Chris Flink
Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school
Chris has been immersed in a world of sketching, foam boards and design reviews from the very day he was born. For more than 30 years, his parents ran a small design consultancy in New York City that focused on brand identity, consumer packaging and other graphic endeavors. Family dinner conversation often touched on the subtleties of typography, strategic positioning, and grouchy Fortune 500 clients.
Chris’ rich experiences at Stanford have helped him develop a broader approach to creative opportunities that integrates design, engineering and business perspectives. Degrees from Stanford’s Engineering/Product Design program and from the Graduate School of Business, as well as years of collaborative teaching, have nurtured an ever-expanding view of what it means to be a designer.
For the past decade, Chris has worked at IDEO, where he currently co-heads their largest practice, Consumer Experience Design. While he was initially attracted by the cool stuff he could create there, he’s since learned that a truly great project is defined less by what one works on, but instead by whom one works with. This simple truth informs his every decision these days and is the reason he is so committed to the dschool.
Before joining IDEO, Chris was an independent inventor and also gained experience at a consulting firm in New York. He successfully patented and licensed a few of his own goofy inventions, including an ergonomic shopping basket, and contributed to the designs of clever medical and consumer packaging systems. Any royalties he still collects are quickly spent on family vacations and hilarious outfits for his remarkably advanced baby girls.
Though Chris remains engrossed in the world of design and consulting today, he’s grateful that his wife helps keep his rants about clients and/or typefaces to a minimum at the dinner table.
