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.

Rich Crandall, director of our K-12 Lab since 2008, is joining the team at NewSchools Venture Fund as Associate Partner.

A Teach for America alum with an MBA from Stanford, Rich spent four years at the d.school focused on spreading design thinking amongst K-12 educators and students. During that time he affected countless teachers, graduate students, school administrators, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and K-12 students, helping to strengthen their creative confidence and develop their innovation skills. In the past year alone, Rich personally ran workshops that exposed over 500 educators to design thinking.

Rich’s deep level of empathy for, and ability to unlock the creative potential of his students is an inspiration to all those who have taught alongside him. His passion for all things pirate, robot, and habit of embarking on treasure hunts will be sorely missed as fixtures of the d.school culture.

At the same time we’re incredibly excited that Rich is joining the team at one of the d.school’s valued partners, NewSchools. With this change in context Rich will be able to continue to expand the scale of his personal impact as a catalyst for innovation within the education sector. As NewSchools presses forward in its mission to transform public education for low-income children, we are enthusiastic to support Rich’s contributions and explore opportunities for future d.school/NewSchools collaboration as they arise.

For more, read NewSchools’ announcement welcoming Rich to their team.

Going forward, the d.school will be working on a reframe of the K-12 Lab and defining new leadership opportunities within the organization as part of that effort. We will take some time to be thoughtful about this important aspect of our work and will share more information later in the spring. We remain committed to innovation in the broader education sector and will be announcing specific plans for a graduate level course and our summer teacher workshop around mid-February.

Please visit the d.school website at that time for more information, or sign up for the K12 newsletter by sending that request to info@dschool.stanford.edu if you are interested in learning more.

• Two pictured teams, d.canvas (Dianna Kane, Josh Schwartzman, Poyi Chen, and Katie Johnson) and Overlay.d (Brantley Beaird, Yuri de Souza, Michael Revell, Roger Pincomb, Eric Tran, and Ivan Marcin), were selected overall winners and will each take away $1,000 in prizes from Quantcast and The Designer Fund;
• d.mafia won both people’s choice and the judges’ “wayward thinker” awards;
• Teams including Kale Chips, d.gallery, Lean Design Experience, and the Random Happy People will be taking part in a “test and ship day” with the staff at the d.school to continue prototyping and iterating on their ideas.

It’s an understatement to say that we were wowed by the enthusiasm and problem solving capabilities seen in our space over the weekend. Projects can be seen here. Their creators have been granted “founded member status” of the d.school HACK.d community and we could hardly be more grateful for their efforts to build and share.

http://michaelmakarov.info/hack

The D.Gallery provides a system that illustrates the beginning stages of the design-thinking process.

Visitors to the D.Gallery can either gain new inspiration from other people’s projects, or vstart their own to help crowd-source ideas. start*

Our aim is to create an “open whiteboard”, where large-scale collaboration and ideation can occur around project proposals.

- Patrick McCrory
- Michael Makarov
- Rachael Turilina
- Jin Zhou

A design thinking tool from The D Party.

Burning Question: how do you make d.T. more accessible to the mass?

http://smooth-moon-1796.herokuapp.com/

We help people move from the phase of stuck to creativity. This is accomplished through three stages:

1) Pulling them into the site where they take a challenge

2) They return and engage in their real life via the challenge (i.e. take 10 photos)

3) They return to the site to share their experience and prove they actually completed it

Why this method? It can be instantly applied, it is applicable to their life, and allows engagement with others.

Kanit Wongsuphasawat
Daniel Cohen
Rodolphe Courtier
Jeany Ngo
Angad Singh
Shishir Raman
Erik Park