RE-DEFINE THE WAY WE LEARN AND LIVE.

Spring 2013
Tu / Th 10:00a – 12:00p
Studio 1
ME 247
3 Units
Credit/No Credit

Transform the place that’s transforming your life.

The d.school is working with the University to re-invent the on-campus experience. Join us in Spring 2013 and uncover new ways for Stanford to continue to be a unique experience for generations to come.

Huge societal and technological shifts are disrupting education in unprecedented ways, questioning what it means to learn and live on campus. It’s time to harness those changes and re-invent what it means to be a student right here at Stanford.

A class in two parts.

In Part 1 (Spring, 2013) you will work in diverse teams to imagine how students might learn–and live–at Stanford 5 – 10 years from now.*

You will work with David Kelley to delve into design, dig into the most adventurous educational experiments happening around the country, immerse yourself in mind-blowing experiences both on- and off-campus, and create short films and wild prototypes that demonstrate the future of campus life.**

Students who want to craft a vision of the future of the Stanford experience, explore potentially disruptive ideas, spark new thinking, and inspire others to take action are encouraged to apply. Your work may be seen or experienced by faculty, deans, and the Stanford community at-large — the opportunity for impact is very real.

*Spring class is the first in a two-part series.You may apply to Part 1 (Spring, 2013) without any commitment to join Part 2 (Fall, 2013), although we hope several students will play a role in both classes. Depending upon your success in Spring, we may invite a small number of students to lead a team in the Fall class.

** Prior design thinking experience is valued, but not required. You must be ready to spend significant time outside of class working on these projects with a multidisciplinary team.

Apply
http://dschool.stanford.edu/at-stanford/

Applications due April 1 at 11:59pm. After you apply, show up on the first day of class.

(It just takes a minute, maybe two. You can also click here for the application.)

Teaching Team
David Kelley, d.school, ME Design, IDEO
Jon Feiber, d.school
Scott Doorley, d.school

Using Radical Collaboration to Improve Institutions

Tue/Thu 1:15p – 3:05p, Thu 5:00p – 7:00p
Studio 1
POLISCI 347D/PUBLPOL 347D
3 – 4 Units
Letter Grade or C/NC
Launching This Year

Join a passionate group of faculty and students inspired by the potential for human-centered design, alongside new technologies, to transform the public sector. Together, we’ll explore citizens’ needs and governments’ capabilities to spur creative ideas about how to make government more efficient, empower people to have a say in how they are governed, and hold those in power accountable for what they deliver.

In this project-based course, student teams will work intensively on concrete design challenges with two unique partners: a groundbreaking civil society activist in Sierra Leone and the City Manager of East Palo Alto. By working with government reformers on the inside and a civil society activist on the outside, the course will explore the challenges of fostering innovations in governance from both sides of the formal institutional divide. Before embarking on their design challenges, students will also examine governance from a theoretical and empirical perspective, enabling them to see how design thinking complements the analytical and policy approaches already being employed. Need-finding work in the local communities will be essential and students have the opportunity to travel to Sierra Leone over spring break. We are looking for students with a diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds who are willing to think outside of the box, work across disciplinary boundaries, and get their hands dirty. Exceptional undergraduates will be be considered.

In addition to regular class meetings, students will need to attend an evening introductory session on March 12 and a day-long design workshop on Saturday, April 13th.

Apply
Enrollment limited to 16. Application due March 1.  Students will be informed of status on March 5, those traveling to Sierra Leone will need to confirm participation by March 6. Apply at http://bit.ly/RebootingGovtApp

Teaching Team
Liz Ogbu, d.school and California College of Arts
Jenny Stefanotti, d.school fellow
Jeremy Weinstein, Associate Professor of Political Science

Questions
jenny@dschool.stanford.edu

Learn to utilize the hero myth to activate superfans for your ideas

Tue/Thu 1:15p – 3:05p
Concept Car
ME 235
2-3 Units
Credit/No Credit
Launching This Year

Apply
Graduates and advanced undergrads and will be considered. Limited enrollment by application. Applications due April 2. Apply here and show up for the first day of class.

Teaching Team
Michael Sturtz, ME Design
Reilly Brennan, REVS Program

Questions
brennanr@stanford.edu, msturtz@stanford.edu

Tuesday evenings
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 & May 7
4:00p – 7:00p
Studio 1
1 unit (optional)

Are you involved in research involving complex or large data sets?  Have you ever been told that you have a technology in search of a problem?  We believe that there is an experiential way in which you can cross the technical insight to product gap by learning how to understand user problems and transition from the lab to customer problem.  This is a series of six 3-hour workshops for data scientists who are interested in exploring the applicability of their technology or research to customers and markets.

Apply
Applications due March 15. Apply here: http://bit.ly/dschoolpopapp

Teaching Team
Jon Feiber, d.school, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Ann Miura-Ko, FLOODGATE

Questions
jdfeiber@stanford.edu

Friday afternoons
May 3, 10, 17, 24, 31
1:15p – 3:05p
Studio 2
1 unit
Credit/No Credit

Ever feel like you’re great at giving others advice on their life issues, but feel yourself lacking the same perspective required to confidently chart your own course? We don’t think that’s an accident. Take this short course to for a chance to workshop your own life with the collaboration and objectivity of another design thinker and apply critical cutting edge frameworks for practically prioritizing a life that matters to you.

How to navigate, bounce back and even flourish from failure

Wednesday evenings
May 8, 15, 22, 29
5:15pm -7:15pm
Studio 1
Directed Study
1 Unit
Credit/No Credit

Flail or Flourish will explore ways to: [1] become comfortable with uncertainty, [2] develop tools to navigate situations of failure, and [3] practice turning failures into opportunities. This quick-paced workshop will examine and exercise the psychological traits and the power of resilience through hands-on activities. Students will practice techniques and tools to help them navigate, bounce back, grow and even flourish in the face of their failures.

Apply
To apply email Grace at grace@dschool.stanford.edu by March 1st with: your name, SUID number, program of study, email, phone number, and expected graduation date. Answer the following two questions in 100 words (or less): 1. What was your most epic fail? 2. What happened next?

Teaching Team
Grace Hawthorne, PAPER PUNK and d.school
Guthrie Dolin, Odopod and d.school

Questions
grace@dschool.stanford.edu

One-week workshop
April 22, 24, 26
6:00p – 8:00p
Studio 2
0 units

How would you have prototyped Facebook in 2002? Or a policy decision that would affect millions? How do you create a cultural change in an organization? As design thinking is used to address increasingly complex challenges we need ways of prototyping that allow us to maintain the intimacy, immediacy and visceral nature of hands-on prototyping. This pop-up class will explore ways to prototype the development of collaborative, connected and interdependent systems. Questions we’ll address: How might we break complex systems into isolated elements? How do you find the critical part of a system? How can one test feedback loops in an accelerated timeframe? We need to evolve the way we prototype in order address the design challenges in our current world. Come explore this question with us.

Tuesday evenings
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
6:15p – 9:15p
Studio 2
1 unit
C/NC

Design is a reflection of the world, processed through the designer’s mind. In this short-format workshop we will explore tapping into your designer’s mind and amplify your creative process. The class sessions will include discovery exercises, guest lectures, critiques, and examples from industry and art of how people use creative experiments, habits and practices to elevate their work. In this class you will stretch your mind, use your hands, and advance a lifelong creative practice.

Where Did You Go, Olympia Snowe?
Redesigning Politics for Bipartisanship

Intensive 2-part Workshop
Dates: Wed May 15, 7pm – 10pm
AND Fri May 17th, 8:30am – 4:30pm
Both sessions are REQUIRED
Space: Building 550, Studio 2
0 units

This pop-up class will be in the form of an intensive workshop. You will be using the design process to gain insight into the lack of compromise in American politics today: for example, why we have so few political moderates and why those who have more extreme views don’t collaborate effectively with those holding other beliefs. You will design around the needs of those increasingly rare politicians and policy makers who have refused to believe that their parties are always right or that compromise is a dirty word. They are a fast-disappearing breed, and we are eager to discover what American government could look like if we designed a system based on their values, perspectives, ideas, and needs.

Are you a PhD or Master’s Student who has always wanted to take a d.school class but never had the time to do something non-academic? Or maybe it sounded like fun but you weren’t sure how what you learned would help your research? We invite you to participate in an upcoming Research as Design Workshop, a fun introduction to the design thinking methods and techniques taught at the d.school but focused specifically on applying them to help you do better research. The extended workshop format is three evenings and one day-long session. Our goal is to recognize the creative, playful mindset that underlies successful innovation in scholarship and explore how design thinking can improve the research process to make us more innovative scholars or scientists.

For more information on our workshops, please visit our blog: http://researchasdesign.com/workshops/upcoming-workshops. To register, scroll down to the second paragraph and click on “Register here” for the registration form. 

Poverty Can Be a Downward Spiral: Here’s How to Design the Way Up

Winter 2013
Tackle Big Challenges

Tue/Thu 3:15p – 5:05p
Studio 1
PUBLPOL 240
3 – 4 Units
Letter Grade or Credit/No Credit
Launching This Year

Conventional efforts to fight poverty in America are not working. Despite billions of dollars and millions of interventions, poverty remains as intractable a social problem as it’s ever been. This class will invite you, the future social impact innovator, to rethink our approach to poverty. Why do so many poverty-fighting interventions tackle short-term symptoms rather than long-term causes? What is it about the systems currently used by government and its agencies that leads to so much ineffective effort and duplication? Isn’t there a better way of finding out what works, and doing more of it?

By partnering with San Francisco-based non-profit Tipping Point, a dynamic, results-focused supporter of grass-roots poverty-fighting organizations in the Bay Area (including communities close to Stanford), you will encounter real world problems of persistent poverty – and be challenged to design innovative solutions. This class will focus on designing for systems: understanding the current systems for social services and the needs of the individuals who are on the receiving end of anti-poverty efforts as well as organizational and policy-level stakeholders, identifying key levers for change, and designing disruptive approaches.

To tackle this ambitious agenda, you will work in multidisciplinary teams to design tangible, near-term experiments and prototypes– as well as a broader strategies for implementation and scale. The aim is to design sustainable new approaches that not only help the specific local organizations that will be partners in this class, but make a contribution to policy innovation at the national level. You will be supported by a teaching team whose experience includes being on the front lines of national-scale policymaking, non-profit service delivery, international social entrepreneurship, and a wealth of human-centered design expertise.

Apply
Enrollment limited to 36. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds encouraged to apply. Please see https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/designthewayup/ for more information. Previous d.school experience is valued but not required.

Teaching Team
Erica Estrada, co-founder d.light design
Nicole Kahn, IDEO
Sally Madsen, IDEO
Sarah Stein Greenberg, d.school
Steve Hilton, Visiting Scholar (Freeman Spogli Institute) & Senior Advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron

Questions
designthewayup@dschool.stanford.edu

Creating the Next Generation of User Centric Theatrical Experiences

Winter 2013
Tackle Big Challenges

Mon/Wed 1:15p – 3:05p + Additional Evening Sections
Studio 1
ME 288/TAPS 130
3 Units
Letter Grade
Launching This Year

Students will work in collaborative groups to learn and apply the design thinking processes to reinvent the theater experience. Small student groups will identify, define, needfind, ideate and prototype the elements necessary to create a new artistic genre of live performance that will utilize technology in new ways and embody what is unique to the Silicon Valley / SF Bay Area. This multidisciplinary class will leverage different technical and creative disciplines to create an accessible and radical collaborative performance atmosphere.

Apply
Enrollment limited to 35 students.Applications due January 3. Apply here.

Teaching Team
Bill Burnett, ME Design
Dan Klein, Drama
Michael Sturtz, ME Design
Carr Wilkerson, CCRMA

Questions
msturtz@stanford.edu

Two evening workshop
March 12, 13
5:30p – 7:30p
Studio 2
0 units

In this two-session workshop of 120 minutes each, you will learn how to harness the power of a ‘hero’ to benefit your startup idea. Utilizing the skills of ‘interviewing for empathy,’ you will launch a prototype to harness the hero coefficient to create a compelling story for your start up.

The idea of a hero begins as a dependent relationship: Heroes fight their own battles, but only when their peers raise them up can they achieve hero status. When we consider why heroes ‘work,’ we often focus on the mythic demigod and overlook the society; in fact no hero can be self-identified. The two are interwoven. In this two-part workshop we will dive deep into the ways people get on with their heroes. How do they talk about them? How they view them? Why did they choose them? Do they view their own life vis-a-vis their hero? Your goal will be to listen, connect and mobilize these learnings into a prototype to capture and share stories. What you build and launch will be the ultimate hero storytelling capture / sharing device (UHSCSD). Your prototype won’t arise as a result of an idea you spitballed, but from the gold you mine from your interviews. Interviewing for empathy allows us to understand a person’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, so that we can determine how to innovate for an individual person. By understanding the choices that person makes and the behaviors that person engages in, we can identify their needs and design for those preferences. Students will work in small groups to create storyboards that outline their ideas. This class is a workshop for a longer Spring Term class, also at the d.school. Funding for this workshop is made possible by the Revs Program at Stanford.

Teaching Team
Michael Sturtz, ME Design
Reilly Brennan, REVS Program

Contact Email
brennanr@stanford.edu, msturtz@stanford.edu