The d.school was built on and developed by the deep creative thinking of many.
Here we share the work of three of the d.school’s founding members that made an especially strong impact on how we teach, learn, and do. These include a 2007 guide to the d.school's thinking process, sketched by George Kembel; a downloadable poster outlining Creative Confidence created by David Kelley; and thoughts on creativity written in 1973 by emeritus d.school Academic Director, Bernie Roth. Included are downloadable PDFs of the archived originals. Feel free to download to print and share with others.
David Kelley's Creative Confidence Map
After a meeting of the minds with renowned psychologist Albert Bandura, David Kelley sketched out his philosophy of design thinking education. He outlines the details in depth in his book Creative Confidence and in his 2012 TED talk.
This poster presents a summary of that philosophy. Prepared for a talk and painted by hand in David's home studio, it is a map of the d.school pedagogy and a high-level treatise on how to unlock creative confidence in his students.
David describes it like this:
“The real goal of the d.school is to give students creative confidence, an idea similar to what Bandura calls “self-efficacy:” the ability to do what one sets out to do, in her own way, even while facing ambiguous circumstances.
The core trait that holds people back is fear: fear of failure, fear of being judged. Something about Design Thinking –– that it is human-centered and focused on helping others, or that it thrives on experimentation and small steps –– gives students permission students to try on new behaviors despite the fear.
The d.school’s job and the job of any design thinking teacher or mentor are to guide students to master new behaviors with a series incremental challenges until the frightening becomes the familiar and students happily embrace what was previously daunting. ”
George Kembel's d.school Operator's Handbook
George Kembel's "d.school Operator's Handbook" lies somewhere between a manual and a manifesto. It was created in 2007 as content for a strategy session at the then nascent d.school. Within its hand-drawn pages is an outline of the guiding principles behind the d.school philosophy and an early map of the workings of the organization.
George recalls the context and intent:
“We had just moved out of the trailers and our teams were asking for clarity on the d.school strategy as we evolved in our earliest days. The handbook was my response. The intent was to enculturate a distributed, emergent & evolving strategy as opposed to a centrally dictated one (a philosophy that I believed to be true to encourage creative habitats). The handbook was an outline for those in the d.community to engage with and design a d.strategy that was both true for their context and coherent with the collective unfolding of the d.school.
“Creative ecosystems like the d.school thrive when they are led collectively and guided in an emergent way. If done well, they can flourish in ways traditional systems often don’t – culturally, economically and scale of impact. This philosophy implies leading towards unknown outcomes as outcomes that create the greatest value and impact are not obvious in advance – if they are, it’s not innovation.
“This handbook was created as a specific artifact to seed a kind of distributed creative agency across our community of teams.”
The “d.school Operators Handbook” is a peek into our early history and thinking and as an example of how big ideas can start with broad sketches.
Bernie Roth's Design Process & Creativity, 1973
In the summer of 1973, Dr. Bernie Roth (now our emeritus Academic Director) was in residence at the University of Negev in their Mechanical Engineering Department (Bernie is also a famous roboticist).
While there, he put pen to paper and wrote down a manual of sorts called “Design Process and Creativity.” Inside are the bones of the practices we still teach today: including the idea that we all possess the ability to think creatively, we have blocks that limit creative and can be overcome and design & creativity can be stimulated through particular activities.
Bernie’s paper is very much related to the work and thinking that was happening in Stanford Design Division (as it was called at the time) through Bernie himself as well as professors like Bob McKim and Jim Adams. It's a short, inspiring read.
Credits
David Kelley is a founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school and a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford.
George Kembel is a d.school founder who currently runs a non-profit with the mission of unlocking the creative potential of people all over the world.
Bernie Roth is a founding member of the d.school, d.school Academic Director and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford.
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