This Fall, the brilliant Carissa Carter has decided to step down from her role as Academic Director. However, she’s not going far; she’ll be staying at the d.school focused primarily on teaching classes and advising students. I am thrilled that she will remain on the team and that her role is shifting in this direction.
Carissa’s accomplishments are wide-ranging and numerous, so I will just name some highlights. In nearly a decade as Academic Director, Carissa led the successful process to remake Stanford’s design degrees into interdisciplinary programs housed at the d.school, and in doing so, ensure students are prepared for a design field that is more interdisciplinary, more fluent across a range of technologies, more embedded in complex systems, and more aware of the implications of design work than ever before. She wrote The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data, co-authored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future, and launched the annual d.school yearbook. She developed and taught many university-wide elective courses on topics as wide ranging as emerging technologies, climate change, and data visualization. Her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain earned multiple awards, including Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 Design awards. And of course, she’s on everyone’s speed dial for all questions related to zine-making, the Olympics, or along the lines of “what’s THIS weird geological formation?”
On behalf of all of us at the d.school, thank you Carissa for your dedication, vision and leadership.
We are thrilled to announce that Jill Vialet has agreed to serve as Interim Academic Director. Jill is an exceptional education and social entrepreneur who has founded multiple organizations and scaled them. She co-founded one of these, Substantial Classrooms, after spending a year at the d.school as a Design Fellow in 2015-2016.
Now, Jill applies her decades of leadership and creative problem-solving to organizations undergoing transition. She recently served for a year as Interim Executive Director for the UC Berkeley Haas Center for Social Sector Leadership (CSSL), along with similar work in additional contexts. Jill brings a wealth of experience, a steady presence, and an irrepressible spirit of play and community to everything she does. I am grateful for her willingness to jump in as we make this important transition.
Jill and Carissa have been working closely together over the summer to ensure a smooth handoff. This fall, we'll launch a nationwide search for the next d.school Academic Director. More to come as the search unfolds. In the meantime, join us in thanking Carissa and welcoming Jill back.
