By: Featured

In light of the new degree program, we’re taking a new and bold approach to developing our electives. 

Historically, electives were the entirety of the d.school. The d.school was an interdisciplinary hub where any Stanford student on campus could learn how design might work in their area of study. With the creation of the IDP, the undergraduate and graduate Design degree programs, how we think about our electives program has shifted. We still have an interdisciplinary focus, and we still invite all Stanford students to take classes with us. However, with the degree programs now being at the center or our work, we’re seeing the electives in a new light. 

Here’s a metaphor: If the degree programs are the Sun, the electives are the planets orbiting that Sun. The degree programs are at the center of our work, but the electives are still a dynamic part of our solar system. And as we’re learning more about how this new solar system works, we’ve made two big changes.

The first change is to give our classes a longer runway for launch. Prior to the IDP, we selected courses on a quarter-by-quarter basis. We’re now selecting all courses for the academic year the winter prior, giving instructors much more time to develop resources, gather materials, and find exciting partners to work with.

This change is helping us to focus on Wild Ways of Making. The d.school has always been a place where students can literally get hands-on with ways of making. We’ve always done this with use of our prototyping cart, a workshop on wheels that can easily move from class-to-class and that has everything needed for low-resolution prototyping: popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners, Post-It Notes and blue tape, googly eyes and more. But as the tools of design have exponentially expanded into emerging technologies, having more lead time to develop a class gives us more opportunity to build relationships and partner with hardware-specific organizations that may lend us gear to test and explore. 

The second change is looking at our electives through the lens of Intro to Advanced Orbital Mechanics–which classes have more of a gravitational pull toward our degree programs? Our new cosmic relationship to d.school electives gives us a stronger ability to create a greater spectrum of classes, from introductory classes for everyone to more advanced classes catered to those in our degree programs who have developed some design skills. 

The ability to frame classes from introductory to advanced is incredibly helpful in shaping our curriculum. For example, the class Redesigning Finance is now in its fifth or sixth year, but it has always struggled to figure out where it should be positioned. The class introduces students to the global financial system and all of its lovely design opportunities. However, given the complexity of both finance and design, the class struggled with finding the right student enrollment. Unless you include advanced design students or advanced finance students you’re going to have to teach people the 101s of either finance or design–and both are incredibly challenging to introduce separately, let alone together. With this new point of view around electives, Redesigning Finance can now position itself as an advanced course appropriate for students from the undergrad and graduate program who have been exposed to the basics of design and who are really interested in applying their work to the world of finance. With this shift, we can really get into the nitty gritty of actually applying design through products or services.

These huge shifts to the electives program have been wild and messy, exhilarating and a little exhausting. But we’re already seeing the benefits of the changes in incredibly inspiring ways. 

Take a look at three classes that exemplify the benefits of these shifts:

Timeless ways of making are paired with social activism to teach visual expression in PRINT ON PURPOSE taught by Patrick Fenton, Milan Drake, and Indya McGuffin. 

A radical collaboration with Stanford’s Dept of Aeronautics and Astronautics explores emerging space technology through a human-centered design lens in the IntroSem HOW TO SHOOT FOR THE MOON taught by Debbie Soneski, Miki Sode, and Seamus Yu Harte.

Dive into state-of-the-art technologies to gain an understanding of how people and society is being shaped by virtual reality, augmented reality, the metaverse, and more in DESIGNING FOR EXTENDED REALITIES taught by YC Sun, Payam Tabrizian, and Ariam Mogos.

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