Stanford’s longstanding Product Design (undergraduate) and Design Impact (graduate) degree programs moved under the umbrella of the d.school as interdisciplinary programs (IDPs) on September 1, 2022.
An IDP is a degree program at Stanford that doesn’t fit neatly within any one department: Human Biology and Symbolic Systems are two of the best known (and loved) IDPs.
Moving these two programs to the d.school opens up opportunity to build a design program for the future, and offer a type of education that doesn’t yet exist.
And we’ve had a head start. Back in 2013, the d.school undertook a massive project around the future of higher education. We explored questions like:
How can we amplify the ways that learning is transformed by off-campus experiences?
How can students move through education at their own unique pace?
How can declaring a mission help students put their focus on purpose?
We’re beginning to infuse what we learned through the Stanford 2025 project to help us restructure and reimagine these programs in light of the challenges facing our world now and in the years to come. By combining the design depth and wisdom that’s evolved over decades with the radical multi-interdisciplinary approach of the d.school, design at Stanford will continue to evolve in a powerful new direction that meets the needs and supports the goals of current and future design students.
Although we have begun imaging what’s possible, our work to explore and shape our future approach to design education has only just begun.
Design degrees at Stanford have a history of stretching across disciplines.
Since they were created in the 1960s, Stanford’s Product Design degrees have been special programs. Professor John E. Arnold came to Stanford from MIT in 1958 and brought with him the idea that design engineering could be human-centered. It was a radical concept.
The interdisciplinary DNA of the product design programs was born, merging art, science, engineering, and rooting them in human values. Professors Bob McKim (Emeritus, Engineering) and Matt Kahn (Art) built upon Arnold’s idea to create the Product Design major and the graduate-level Joint Program in Design (JPD). David Kelley integrated even more professional design perspectives, and championed interdisciplinary collaboration across Stanford’s campus. Along the way, Stanford’s Product Realization Lab has been an invaluable partner in helping students bring form to their ideas.
This unique beginning and evolution of the design programs attracted a quirky “I don’t fit in a box” type of student. For a long time, there wasn’t a comparable program at other schools; it took a while for others to catch on to this unique blend of engineering and art. At Stanford, the undergraduate program in particular has grown in popularity over the years. The students who graduate from these programs feel a strong bond, often sharing similar and profoundly transformative experiences.
Throughout this history, one thing has remained constant: Design as a field, a practice, and a way to create impact is continuing to change and evolve. For example, designers make things with materials. Historically, these materials have only included media like metal and wood, then plastic and pixels. This is no longer the case. Today’s and tomorrow’s materials of making are complex, interconnected, and unpredictable. They are algorithms and blockchains, synthesized organisms and DNA sequences, massive data sets and social networks: mischievous materials that continue to morph after they are made or molded. We’ve entered an era when it’s near impossible to predict the impact of our creations because they change us as quickly as we make them. Put something new in the world, and it will ripple. It will grow, heal, evolve, and maybe even destroy. Possibilities will be magnified. Mistakes will be amplified. This ambiguous ecosystem for creative work is our future, and we must prepare Stanford students to be leaders in it.
Our overriding goal: To amplify the best aspects of the current programs, and bring freshness and evolution where it’s needed. It is critical to honor the legacy of these successful programs, while stewarding them in a direction that stays true to the trailblazing values of the program’s founders and their desire to reimagine what’s possible within design education. The result will be a BS Design and an MS Design, eventually replacing the Product Design major for undergraduates, and the Design Impact degree for masters students.
Four pillars guiding the evolution of design at Stanford.
In shaping these two new degree programs, we were led by four guiding and interconnected pillars, which were articulated by Carissa Carter, our Academic Director. Stanford design students will be equipped with the following knowledge, abilities, and perspectives:
Be ready to make in any medium. The knowledge and ability to prototype and make across a wide range of mediums, existing and emerging. Students can contextualize and apply design principles across disciplinary domains. They have broad material literacy and can build and analyze in many mediums, like physical products, code, policy, and emerging technologies.
Develop the care and responsibility to be leading stewards of the planet, all people, and the data we generate. Students know how to work slow and fast, with appreciation and respect for varying time scales of change. They learn from and with other humans and the environment. They realize the importance of equity, ethics, and implications.
Use quirky creativity to produce new-to-the-world ideas. Students see trends, spot new opportunities, and have the courage to boldly try something untested. They relish disciplinary intersections, embrace ambiguity, and can collaborate and communicate with a diverse group of people. They can set visions and the paths to them.
Learn how to learn and have the flexibility of adaptive learners. Students can synthesize and integrate ideas and experiences from across the different aspects of their Stanford education and beyond. They can articulate their own capacity and needs as adaptive learners when tackling open-ended problems. As emerging leaders, they can establish the conditions for others’ creativity to emerge.
In addition to these four pillars, we leaned heavily on the collective insights and wisdom from those who’ve taught in the PD program over the years in order to shape the two programs. As a result, the undergrad and grad degree programs are becoming even more interdisciplinary. PD has always prided itself on bringing disparate fields together (ME, Art, Psych, CS). Now students will have the opportunity to take classes in even more disciplines. This will be reflected more strongly in our leadership and teaching community. We’ll be forging new faculty relationships across departments.
Here are a few exciting ideas that characterize the new design programs:
Design 1: A New Introductory Class. Currently, students don’t really get the opportunity to get into the “meat” of PD until their junior year (with a few exceptions). The development of a new introductory course, Design 1, will give degree exposure to students in their first year at Stanford. It is meant to attract students to the major, particularly those that might not have considered an engineering opportunity, and also help them start to calibrate where they’d want to specialize.
Deeper Integration of Ethics and Implications. Students are challenging instructors with increasing care and concern about the impact of their work in the world. Ethics and implications work will lead off and be integrated throughout the design fundamentals sequence.
Methods Depths: Choosing What Making Abilities You Want to Specialize In. Product Design has always been more of a generalist degree, although student interests have been broadening over time (physical PD, UI/UX, design research, entrepreneurship, social impact, and so on). Students will now get to gain professional fluency and elevate their skills and abilities in one of three selected methods focus areas (Physical Design and Manufacturing / AI and Digital User Experience / Human Behavior and Multi-stakeholder Research).
Domain Focus Areas: Deeply Understanding a Context for Impact. Students will also choose a Domain Focus Area to take a few classes in. This should be an area of interest to them, like a domain or industry, where they’d be excited to apply their design abilities in context, and where we believe human-centered design could add real value. Students will take three courses: one foundational, one applied, and one that examines future horizons. We will begin with these five focus areas:
Climate and Environment
Living Matter
Global Development and Poverty
Healthcare and Health Technology Innovation
Oceans
We will plan to add others and/or modify these depending on student interest. We’re interested in allowing students to propose their own domain area as well as an “honors” option.
Capstone: The Culmination of Method Depth x Domain Focus. Currently, there’s one Capstone option for everyone, and students often rely on their own self-taught skills and developed interests (outside of PD) to inform how they choose a Capstone project. Within the new IDP, students will choose from several flavors of Capstone experiences, and will scope and execute design work that integrates their methods and domain focus areas.
Credit
Kelly Schmutte