Artist, Experience Designer, Possibilitarian
Elysa Fenenbock is an artist, experience designer, and educator who believes great design is medicine. She's been a Lecturer at the Stanford d.school since 2010. She co-built and teaches “Design for Play,” one of the school's longest-running courses, and created “Psychedelic Medicine × Design,” the first Stanford course on the subject, in its fifth year, blending design, medicine, policy, and indigenous wisdom. She was on the teaching team for “Forbidden Design,” where she shaped the experience design: a playful, immersive way into subjects like cannabis, EVs, death, and marriage, ones that feel forbidden, entrenched, or so new there's no map yet.
She helps people imagine what doesn't exist yet, then move from wide-open possibility to what to build first. She's done this across 20+ courses and with clients from startups to global companies. She's a messy artist, happiest with materials in her hands and her body in motion, raising a son who's a mover and maker in his own right.
Beyond Stanford, Elysa was Google's first Designer-in-Residence and co-created IDEO's Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators, used by 80,000+ teachers in 8 languages. She produced a global event with Dr. Jane Goodall for the Greater Good Science Center and designed a companion course on purpose and life transitions for 6,000 learners. She founded the School of Psychedelic Design and holds an Edmund Hillary Fellowship and an MFA in Design from Stanford.
She teaches, speaks, and loves collaborating on projects with purpose that help people do their most creative, most human work.