to be able to meet with them and share ideas about how human-centered approaches to important problems can produce tremendous innovations with a positive and lasting global impact.

Check out Pavithra Mehta's film "Infinite Vision" as well, which tells the story of this amazing institution and it's founder.