Try out a Pop-Out or workshop for a taste of experiential learning and design thinking. Pop-outs all take place out in the world in a relevant context for the specific course topic.  No credit offered. Length varies.

Workshops

Design for Justice: Traffic Courts
Research as Design: Redesign Your Research Process

Pop-Outs

Designing for Complex User Ecosystems
Learn to Teach — Teach to Learn: Peer-Led Ed
Ritual Design for Organizational Change
Sensory Lab
The Tactics of Creativity

Workshop

Design for Justice: Traffic Courts

Macro System Change through Micro Traffic Court Redesigns

• 2 weeks
• Thursday, November 9, 4-7pm; Friday, November 10, 8am-12pm; Saturday, November 11, 1pm-4pm
• Credit/No Credit
• d.school Studio 3

A traffic ticket can ruin your life. A fine of $490 for running a red light can spiral into growing interest and penalties, a hold on your driver's license, and a bench warrant for your arrest. There's increasing awareness of how traffic court practices contribute to systemic inequality and poverty. Our class will take this as a starting point: how can we make traffic court more understandable and empowering, so that a ticket doesn't spiral into a life crisis?

We will be on-site in local traffic courts, and working with a mix of stakeholders. We'll be refining prototypes that an earlier class on this same topic created, and using them to test with users, iterate ideas, and move towards working pilots. Our goal will be to make interventions that can help people navigate the existing system – and also to change the system itself.

The goal is to take a user-centered, grounded approach to social and racial justice issues. We'll design for very particular traffic court problems, but with a systems-approach that aims for large impact.

We invite students from all disciplines to apply — no legal knowledge is required.

Teaching Team

• Margaret Hagan, Stanford Legal Design Lab
• Brandon Greene, East Bay Community Law Center
• Kursat Ozenc, SAP
• Theresa Zhen, East Bay Community Law Center

Questions

mdhagan@stanford.edu

Workshop

Research as Design: Redesign Your Research Process

Using design to help scholars be more mindful of their research process

• Saturday, September 30
• 10am - 6pm
• d.school

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 outside of your field or department? Or maybe it sounded like fun but you weren’t sure how what you learned would help your research? Come join us for this fun introduction to design thinking methods and techniques that focuses specifically on using them to help you do better research. 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. Our starting premise: Emerging scientists, scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers need tools, techniques, support, and inspiration to approach their research in an innovative and playful spirit of design.
You will explore a variety of design skills and mindsets, but focus especially on how being mindful of your own research process, work styles, emotional state, and sometimes-hidden assumptions can help you get “unstuck” when you face research bumps in the road. This class is designed for students without previous experience in design thinking (especially those who may have very little idea what “design thinking” even means!).

Teaching Team

• Anja Svetina Nabergoj, Lecturer, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
• Adam Royalty, Lecturer, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

Questions

anja@dschool.stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Designing for Complex User Ecosystems

Design as if everyone's experience matters!

• Saturday November 18, 10:30am to 3pm
• Sunday November 19, 12:30pm to 5pm
• East Bay Community Foundation, Oakland

We typically design products, services, and spaces with very narrow conceptions of the user roles that we can or should serve. This class is about broadening the ways we look at users, and pushing design to work better for more people. The class will be grounded in a “complex user ecosystem” perspective and we’ll experiment with a new typology of user roles and relationships. We’ll learn about associate users, ambient users, and intermediary users, to name a few, and we’ll consider ways that a broad ecosystem of user relationships can support or inhibit the success of the things we design. 

As a pop-OUT, our class will meet in the heart of downtown Oakland, itself a quintessential complex user ecosystem. In partnership with the East Bay Community Foundation, we will explore a prominent downtown public plaza, utilized by a wide cross-section of the Oakland community and just steps away from the downtown BART station. Working in small teams, we will attempt to understand the social ecosystem of the plaza and identify opportunities to redesign the space to enhance the ways it is engaged and experienced by a broad range of users.

While our project will be focused on design in an urban plaza, the class will also draw the instructors’ experiences in healthcare, education, product design, and more to explore how the same tools and perspectives can push design further in any field.

Teaching Team

• Mike Youngblood, The Youngblood Group
• Benjamin Chesluk, The American Board of Internal Medicine
• Sachi Yoshi, East Bay Community Foundation

Transportation

Our class space at the East Bay Community Foundation office is easily accessible by BART. There is also street parking and paid parking lots in the vicinity.

Questions

mike@theyoungbloodgroup.com, benchesluk@gmail.com

Pop-Out

Learn to Teach — Teach to Learn: Peer-Led Ed

Making first teaching experiences fun and fruitful

• October 14, 11am-5pm 
• October 15, 11am-5pm 
• East Palo Alto Academy 

Try teaching for the first time! Explore the challenge of peer-led education through three interactive projects. Learn and teach how to make a skateboard, a custom tshirt, or a laser cut speaker. Share your learning and teaching experiences with the team at East Palo Alto Academy’s DreamLab and Palo Alto’s MakeX makerspaces, and help inform their development of new curriculum for young people in their communities. If you want to make something, and you’re interested in developing yourself as a hands-on peer teacher, this class is for you!

Teaching Team

• James Wang, StreetCode Design founder and director, MakeX founder
• Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, d.school Director of Community
• Aaron Ragsdale, DreamLab director
• Bernie Trilling, 21st Century Learning Advisors founder and CEO
• Jonathan Bryant, StreetCode programs director, teacher and tinkerer at Belle Haven Elementary school

Questions

jamesw97@stanford.edu, cbauburn@dschool.stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Ritual Design for Organizational Change

Rituals and Interaction Hacks for Better Orgs

• Tues. Oct 24, 5-7:30pm
• Wed. Oct 25, 12-5pm
• SAP, Microsoft. Students will contextualize their understanding and designing when they will be visiting the locations.

How do we make organizations with culture that is happy, productive, and supportive of individuals? We know that a successful culture will make an organization more adaptable to transitions in management, workforce, customer needs, and reorgs. It also can bring respect and support to people from diverse backgrounds, build a sense of community, and bring out people’s creativity and innovation.

We will be designing rituals to change culture and strengthen good practices. We’ll focus on rituals in different themes: for resilience, for diversity, for cohesion, and for creativity. Building off past classes and cutting-edge organizational design, students will run through quick, lively, creative ritual design sprints. They’ll work with local organizations to develop and test new rituals, for real challenges they’re facing. They’ll also use photo and video storytelling tools to capture their design work.

This is a prototype driven studio, meant especially for students interested in organizational behavior design and bringing emotion and values into experience design. We welcome students who are interested in how to create stronger cultures in their own orgs and companies, and who want to explore humorous, strange, magical, and curious ways to do so.

Teaching Team

• Kursat Ozenc, Ph.D., SAP Labs
• Isabel Behncke, Ph.D., Oxford University
• Margaret Hagan, Ph.D., Stanford Law/d.school

Transportation

Traveling to organizations in Mountain View and Palo Alto

Questions

fkozenc@gmail.com

More Information

www.ritualdesignlab.org
https://medium.com/ritual-design

Pop-Out

Sensory Lab

Designing for Experiences

• Friday, October 6th | 9:00a-3:00p
• San Francisco (Airbnb) 

How you ever wondered why a crowded room with pulsing lights and speakers can make us feel energetic while a cold somber space without furniture can make us feel withdrawn? Experience Design is a proxy for human relationships. While these experiences might be designed with intention – there is no right way to respond to these. Humans respond to stimulus based on personal perspective and the previous life experiences that make us who we are today. 

In this one day workshop we will explore ways of designing touch points around the 5 senses – taste, sight, touch, smell and hearing – to stimulate emotional triggers for your audience. What do you want them to feel? Why are you hoping to elicit a particular response? What is your point of view as an experience designer?

Beginning and ending with an immersive experience, we will guide you through how to think about experience design in a thoughtful and visceral way. Come join us on this exploratory workshop as we navigate the world of spoken and unspoken clues that are waiting to be tapped around us!

Teaching Team

• Emily Tsiang, Life Design Lab, Stanford 
• Stephanie Szabó, Teaching Fellow, d.school

Transportation

Students will need to travel to the Mission District in San Francisco, which is within walking distance from both 24th Street and 16th Street BART Stations. They will also need to get from the Mission District to Soma.

Questions

etsiang@stanford.edu

Pop-Out

The Tactics of Creativity

Learn battle-tested real-world creativity tricks and tactics at one of the world's truly great museums

• Saturday, Nov. 11.
• Exploratorium, San Francisco
• In addition, we strongly suggest that students join us for an informal couple of hours on the evening of Thursday, Nov.9 to tour the museum and familiarize with a few of the pre-selected course-specific exhibits.

The Tactics of Creativity will be held on one very full day at the San Francisco Exploratorium. The goal of the class will be to provide you with an effective collection of user-friendly and battle-tested tools and tactics for the ideation phase of design thinking. In this class, we will spend no time waiting for your lovely but elusive muse and her inspiration; we will spend all of our time in the trenches of reality, working on specific creative challenges and using specific tactics. We will use the exhibits of the museum and its visitors as our "lab" and each tactic will be tested and reinforced with a number of "mini-field trips" to the floor. At the conclusion, we will show how a collection of point-to-point tactics can actually combine to form a powerful and limitless creativity solution platform. And all of this will be fed by the energy and excitement of one of the world's truly great museums.

Teaching Team

• Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, d.school 
• John Cassidy, d.school

Transportation

The Exploratorium is accessible via public transportation from Palo Alto using CalTrain and MUNI. One-way travel time is 80-90 minutes.

Questions

johnbcassidy@gmail.com