What leaders need in order to evolve their business strategy requires a new kind of smart.

Find it at the d.school.

Join us for our largest and most robust executive bootcamp ever —Design Thinking Bootcamp for Executives—taking place this July 11-13.

This hands-on program offers executives the chance to learn design thinking—a human-centered, prototype-oriented process that enhances your ability to drive innovation. We believe that innovation is necessary in every aspect of business, and that it can be taught.

Design Thinking Bootcamp Key Takeaways:

• Develop deep consumer insights through real-life ethnographies
• Reduce risk and accelerate learning through rapid prototyping
• Drive towards innovation, not just incremental growth
• Empower your employees to be innovative

Participants in this program will roll up their sleeves and get into the field to develop deep insights about the people they’re serving. By grouping into multidisciplinary teams, participants plow through a complete design cycle, leveraging low-resolution prototyping and high-frequency iteration to get to unexpected, BIG IDEAS. D.school faculty and coaches guide executives through each stage of the innovation process, and teach the important lesson of how to apply the bootcamp principles immediately once executives are back at work.

“I wouldn’t have had the idea to approach the problem in this way if I hadn’t been to the d.school. You realize that you aren’t going to solve the problem sitting in an office, you need to get out and talk to the people who are actually dealing with it, whether that’s your customers or your front-line employees.” — Bonny Simi, Director of Airport Planning, Jet Blue

Who Should Attend

• Executives who are tackling strategic challenges in their organizations.
• Executives responsible for internal and external client (or consumer) touchpoints across the product and organization.
• Titles include: C-Level execs, Directors, VPs

Design Thinking Bootcamp is meant to create and empower a community of do-ers. Enter a collaborative and intelligent program that leverages the d.school’s creative workspaces, and exit with meaningful methods and tools that can impact personal, professional, and organizational growth.

Apply by June 22

The deadline for this July’s Design Thinking Bootcamp for Executives is June 22. Space is limited and will sell out. Apply now.

Photo courtesy of Adam Royalty.

We’re holding a public workshop on Friday, March 23 from 3-5pm open to anybody who has not yet taken a d.school course or workshop. All you have to do is show up. We’ll take it from there.

Where: Stanford d.school, Building 550, 416 Escondido Mall, Stanford University (directions).
When: Friday March 23, 2012 from 3:00-5:00pm.  This hands-on learning experience will start on time! 
Who: Open to the public! Come one, come all – be ready to roll up your sleeves and get building.  Our workshops fill up quickly due to high demand and are first come, first serve.  We cannot make exceptions for individuals or groups traveling from out of town.

Registration for this event is now closed.  Stay tuned for future crash courses!  

Contact email: crashcourse@dschool.stanford.edu

If this makes you excited, check out this link for more details: http://bit.ly/GKjhvZ

We are thrilled to invite you to beta test our new virtual Crash Course series of creative and intelligent teaching tools.

Visit our Crash Course page NOW and add yourself to the d.school heatmap.

This virtual Crash Course has custom-created videos, handouts, and facilitation tips to help you as both the learner, and the teacher.

Experience a challenge in Design Thinking:

• Gear Up!: How to kick-off a Crash Course
• Go for a ride!: Virtual Crash Course Video
• Chart a new course: Putting design thinking to work

Whether you’re a business executive, stay at home mom, college student, or a student’s grandmother, we invite you to join this prototype! All you need is one friend, or you can host a Crash Course for your colleagues, peers, friends, or family. Groups can range from 2 to 100+.

This crash course is an ongoing experiment for us, rough edges and all. Have some thoughts? We invite you to document any feedback through audio, video, written, or visual means. We are looking to iterate the process, and can’t do it without your help. Shoot us a note at crashcourse@dschool.stanford.edu.

Through this virtually-facilitated workshop we hope you will take away some of the basic principles of Design Thinking and start to adapt them into your personal and professional routines.

The Crash Course aims to:

• Grow your own capacity to innovate.
• Allow you to experience something different than how you normally work.
• Encourage collaboration with interdisciplinary teams; unraveling new perspectives on approaching solutions.
• Give adults back break time. Participants work with arts & crafts supplies as a way to understand the value of rapid prototyping.
• Help you put Design Thinking to work immediately following the video via half-day long guided tours through some of our methods, called “mixtapes.”

SPREAD THE WORD & GET INVOLVED.
Share your stories. LIKE the Crash Course page on Facebook.
Follow @stanforddschool and participate in the conversation by using hashtag #dgift on Twitter.

Experience the VIRTUAL CRASH COURSE.

A heartfelt thank you to all who participated to bring this to life for the d.school community. 

Workshop Dates: June 18th – 20th, 2012 at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (“the d.school”)

The cost is free for K-12 Teachers and Administrators.

Applications are due by March 30th and can be found here

Content Overview
The d.school design thinking process is user-centered and prototype-driven. As a participant in Design Thinking Boot Camp, you will be part of a small team and work through a hands-on innovation challenge from start to finish. You will walk away from the workshop with a strong understanding of the key tenets of design thinking and be able to execute them at your school. While our focus will be on participants’ first-hand experience of the design thinking process we will also spend some time making explicit connections to how design challenges can be implemented in K-12 classrooms.

Who Should Attend
This program is designed for teachers or administrators who want to bring innovation into their classrooms or districts. We have found that implementing design thinking best happens with collaboration. Preference will be given to those who apply in pairs – in essence, with someone else from his/her school or team.

Meals and Accommodations
We will provide lunch on all days of the workshop along with all program materials. Participants will be responsible for the cost of transportation, parking, lodging, breakfasts, and dinners. We recommend three hotels, all of which are very close to campus.Please be sure to make arrangements for transportation to and from the d.school each day.

Admission Procedure
Application does not guarantee admission; an Admissions Committee will review all complete applications. We will send a decision in the first 2 weeks of April.

CALLING ALL STANFORD GRADUATE STUDENTS

Have you been itching to find out more about what kinds of design thinking classes and projects are still on offer by the d.school this Spring? Here’s your chance to find out.

THU FEB 23, NOON-1PM
d.school LUNCH AND INFORMATION
Building 550 Atrium

The d.school will present an expo info session for our open Spring classes at Noon this coming Thursday, February 23. Find out more about the classes we’ll be offering this Spring (and eat Ike’s for free!). Talk to the teaching teams and your potential classmates, and get your design thinking groove on.

The d.school’s flagship class, Design Thinking Bootcamp, consistently draws students from every school and program to work together on team-based approaches to real-world challenges. Want a glimpse of what it’s like? Justin Ferrell, the Director of Digital, Mobile and New Product Design for the Washington Post, is on campus for a one-year long Knight journalism fellowship. He shares his experiences as a Bootcamp student, and distills a few principles he plans to apply to his work.

The chance to study at the d.school is the reason I applied for a journalism fellowship here, and having read design thinking books by Tim Brown and Roger Martin  — and being a professional designer myself — I thought I’d come to Stanford to “polish” my practical team-building style with some high-brow academic theory.

For sure I had a lot to learn — just not what I thought. Design thinking is anything but a theory. The d.school’s officially called the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, but Workshop might be a better moniker. Instructors preach a “bias toward action” and students physically tackle real-world problems (sometimes with chainsaws and glue guns). As a design director at The Washington Post, I tackle problems too. But there’s a big leap between doing your best within your opportunity and reframing that opportunity entirely.

That’s what I call the d.school SMACK! — which hit me the first week of class. No doubt it shakes you up, especially if you’re an industry pro who’s worked very hard for very long, moreso if you’re proud of your insular achievements. The upside is, if you endure the SMACK! and turn loose your assumptions, the d.school instructors teach you HOW to reframe. Your bruised ego heals. And you begin to see problems, no matter where they are, as innately solvable. One of the great benefits of design thinking is, the need (or problem, if you prefer) is never a bridge too far: the process applies if you apply yourself to the process.

1. I KNOW, YEAH, DIVERSITY — WAIT, WHAT?

I’ve had many official titles at The Post, but as the industry’s come under extreme duress, I’ve made organizational change my unofficial job. As often as possible, I’ve brought together distinctly-skilled journalists throughout the newsroom to create stories with more impact than they could make on their own. As storytelling evolves, I’ve recruited (mostly) data programmers and front-end designers to build ever more sophisticated experiences. I love breaking down conventional work models and enabling talented people to empower each other, and I’m constantly drawing org charts on paper scraps and passing them to my boss.

So I know all about building innovative, diverse tea– SMACK!

The first Bootcamp team design project grouped me with three complete strangers: an English MBA, an Indian engineer and a Taiwanese programmer. We were given a complex assignment we knew nothing about:

Redesign the Muslim-American Philanthropy Experience. Um, ok.

I’d always thought my journalism teams were diverse, but we were like clones compared to this. My d.school group had greater functional diversity than I’m used to, and we also had tremendous perspective diversity, which meant it took awhile for us to learn to communicate.

These terms come from the fascinating research of Lu Hong and Scott E. Page from the University of Michigan, who published their findings in a paper titled “Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers.” That chief finding is astounding, and my experience in Bootcamp supports it: When it comes to teams, diversity can be more important than individual talent.

So how do you work with people you’ve never met? Take chances with folks who don’t know you? Share expertise without driving the outcome?

And help each other along?

2. THERE IS NO HIERARCHY WITHIN THE TEAM

I’ve worked in journalism for 15 years. I earned a degree from a prestigious school, I started at a very small newspaper in an entry-level job, and I’ve worked my way up (with much help) to a leadership position at The Washington Post. Over the years, I’ve won several awards and have had the good fortune to work on many big news events and important projects — some of them impacting national security! At Stanford, I’m at least 10 years older than most of the graduate students. And though all of them are intimidatingly smart (and most are equally friendly), you’re saying that I have no group authority?

In media organizations, this is where things often fall apart. Journalists like to get work done. They care very much about the work they do. And they have strong ideas about how best to do it. This ambition is what makes excellent reporters, photographers and editors, and therefore is not something a manager wants to discourage. But by suspending hierarchy, and making it known and accepted within the group, its members are freed to own their personal expertise.

I wasn’t about to tell the MBA student how to run a business, but I had ideas to challenge her thinking. I couldn’t project manage like the mechanical engineer, but I could help us feel okay about staying in a step the group hadn’t comfortably completed. None of my partners were free-thinking designers, but they knew how to keep me from plunging down tangential rabbit holes. Suspended hierarchy is a gift. So how do you decide what to do?

3. ASK PEOPLE

Empathy is actually the first “official” step in the design thinking process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test), so think of the team building as step zero. But like everything in the process, each step is additive: if you’re able to form a diverse group, suspend your respective authority within the group and openly share and welcome ideas, then you’ve learned to drop some ego and listen. You recognize that the difficulty of those steps personally is well worth it to the project, which you hope will fill a societal need (and is therefore more important than your own). Those two steps are required to be able to nakedly seek “ordinary” opinions, to really hear what people say and discover insights without bias.

The empathy step is not about listening to people and doing what they say. It’s about listening to them to find out what they need. That insight emerges at the intersection of your team’s individual and collective expertise and the information (verbal and otherwise) that you glean from your interviews.You’ll have a chance later to find out if you’re right, when you test. And if need be, you can do it again!

My group discovered that some Muslim Americans need an avenue to openly share their perspectives with non-Muslim Americans. We created an educational prototype, just one solution among the 20 our class proposed. There’s no one answer to Redesign the Muslim-American Philanthropy Experience, or to Save Journalism, or to Solve World Hunger or whatever problem you take on. What Bootcamp taught me foremost is this: if we get together and do it, we’ll end up solving problems collectively.

Gathering Data

We gave the 76 students in the fall course Design Thinking Bootcamp a challenge: describe each design process mode in one sentence. We’ve had the individual responses posted on our wall at the d.school for a while, and we love the headlines:

Then we got curious. Could we find patterns in their responses? We aggregated their sentences and got a totally different view. We lose the students’ cleverness and style. But we start to see a rhythm revealed behind the design process.

d.dataviz

Each slice shows the number of times a word was used. The area of a slice is proportional to the frequency of the word. We broke the frequency down further into singular and plural forms. The diagrams are all drawn to the same scale.

What does this tell us about how we’re teaching? Here’s what we noticed first: Empathy and Test, which we usually present as the bookends to the design process, sure have a lot in common for our students. This makes sense, as they both involve engaging heavily with users (see the User/Users graph). They start to look different in the Idea/Ideas graph and the Solution/Solutions graph. This suggests that the distinction we’re drawing here is that testing involves the designer’s own concepts, while empathy doesn’t. Put another way, Test = Empathy + Concept.

One more callout: it looks like students see some process modes as about keeping multiple concepts in play, and some about working down to single concepts. Students wrote about “solutions” and “ideas” in the Ideate phase, which changed to “solution” and “idea” in Prototype and Test. We know that we emphasize the broadening and narrowing, or focusing and flaring, of the design process, and that we tie this rhythm to certain steps in the process. What about building this broad/narrow pattern into other process modes as well?

About the visualization

The graph format above is called Nightingale’s Rose, after a now-famous diagram by Florence Nightingale illustrating casualties of the Crimean War. Read about Nightingale’s Rose in the Economist. Want to talk about the data or the graphs? Ping Molly. Props to Jenn, who typed this stuff up.