Classes 2011-2012

If you are Stanford graduate student, we encourage you to attend the d.school’s Spring classes info session on Thursday November 23, 2011, Noon-1PM, to learn more about the classes listed below.

Fall Quarter 2011

The Designer in Society

Design Thinking Bootcamp: Experiences in Innovation and Design

Winter Quarter 2012

Transformative Design

d.science: Designing for Science

d.leadership: Advanced Coaching

Designing for Sustainable Abundance

d.media: Designing Media that Matters

Creative Gym: A Design Thinking Skills Studio

StoryViz: Storytelling and Visual Communication

Design Garage: A Deep Dive in Design Thinking (2 Qtrs)

Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability (2 Qtrs)

D-Lab: Design for Service Innovation—Financial Services

D-Lab: Design for Service Innovation—Health Care Services

Spring Quarter 2012

Social Brands

Improv & Design

Cross-Cultural Design

From Play to Innovation

Creativity and Innovation

d.compress: Designing Calm

Designing Liberation Technologies

Launch Pad: Design and Launch Your Product or Service

Innovations in Education: Redesigning the Teaching Experience

Collaborating With the Future: Launching Large-Scale Sustainable Transformations

In this hands-on, team-based, multidisciplinary class we will tackle real design challenges with a radically human-centered approach, increasing sustainability hand in hand with abundance. Winter quarter will be devoted to food and sustainability. We will apply the design process to two real world food-related challenges, considering environmental and economic sustainability as well as physical and emotional health and wellbeing.

Students will benefit from close interaction with the teaching team, support from project sponsors, and the varied perspectives of a wide range of guest speakers.

What students have said about Sustainable Abundance:

“Fantastic! You challenged us to step WAY outside our comfort zones and really look deeper. This skill is useful not only for school, but for life as well.”

“A mind-opening class and one I often talk about to others about the advantage of coming to Stanford.”

“Absolutely wonderful course. I highly recommend it to others. I learned so much about the design process and about sustainability which I will really take with me. My retention of the material in this class is head and shoulders above any other class I have taken here so far.”

Applications for Winter Quarter are due December 2. Send your resume and a brief statement of why you should be in the class to ddunn@stanford.edu and nitzan.waisberg@stanford.edu. Please note any other d.school classes taken.

Teaching Team
Debra Dunn, d.school
Nitzan Waisberg, d.school

Build your creative confidence and sharpen your design thinking skills. Train your intuition and expand the design context from which you operate every day. This experimental studio will introduce d.school students to fast-paced experiential exercises that lay the mental and physical foundation for a potent bias toward action, and a deeper knowledge of the personal skills that expert design thinkers utilize in all phases of their process. Exercises will be offered by a number of the d.school’s most creatively confident design thinkers. Apply at the first day of class.

Teaching Team
Grace Hawthorne, d.school
Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, d.school

ME 316B/C, 3 Units, Letter grade
Tues 7:00-10:00pm, Design Loft (Building 610) Room 619
Enrollment limited to 40
Students must make a two quarter commitment
Contact: wburnett@stanford.edu

Design Garage is a class for anyone who wants the experience of developing a real product, service, or experience, using design thinking as the method, and utilizing the resources of the Loft, the graduate Design Studio, and the Masters students in the Design program. Projects range from the entrepreneurial to the socially conscious and are selected and driven by student teams. This is a two-quarter long commitment; a deep-dive into design process, radical collaboration, and making things real using a project-based learning format. This class provides a unique learning opportunity that includes a mini boot camp in Design Thinking (first week, Winter), an immersion into design culture (the Loft), and a thorough experience with rapid prototyping, ideation and need finding. Students will have the experience of working with an outside client/affiliate and making their project real, either through a market-based solution or through a socially-focused non-profit enterprise.

The class will meet every evening in the first week of Winter quarter, from Tuesday through Friday at 7:00PM for a mini-Design Bootcamp. Students must attend this boot camp in order to participate in the class.

Students wishing to apply to the class need to submit an application (available by emailing wburnett@stanford.edu) and a current resume. Students must list their first and second project choices on the application. Applications are due by Friday November 18th. Students will be notified of admission during the week of December 5th.

Teaching Team
David Kelley, Graduate Program in Design and d.school
Nicole Kahn, IDEO and Graduate Program in Design
Bill Burnett, Graduate Program in Design
Perry Klebahn, d.school

SOCIAL BRANDS

Social Brands is a class where students will get a chance to craft and implement a social experience around a brand and get tips from world-class experts in the field.

As savvy consumers are increasingly participating in brands rather than merely receiving their messages, how do leading organizations stoke conversations, co-create experiences and stories, and build engaging relationships with consumers? Moreover, how do they harness social media to build a brand, and empower employees and consumers to share these brand stories with others?

Social Brands is a hands-on, project-based course that will draw brain power from the GSB, School of Engineering, and other Stanford graduate programs to collaboratively and creatively explore these questions. While we examine various inspiring examples of social brands, we will find that the rules are yet to be written. This emerging genre of social commerce and marketing is the “Wild West” and students working in mixed teams will be challenged to design and launch their own social experiments to form their own hypotheses.

Assignments will push student teams to audit a brand, focus on a strategic goal, and design a social interaction that invites people on campus to participate in an extraordinary personal experience with that brand. Teams will then capture this experience in short videos and compile them into a story — one that highlights the brand experience they orchestrated, its impact, and their key learnings.  This course will integrate approaches from the d.school and marketing curriculum — including brand strategy, storytelling fundamentals, human-centered methods, rapid prototyping, and a bias toward action.  This is a class for those that want to learn by doing and creating.

Spring 2012
EDUC 338X, 3-4 Units, Letter grade
Tues 10:00-11:50am, d.school Studio 2 / Thurs 6:00-8:00pm, d.school Studio 1
Enrollment limited to 30
Contact: innoved@dschool.stanford.edu

This class is centered on one of the most powerful movements in education right now: the growth of learning and teaching decoupled from the classroom. The idea that education can take place outside of school is far from new, but a constellation of movements has thrust informal and non-traditional education front and center on stage in the last few years. (Ask anyone who’s earned a degree at their kitchen table, looked up an unusual plant on a smartphone, or helped a group of neighborhood kids enter a building contest.) Technological tools dramatically widen the scope of available materials and interactions. More entrepreneurial capital is entering the educational space. Legions of content experts outside the classroom are ready to share their knowledge, and the means to reach others are easily accessible. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to design for teaching interactions outside of schools. How do we intentionally use the design process and leverage educational know-how to enable and support these would-be teachers?

We welcome graduate students from all departments. To give each design team individual coaching, enrollment is capped at 30 students and admission is by application. Apply at http://bit.ly/338xapp2012. Applications are due March 21, and decisions will be sent out on March 28.

Teaching Team
Molly Wilson, d.school
Adam Royalty, d.school
Karin Forssell, School of Education
Jennifer Carolan, NewSchools Venture Fund (adjunct teaching team)

This ambitious course focuses on stimulating creativity in individuals and teams within organizations. We use experiential methods including case studies, workshops, field trips, and team design projects, supported by guest speakers and readings. The philosophy of the course is that every problem is an opportunity for a creative solution; and its goal is to help students identify individual and organizational factors that promote and inhibit creativity. Interested students must sign up in Axess to receive info about the application process; details will be sent two weeks before the quarter begins.

Small interdisciplinary project teams will work with selected enterprises and NGOs in Kenya to design new technologies for promoting development and democracy. The focus for the students will be a quarter-long design project, taking advantage of the design process structures and methods that have been developed in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school). Promising projects will be encouraged and supported to develop beyond the end of the academic course to turn the ideas into viable products and applications.

For the 2012 class we will be developing mobile applications in areas such as health, education and economic development, in conjunction with the University of Nairobi and corporate and NGO partners in Kenya. Collaboration with these groups will provide students with access to the settings for design and their needs and values will be the touchstone for measuring the success of the projects. Class sessions will include background and

discussions on issues that contribute to and/or hinder social change through technology. Students will analyze case studies of interventions that have been attempted in a variety of social contexts—both success stories and striking failures.

Readings, speakers, and discussions will provide a technical grounding and will address political and cultural concerns, including the complexity of technology adoption in contexts outside of Western technology-advanced groups and cultures, the development of infrastructure, both technical and social, that is required as a basis for the successful adoption of new technologies, and the challenges of assessing the value of interventions in real social and political contexts.

We will send selected students from the course to do initial needfinding and collaboration development in Kenya during Spring Break before the course begins.

More info at http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs379l/

We are entering an era marked by issues such as the environmental crisis, unstable economies, and questions regarding continued resource availability.  As leaders you will learn an entirely new kind of thinking in working within the context of challenges that are complex, massive and critically urgent. We believe that solutions in the future will need to simultaneously create value on economic, societal and environmental fronts, and the class will introduce a methodology to innovate using powerful frameworks and integrated paradigms.

This is an project-based innovation class and incorporates processes that combine four elements: (a) Design Thinking Methodology (b) Behavioral Sciences techniques (c) Tools for large scale transformations including elements of marketing and diffusion theory (d) Methodology for integrated strategies.  The class will introduce a powerful methodology, the theoretical underpinnings, and the techniques for hands-on generation of transformative initiatives.

Students will use the tools and theories introduced in class to launch initiatives that are designed to work at a very large scale in short time frames.  We encourage students to use this class as a launching pad for real initiatives and we expect that some initiatives will continue beyond the class with the support of external stakeholders. The application, which is due Feb 15, can be found here.