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

Research as Design
From Prototype to Fruition
Design for Justice: Fines, Fees, and Bail after Ferguson

Pop-Outs

Medical Device Design
The Tactics of Creativity
Lens and Pens
Physical Frameworks
Mindful Activism
The Power of Immersion
Design for Civic Engagement
Design + Argument
Long Distance Design
Universal Design

Workshop

Research As Design: Redesign Your Research Process

• May 5 1:00-5:00pm
• May 6 10:00am-5:00pm
• the 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 at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
• Lindley Mease, Co-Founder of Blue Heart.

Questions

anja@dschool.stanford.edu, lindleymease@gmail.com

Workshop

From Prototype to Fruition

Take your idea from the drawing board and bring it to fruition and sustainability

• Friday, April 21, 12:30-3:20 PM
• Friday, April 28, 12:30-3:20 PM
• Friday, May 5, 12:30-3:20 PM
• Studio 1

Whether a product or a service, this series of workshops will help you “go to market.” Whether its future belongs in a for-profit, a non-profit, a social venture or as part of an existing organization, students will learn how to “design” the right business model and allow your offering to become sustainable and have as wide an impact as possible.  Like with design thinking, you will develop prototypes (but these will be business model prototypes), test and iterate.

The workshops are based on the popular GSB class, “Startup Garage.” You will interact with professors and students who have been through the class, and you will benefit from the classes' videos and workbooks.

Teaching Team

• Stefanos Zenios, The Investment Group of Santa Barbara Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Operations, Information & Technology.
• Matthew Glickman, Lecturer in Management

Questions

stefzen@stanford.edu, mattgli@stanford.edu

Workshop

Design for Justice: Fines, Fees, and Bail after Ferguson

• April 13, 4 - 7pm
• April 14, 10am - 5pm — on site at courts 
• April 15, 10am - 5pm
• May 25, 4 - 7pm
• May 26, 10am - 5pm — on site at courts 
• May 27, 10am - 5pm
• Studio TBD

In the past years, stories have come out of Ferguson, New Orleans, and other cities, about how courts impose huge fees and fines on people for small infractions (like missing a stop sign, driving without insurance, or missing a court date). If you can't pay this money, often you spend time in jail -- and you and your family end up in debt. Most often, these punitive fines, fees, and bails are put on low-income people.

In this workshop, we'll take a human-centered, agile approach to address these injustices. We will work closely with policy experts, public defenders, court officials, and other experts to identify promising new interventions, and then prototype and test them.  Our work will be on two tracks: front-end changes that could help people directly, and back-end changes in policy, court structure, and rules that could make the system more just. By the end of the class, we will have refined proposals of new tech, services, organizations, rules, or other interventions for partners to pilot.

We encourage non-law students to apply! The ideal student will have a strong interest in public service - detailed knowledge about the legal system is not required.

Teaching Team

• Margaret Hagan, Director of the Legal Design Lab, Stanford Law School
• Kursat Ozenc, Senior User Experience Designer, SAP Labs

Questions

mdhagan@stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Medical Device Design: Observation and Hands on Training Approach

• April 8, 9am-12pm
• April 9, 9am-2pm
• The Center For Advanced Pediatric And Perinatal Education (CAPE)

Simulation learning fits well within the design-thinking paradigm: empathize (through immersion), define (the needs or problems), ideate (brainstorm), prototype (iterative low resolution style) and test with users (repeat). Creative people tend to work in two different ways: either as finders or makers. Finders demonstrate their creativity through discovery. They are driven to understand and to find explanations for phenomena not well understood. Makers are equally creative, but they are driven to synthesize what they know in new constructions, arrangements, patterns, compositions and concepts. In this class we will focus on what finders naturally do: observe, inquire and identify gaps and/or problems. Our class focuses on practicing the first two phases of the design-thinking paradigm: 1) empathize and 2) define, with a complex medical setting as our backdrop. Students will engage in concrete experience, abstract conceptualization and reflective observation in order to identify and package needs through storytelling.

During our weekend workshop, you will observe and learn (hands-on) how to perform two neonatal and obstetric medical procedures, then further analyze the scenarios by watching the video afterwards during a debrief session. Students will also interview the clinicians on our teaching team. Synthesis of informa­tion gathered will follow in student groups. Finally, students will present the “story in,” or what was perceived as problematic, and then package insights and potential innovations as a “story out”. Students groups will present their insights and new framework to a panel of designers and clinical experts. Homework will be reading journal articles. Prior design experience is not required. An interest in medical device/healthcare innovation and human factors is highly recommended.

Teaching Team

• Jules Sherman, CEO Maternal Life, Consulting Designer For Stanford Medical School
• Janene Fuerch, MD, FAAP Neonatologist, Stanford Bio Design Fellow
• Ruth Ann Crystal, MD, OB/GYN
• Julie Arafeh, RN/MSN

Contact Email

julessherman@alumni.stanford.edu

Pop-Out

The Tactics of Creativity: A Crash Course

A practical guide to making new ideas.

• April 15, 9am - 6pm
• Exploratorium, San Francisco

Everyone has their own take on the process of creativity, but when the rubber meets the road, there’s a bunch of stuff that just works. This workshop is devoted to the introduction and practice of a large collection of hard-won and battle-tested creativity tactics. From breaking the internal and external roadblocks to creative thinking, and unlocking the black box of making new ideas, to finding that extraordinary needle in the proverbial haystack of ordinariness—all these tricks and tactics share a common root and collectively, they form a powerful creativity platform relentlessly used by such fakers as Picasso and Shakespeare.

Teaching Team

• John Cassidy: Klutz Publishing
• Charlotte Burgess-Auburn: d.school

Questions

johnbcassidy@gmail.com

Pop-Out

Lens and Pens

Learn to sketch in one 60th of a second: using photography to see in two dimensions

• Saturday, April 15,   9:30am  5:00pm
• Palo Alto Art Center

In this one-day intensive workshop, get ready to travel from three dimensions to two, by way of the photographic picture plane.

Effective visual communication -- whether your interest is in ideation, documentation, or creative self-expression – is grounded in observational drawing. In this class you will leverage photos as valuable tools for developing observational drawing skills. They can bridge the daunting abyss between our intentions and what we actually create on the page.

Scholars have established that lenses were used by the 16th century great masters to create their highly-detailed and realistic paintings and drawings. Those lenses, and the camera obscura that incorporated them, gradually evolved over the centuries, until the modern camera was invented.  Throughout this process, many artists used whatever pre-photographic/photographic technology was available to them at the time to effectively help them represent the 3-dimensional world. We will continue this long-standing tradition by teaming up freehand location drawing with contemporary “picture plane” devices, including digital cameras, to evolve our own abilities to portray three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.

Teaching Team

• Joel Simon, President, Sea for Yourself, Inc.
• Jane Kriss, Jane Kriss Studio

Questions
janekriss@gmail.com

Pop-Out

Physical Frameworks

How to find opportunity by bringing diagrams to life

• May 20,  10am -3pm
• May  21,  10am -3pm
• Lucille M. Nixon Elementary School

What if there was one image that could explain it all? Design Frameworks––simple diagrams to explain complex problems––are visual tools to see problems in a new way. In this class we will use physical manipulation of objects to diagram problems and build generative, useful frameworks. Creating a design framework is like putting up scaffolding on a building. On a building, scaffolding allows you gain new access points (not just the front door), work on it from the top-down or bottom-up, and get a better view of hidden architectural details. On a problem, a framework lets you attack it from different angles, plug-in or extract information, and to see opportunities that you might not have been able to otherwise. Working “in the wild” we will literally and figuratively learn what it is like to build a frame around a problem. At this location we will practice dimensioning information to create meaningful insights, become comfortable with attacking problems from different angles and present inventive and well-crafted diagrams that are easily understood. Be it a presentation to your boss, an approach to a project, or just a way to explain the current states of things, frameworks help you see the open space to guide decision making. Learn to chart the course and plot opportunity by getting your hands dirty through the design of diagrams.

Teaching Team

• Stephanie Szabo, Teaching Fellow at Stanford University
• Lauren Braun, Head of Product and Marketing at Naked Labs
• Susie Kang, Innovation Strategist at Salesforce

Questions

stephanie@dschool.stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Mindful Activism

Becoming Aware of your Assumptions

• Saturday April 8, 10am - 2pm
• Wednesday April 12, 4 - 8pm
• East Bay Meditation Center, Oakland and San Francisco.

Over the past several years living in and around the Stanford community, we have been inspired by student activism in response to injustice. Political, racial, and environmental causes call us to take action and respond. However, ideas about how best to respond to injustice can vary greatly. It can be difficult to define the best course of action that takes into account the differing needs and perspectives of the variety of stakeholders involved.

This pop-out challenges you to pause, empathize, reflect inward, and clearly define the problem and your assumptions in order to take mindful action. Our hope is that when supporting important causes students will take the time to ask themselves a series of questions - am I considering the real needs of the communities I am acting on behalf of? What is the best way to use the resources I have at my disposal? Have I communicated my plans for action with other stakeholders in my community? And have I considered how my actions will impact myself, the cause, and the people around me in the long-term?

We will meet with community organizers from a variety of contexts to broaden our understanding of what effective, ethical, and impactful activism can look like. We will also structure time and space for you to prototype different personal reflective and mindfulness practices, so that when you are inspired to take action supporting or opposing an issue you have a toolkit and process that you are confident and comfortable using. Our hope is that participants come away from the pop-out with clear examples of effective activism, personal experience in what mindfully informed activism can mean as individuals, and that they will share these practices with their communities on and off campus in ways that support meaningful causes and strengthen community.

Teaching Team

• Laura Pickel, d.school, SAP
• Emily Tsiang, Stanford Life Design, Parallax Press / Wake Up
• John Armstrong, Stanford Life Design, Stanford Graduate School of Education

Questions

lpickel@stanford.edu, etsiang@stanford.edu, jarmstrong@stanford.edu

Pop-Out

The Power of Immersion

Embedding with people to inspire design

• May 20, 9am - 5pm
• May 21, 9am – 5pm
• In families' homes within a 30 min drive from campus (from EPA to Menlo to Redwood City)

Do you often feel there is a lot more to someone's story? Immersion is an opportunity to go behind the scenes and understand someone's story in a way that goes beyond traditional interview techniques.

Dig deep as you immerse yourself in intimate moments, such as a family at home on a Saturday morning—which are usually sheltered from the outside world. You’ll design for the moments and rituals of family to improve their everyday experience, to provide learning opportunities for kids, and to address challenges they’re facing. You’ll try early prototypes with the families and get their feedback.

You’ll flex your design muscles with specific focus on empathy through immersion, connecting individual insights to broader themes, and prototyping for feedback. This will be a whole weekend project, including time with a family Saturday/Sunday with design time interspersed.

Teaching Team

• Sally Madsen, IDEO
• Jessica Munro, Entrepreneurs by Design

Questions

jess@dschool.stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Design for Civic Engagement

• May 20, 1 - 5pm
• May 21, 1 - 5pm 
• YBCA, San Francisco

Services are everywhere in today’s economy, and it’s not just coffee-buying apps, grocery delivery, travel, or theme parks. It’s healthcare, housing, and government (to name a few). We live in turbulent, complex, and challenging times. Now more than ever we should be applying our design toolkit to help others navigate, take action, and feel like they are making a difference in the issues that matter to them.

In this class, you will be designing a new service concept that helps people feel they are able to make positive social impact, through the lens of civic engagement. In the process, you will be exposed to key methodology in service design projects: service value positioning, service ecosystem mapping, service blueprinting, and service simulation. We will focus on how designing for service enables us to think more holistically and apply a systems approach to our design challenges. This end-to-end process will expanding your toolkit and empower you to build your own strong service design practice, while applying your new skills to creating a new service experience aimed to deliver positive impact.

What you will gain from the pop-out:

• Foundational understanding of service design as a design practice, and the difference between UI/UX/other design disciplines and service design
• Practice in applying core service design methods to a real design challenge, to make real social impact through the lens of civic engagement
• A new perspective that helps you design beyond the touchpoint and think more holistically about designing for service

Teaching Team

• Holly May Mahoney; Teaching Fellow, Stanford d.school
• Megan Erin Miller; Service Design Manager, Stanford University IT

Questions

holly@dschool.stanford.edu, meganem@stanford.edu

Pop-Out

Design + Argument

How might we use argument to make better designs?

• May 12, 6 - 8:30p
• May 13, 10a - 6p
• May 14, 10a - 6p

In Design + Argument we will explore the relationship between design thinking and argumentation, asking—

(a) How might we use design thinking as a way of constructing strong arguments? 

(b) How might the methods and theories used to construct strong arguments be used in design thinking to create a more purposeful design outcome?

A good argument is constructed step by step, brick by brick— it is the foundation in which an idea, action, or theory is built. A good argument is the result of good design.

Using human centered design we will investigate the structure of argument within spoken and writing language. We will also investigate the different forms and uses of the arguments that shape  communication and thought. These learnings will be introduced into the design thinking process towards the goal of constructing new alternative design outcomes and alternate forms of argument. 

Students who register for this Pop-out will leave with (1) a multi-faceted understanding of argument, (2) tools to help deconstruct, analyze and design arguments, (3) tools to foster more intention and purpose in design, and (4) an awareness of Design + Argument as a tool not simply for dispute and assertion, but as a tool that can influence and enhance all aspects of one’s life.

 Teaching Team

• Kareem Collie, Teaching Fellow at the d.school
• Jose Fernando Torres, Legal Design Fellow Stanford Law School
• Rebekah Baglini, Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at Stanford

Questions

kareem@dschool.stanford.edu, jftorres@stanford.edu, rbkh@stanford.edu

Pop-Out 

Long Distance Design

A remote collaboration experiment between Stanford and Malaysia

• Stanford: Friday, May 5 and Saturday, May 6  (5pm to 10pm)
• Kuala Lumpur: Saturday, May 6 and Sunday May 7 (8am to 1pm)

Most of the time when we practice design thinking, the assumption is that we need to be there in person. We need to interview and observe people in person to be able to see their full range of behaviors, including their body language and facial expressions. We need to be able to work with our teammates in person to be able to make sense of insights together, to brainstorm together, to make things tangible together.

And yet… being there together in person isn’t always a viable option. Sometimes, you don’t have the money to keep flying team members thousands of miles so that they can all be in the same physical location. Sometimes, there could be great value in collaborating continuously over a longer period of time with team members who live very far from each other.

So what if we thought of remote collaboration for design thinking teams differently? Instead of thinking of it as a direct substitute for in person collaboration, what if we thought of it as its own animal, with its own set advantages and constraints? And what if we approached how we collaborate remotely with a design thinking mindset?

In this pop-up class, you will experience and explore remote collaboration for design thinking teams. You will experiences what it is like to work in a multinational design thinking team that has to design together through remote collaboration. Half of the students in the class will be at Stanford, half students in the class will be in Kuala Lumpur.

You might develop a greater appreciation of just how much is possible with current technology, including how it might be used in unexpected ways in building empathy, sharing insights, sense-making, and prototyping. And you might get a better sense of how better remote collaboration in design thinking might help promote greater diversity in cultural perspectives and radical collaboration over time.

Teaching Team

• Glenn Fajardo, Director of Co-Design Practice, TechSoup Global Network, TechSoup
• Kal Joffres, CEO, Tandemic
• Zvika Krieger, Representative to Silicon Valley, U.S. Department of State // Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation

Questions

glenn.fajardo@gmail.com, kal@joffr.es, z.krieger@gmail.com

Pop-Out 

Universal Design

Universal Design = Innovation x Everybody

• April 4, 1 – 6pm
• April 11, 3 – 7pm
• Google Headquarters, Mountain View & California School for the Blind/Deaf

If you want to build solutions for a better world, you need to understand the people first. 1 Billion people in today’s world live with a disability. Research shows that opportunities for people with disabilities are not the same. One big challenge is that unemployment rates among people with disabilities are very high.

People with disabilities need to operate a world that too often didn’t consider their needs when making design decisions. We believe inclusive design is a great enabler for those with disabilities, but moreover it can be really beneficial for everyone. Learning from extreme users can lead to even more interesting innovation. Inclusive design demands that innovation leaders use the diversity of users and their perspectives to strengthen an innovative culture that challenges what’s possible. You can become a leader of inclusive design and contribute to a truly accessible world: Changing your perspective with empathy for your user’s perspective; Creating equal opportunities for everyone to participate; Testing new accessibility concepts through rapid prototyping; In this course, we use design as a segway for inclusion to support each of these outcomes, so you can experiment with ways to build truly accessible concepts.

The Pop-Out will be structured as two sessions separated by one week of independent experimentation in multidisciplinary teams. In the first session, teams will define opportunities based on the research method of participatory observation. In the experimentation week, teams will synthesize their findings and develop ideas to work towards a more inclusive world. In the final session, teams will present their learnings in form of rapid prototypes and we will do a larger synthesis across teams. This Pop Out is open to Stanford students, Google professionals and industry leaders who have previous basic experience (courses or equivalent) with design thinking.

Teaching Team

• Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, PhD,
  Co-Director, University Innovation Fellows
  Adjunct Professor, d.school
• Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt,
  Chief Innovation Evangelist, Google Inc.
  Adjunct Professor, d.school, Stanford University
• Jen Devins, Accessibility UX Design Lead Google Apps
• Astrid Weber, UX Research Lead for Accessibility Engineering at Google

Questions

leticia@dschool.stanford.edu, fgpferdt@google.com, aweber@google.com, jendevins@google.com