Overview

d.school Creativity in Research Scholars (CIRS) are a diverse set of Stanford PhD students across all disciplines. In addition to their primary research activities, these individuals are learning and applying design thinking to push the boundaries of their work and create entirely new applications and approaches to their research.

Historically, CIRS has been a three quarter program to empower PhD students to integrate design thinking tools into their research culminating in a personal project. We’ve modified CIRS to deal with the realities of the current environment and the challenges of remote research. CIRS for Remote Research will be integrating design thinking into Jupyter Notebooks to bring design methods closer to everyday research tools. Also, this year CIRS will be offered as a single quarter program.

This program is meant for doctoral students that are eager to use creative practices and collaboration to create impact. In the past, students were pursuing individual capstone projects for CIRS. This year, we will work on a single project together: Integrate design thinking approaches into remote research. We will collaborate, in class and outside of class, with the goal to find “best practice approaches” to help other students around the world to better find a creative spark when working from home.

Learn more about the previous CIRS projects here.

Program Timing

This is a ten week program for the 2021 Winter Quarter. Class meets weekly on Wednesdays from 4-6PM.

Want to apply?

Selection and Eligibility

Stanford PhD from any field are eligible and encouraged. A group of 12-15 PhD students will be admitted with an effort to make the group as diverse as possible from as many angles as possible.

Questions? Contact Megan Stariha: megan@dschool.stanford.edu