d.school Yearbook 2021-22

CREDITS

Editorial Team

Jennifer Brown, Laurie Moore, and Charlotte

Burgess–Auburn

Data Acquisition and Analysis

Megan Stariha

Creative Direction, Visual Design, and Typography

Daniel Frumhoff and June Shin

Typeface Design and Lettering

June Shin

Photography Patrick Beaudouin

Photo Retouching

Daniel Frumhoff and Patrick Beaudouin

Michael Hirshon

Michael Hirshon

Radostina Georgieva

David Alabo

Michael Hirshon

Rick Griffith

Reina Takahashi

Scott Teplin

Jori Tytus

Michael Hirshon and Khristopher “Squint”

Sandifer with Hope Meng

John E. Arnold

Lala Openi

Art Consultants

Scott Doorley

Nan Cao

Proofreader

Natasha Bach

Colophon

Ziza by Novo Typo

Signifier and The Future by Klim Type Foundry

Neue Haas Unica by Toshi Omagari

All of the work we do is a collective effort made possible by the d.school team, our teaching community, and the students we serve.

Note: Use the QR code at the end of each article to learn more about the work coming out of the d.school.

Stanford’s Two New/ Old Design Degrees: Designing Design Education for the Future

Kelly Schmutte

Creativity in Research Scholars: Supporting PhD Students with Design Capabilities

Jonathan Feiber, Saara Khan, Lars Neustock, and Irene Alisjahbana

COVID Signs: Returning to the d.school Space

Olga Saadi and Hannah Joy Root

Reimagining Campus Life

Glenn Fajardo

Stepping into the Bay: Extreme Immersion

Manasa Yeturu

The Moral Imperative of Teaching Every Student Tech Ethics

Karen Ingram and Megan Stariha

Don’t Throw Out the Joy: Creative Direction at the d.school

Scott Doorley

Coffee with Courtlandt: JEDI Training at the d.school

Courtlandt Butts

Designing Bridges: Building Belonging and Community at the d.school

Milan Drake

REP Magazine

Ariam Mogos

Creative Acts for Curious People: Creating a Collection that Celebrates the d.school

Sarah Stein Greenberg

Introducing the d.school Guides: Creative Ways of Cultivating Resourcefulness and Inventiveness

Scott Doorley and Charlotte

Burgess Auburn

Everything Is a Collaboration: Books Edition

Scott Doorley

Faces of Change: Work from the University Innovation Fellows

Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Humera Fasihuddin, Lupe Makasyuk, Laurie Moore, and Ghanashyam Shankar

Changing the Conversation: About School Safety sam seidel and Barry Svigals

Design in Action: A Case Study from Designing for Social Systems

Thomas Both, Nadia Roumani, and Susie Chang

Masters of Creativity: Connecting Alumni and Worldwide Learners with a Creative Community

Jeremy Utley

Building Future Foundations

Scott Doorley, Leticia Britos

Cavagnaro, Lisa Kay Solomon

Becoming Good Ancestors: The Urgency of Long-Term Thinking

Lisa Kay Solomon

Visions of the Future: A Radical Invitation toward Shaping Collective Futures for Education and Beyond

Ariel Raz, Louie Montoya, Lisa Kay Solomon, and Laura McBain

Positive Deviance For Educators: Using the Brilliance of Our Communities to Find Existing Solutions to Persistent Problems

Devon Young, Jessica Brown, Marc Chun, Peter Worth

Get Down with the Mission: The K12 Lab’s New Learning Deck on Taking Action toward Racial Justice

Jessica Brown, Louie Montoya, and sam seidel

Data

2021–2022 d.school

Contributors

Welcome to a new type of d.school yearbook

By Sarah Stein Greenberg

First initiated by our Academic Director Carissa Carter, in the past five years our yearbook has chronicled the developments and ideas coming out of our academic program. The document you have here represents a transition: as our academic team takes on greater responsibilities for our new degree programs (see page 6), we are starting to publish an annual roundup that showcases learning, innovation, and impact from across the entire d.school.

Introduction Introduction Introduction

he d.school is navigating a time of tremendous transition, both in the world as a whole, and right here on campus. We are aiming to fuse the rigor and depth of our new degree programs with the interdisciplinary vitality of our university-wide course offerings. We’re reimagining our models for spreading design and creating impact alongside professional learners, and we’re developing new approaches for design to meet the most complex and rapidly emerging challenges of our time. This work will unfold in the coming years.

In addition to sharing highlights from classes and our work in supporting a vibrant, interdisciplinary, inclusive

examples throughout this collection that touch on our projects with K12 educators and young people, social sector leaders, and with students and faculty in higher education from around the world. You’ll hear from our teams who have been focused on producing innovative tools, books, and spreading design methods broadly, and even explore some hints and glimmers of where we see design itself heading.

Whatever and however you design, whether you’re interested in learning or teaching, looking for new tools or inspiration, a prolific contributor to our shared work already, or just hoping to get to know the d.school as a whole a little better, I hope you encounter many ideas and resources in this collection that meet you right where you are.

Learn Learn & & & Teach

As campus comes back to life with renewed vitality, our approach to academics embraces the reality that our context is our curriculum. As you’ll read in this section, d.school faculty and students have been designing new ways to navigate a hybrid world, inspiring students from all backgrounds to engage with emerging technology, and interweaving cutting edge research across disciplines with creative abilities. Not only does context deeply shape what and how we teach, so too does community. Read on to see how we are designing

bridges to support students who don’t (yet) feel at home at the d.school, making art-inspired reminders that cue COVID –safe behaviors throughout our space, and crafting a visual language across the work we produce that is a pluralistic expression of joy and hope for the future. Up first: how we are reimagining Stanford’s design degrees to help future students adapt and thrive in a changing world.

Stanford’s Two New/Old Design Degrees

Stanford’s Two New/Old Design

Stanford’s ew/Old Design Degrees

By Kelly Schmutte Designing Design Education for the Future

Product Design and Design

tarting on September 1, 2022, Stanford’s longstanding Product Design (undergraduate) and Design Impact (graduate) degree programs moved under the umbrella of the d.school as interdisciplinary programs (IDPs). 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 an opportunity to build a design program for the future.

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 imagining what’s possible, our work to explore and shape our future approach to design education has only just begun.

Design Degrees at Stanford: 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 creative. It was a radical concept.

The interdisciplinary DNA of the product design programs was born, merging art, science, and engineering, and rooting them in human values. Professors Bob McKim (Engineering) and Matt Kahn (Art) built upon John’s idea to create the Product Design major and the graduate–level Joint Program in Design (JPD), both of which emphasized a human centered, visual thinking, design approach. Rolf Faste and 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.

Stanford’s

Impact degree programs have moved to the d.school–signaling a chance to offer a type of education that doesn’t yet exist.

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. The IDP proposal for the new degrees articulates it as follows: “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:

1 2 3 4

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.

A 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.

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 response. We’re interested in allowing students to propose their own domain area as well as plan to offer 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.

Creativity in

Supporting PhD Students with Design Capabilities

Creativity in Scholars TEACH & LEARN

14

Creativity

Research Scholars

Creativity Scholars

tudents committed for two quarters to explore a new project at the intersection of their PhD research and growing design abilities. The first quarter focused on applying learning design to various research mindsets and the second quarter focused on pursuing their individual and paired projects with these leveraged intersection points.

The way the students were able to intersect their learnings was beyond what we could have envisioned. Each project the students pursued represented a new take on their PhD work and culminated in something novel and unique. Here are some snapshots of their projects.

The Discotracker

Jannicke Pearkes (Physics)

Jannicke’s PhD work is focused on experiments via the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 km long particle accelerator sitting between Switzerland and France. She studies the Higgs boson—a particle first

discovered in 2012. By analyzing data from trillions of proton–proton collisions, she looks for collisions where two Higgs bosons are produced at once. Jannicke’s goal was to help create a physical understanding of how the Large Hadron Collider works, by creating a realistic representation on a smaller scale of the particle accelerator. She built (using mirrors, glass, wood, LEDs) an artistic representation of this particle accelerator, which will be on display at the sixtieth anniversary of SLAC and remain on permanent display afterward.

She says, "The Discotracker is an artistic interpretation of a particle detector being built by my research group at SLAC. Every 25 ns, particles collide in the center and produce new particles, which travel outward through the detector. Once constructed, the detector will be flown to Switzerland where it will be installed in the heart of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. After installation the detector is incredibly hard to access. This project aims to bring the beauty of tracking detectors to a wider audience.”

Stanford’s PhD students are often hungry for the tools to take their ideas to the next level. We equip PhD students with design research mindsets to enable the students to explore their research in creative new ways.

Gravity Sandbox

Jared Blanchard (Aerospace Engineering)

Jared studies orbital dynamics, specifically the three-body problem, and wanted to find a medium to teach orbital dynamics in a compelling and engaging way. After exploring and brainstorming several different methods, Jared found VR to be this medium. During the class, Jared taught himself Unity and prototyped several different VR apps to bring his research into the virtual world. He refined his Unity skills, UX skills, and created Gravity Sandbox (which is available for download on the VR App store).

He says, “My project was a VR experience designed to build orbital mechanics intuition in students. I had been wanting to make something in VR for quite a while, and this class provided me the perfect opportunity to do so. Following YouTube tutorials on how to use Unity, I created Gravity Sandbox and uploaded it to the Oculus store. Users can throw spacecraft into orbit around the Earth, create their own asteroid belt, and interact with the classical orbital elements in VR.”

Emotive Design

Tara Srirangarajan (Psychology)

Tara’s PhD work combines insights from behavioral experiments and neuroimaging to understand the dynamic neural substrates of emotion. Despite great advances in our understanding of sensory and motor neural processes, it remains a mystery how the nervous system gives rise to our subjective experiences. Tara sought to tackle this by exploring the intersection of emotional meaning and visual shapes, colors, and movements of objects. Her exploration led her to create a mapping of Emotive Designs that she correlated back to movement, shape, color, and texture.

She says, “I explored how different visual attributes like shape, color, and movement can be effective tools in conveying emotional meaning. These principles have been applied across diverse domains such as graphic design, marketing, animation, and film. I began by analyzing what specific features are most effective in evoking affective responses, based on empirical work in visual neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. Merging these lines of thought and finding creative intersections between them was a wonderful opportunity to delve deeper into the interplay between emotion and aesthetics.”

GradsTeachGrads

Nandita Bhaskhar (Electrical Engineering) & Tess Hegarty (Civil and Environmental Engineering)

Nandita’s PhD is on Machine Learning for Healthcare to aid in data acquisition and processing, while Tess’s research is on Climate Change and how it affects marginalized people worldwide. The two of them teamed up to tackle an issue that they saw outside of their core thesis work, but is deeply rooted in their experience as graduate students. They designed a new way for graduate students to learn from, teach, and mentor each other, and to make sense of the many resources that Stanford provides. GradsTeachGrads is a collaborative wiki by and for Stanford grad students, housing a collection of grad student experiences and advice and a curated database of resources from across campus and beyond.

Nandita says, “Grad school can tend to get lonely and isolating as we progress further in our research. I strongly believe that it doesn't have to be. While each of us have our unique paths, there are experiences that everyone goes through. Through GradsTeachGrads, we can share and learn from each other.”

Tess says, “I think we all have something to teach and we all have something to learn from one another.

I hope GradsTeachGrads helps increase the feeling that we are all on the same team in working on research oriented toward making the world a better place, and so it makes sense for us all to ask for and offer help.”

COVID Signs COVID Signs COVID Signs

Returning to the d.school Space

By Olga Saadi and Hannah Joy Root

In anticipation of staff and students returning to campus, the d.school’s Community Manager, Hannah Joy Root, alongside Design Impact masters student, Olga Saadi, designed a series of COVID safety signs to be used in the d.school’s space.

These kinetic, light–utilizing, colorful art pieces aren’t your typical COVID protocol posters. While these signs promote d.school rules (wear a mask, wash your hands) and values (practice empathy), they also act as an art installation. As the light changes throughout the day, so does the art. The transparent sheets adapt and absorb light, so as the sun and studio lights flicker and change in intensity, the art follows.

Reimagining Campus Reimagining Campus Reimagining Campus

By Glenn Fajardo

As we returned to campus in Fall 2021, after a year and a half of emergency remote teaching, many of us had ambivalent feelings. We felt joy when we saw everyone face-to-face again. And we felt confusion when faced with campus life that clearly wasn’t the same as it was in March 2020.

Reimagining Campus Life Reimagining Campus Life Reimagining Campus Life

he root word for confusion is the Latin confusionem, which means “a mingling, mixing, blending.” We can think of “confusion” as when we feel mixed up in a way that doesn’t yet make sense to us–and that’s how many of us, educators and students alike, felt when we returned to campus amid the pandemic.

Through the confusion, we could sense that we’re not going back to the way things were. We’re going forward to a new hybrid reality, where in-person and virtual mix.

Design is uniquely suited to help us navigate this new world. Design’s mindsets and methods can help us

create human interactions that feel more human in this confusingly unfamiliar new reality. Design can help us make “mixed” feel less “mixed up.”

In Reimagining Campus Life: Designing Hybrid Experiences, our students prototyped ways to make the hybrid campus experience feel more human.

A seemingly simple viewpoint shift was the turning point. Once we stopped pitting virtual against in–person and instead noticed and distilled the strength of each, the floodgates of possibilities opened up. Our students prototyped hybrid interactions that could be more inclusive, connected, adaptive, and resilient.

Here are a few of their reflections:

Alex Liang

I never thought I would be able to combine space and senses with hybrid and virtual settings. To me that’s something super new.

What if hybrid becomes the norm in the future?

Candice Kim

I never thought I would be able to really parse through the magic of in–person interactions and be able to really think about how we recreate that magic or the heart of in-person interactions in different contexts through virtual interactions. Instead of thinking about recreating the in-person experience, I’ve started looking at virtual interactions as capturing the heart or the energy or the magic of what the in–person experience is. We can then bring that

to life through different media in the best way that media has to offer, which might not actually be the in–person experience.

Michaela Gordon

I never thought that you’d be able to form such close relationships through hybrid settings. I always thought in–person would be the best way to go, but this has taught me so much about the different capabilities of these hybrid environments.

What if we can spread this knowledge to a wider audience?

Charlie Perry

I never thought I’d be able to create a prototype to solve a pretty major problem on such short notice. There’s something to be said about deadlines, and short periods of time, and bursts of brainstorming that I didn't really realize I had until this class.

I’m wondering how to use the benefits of technology to meet the needs of people in reality rather than having something that’s made and have people adjust to it. Instead of ‘how do we adjust to technology’ it is ‘how do we make technology adjust to what people need.’ What if we apply this thinking of adjusting to how people really are for all aspects of our lives, not just technology but anything we’re designing?

Adel Rahman

I never really thought that you’d be able to capture the essential magic of a lot of these things that seem so tied to being in-person. I didn’t realize you could capture aspects of their magic in situations where we’re not necessarily together.

I’m wondering if I can actually make use of any of these ideas to more meaningfully keep in contact with friends who don’t live in the Bay without hopping on a plane all the time.

the Bay the Bay Stepping into Stepping into Stepping into

By Manasa Yeturu

Extreme Immersion

xtreme student Nabeel Momin reflects, “One of the biggest nights for me was immersion when we had artists come in and talk about some of the socioeconomic discrepancies that have happened right here in Palo Alto. Being new to this area many people in the room never would have known the history here. It opens your eyes to a new part of what it means to be at Stanford, and the privilege that we have to make a difference.”

Curated by Manasa Yeturu, curriculum lead for Design for Extreme Affordability, Stepping into the Bay was a curated class experience set up as an immersive evening where students literally stepped into the sociopolitical history of the Bay Area via Studio 2 at the d.school, which was transformed into an art walkway filled with nods to the deep history of the Bay Area. The evening consisted of dialogue and performances by three spoken word artists—Labika Pittman, Dr. Aseem Hassan Loggins, Kevin Madrigal—Bay Area Natives from East Palo Alto, South San Francisco, and Richmond. Prior to the start of the evening, students had just received their Extreme project teams and challenges. Stepping into the Bay was meant to serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of understanding

the culture, context, and history of a location and the problem spaces they would be working before engaging with and stepping into communities.

Rozy Estaugh, an Electrical Engineering student, shared, “In the spoken word night, the takeaway was to be ‘really real.’ Often at Stanford, thinking is at a higher level, we do not often center lived experience in a real practical way. The artists emphasized why it was important to be humble and real in terms of building relationships. Stanford is a bubble… I started to see my position as an outsider with a lot to learn. It was incredibly powerful to break outside the bubble as we began this work.”

The immersion night was a launch into the first phase of work for the Extreme teams: to create a map of the policies, history, people, and initiatives that had influenced and shaped their challenge statements. They used these maps to host their first co-design session with their non–profit partners—showing rather than telling them that they were keen to understand and build on community initiatives that had come before them. As Nabeel and Rozy shared, immersion and a sociopolitical evening rooted in real talk allowed them to move forward from a place of humility, respect, and care as they tackled challenging issues across the Bay Area.

The Design for Extreme Affordability group curated an immersion night that used storytelling as a bridge to connect students and the community–setting a foundation for real talk and empathy work.

The Moral Imperative Imperative The Moral Imperative

By Karen Ingram and Megan Stariha

What do you think about synthetic biology? What about altering a baby’s genes? You likely had a stronger reaction to the second question. But do you know how the two are related?

merging technologies like synthetic biology are all around us and at varying degrees of development and dissemination. Their applications are being tested, products are being built, data is being collected. But by and for whom?

Some instances of scientists or technologists going too far or misusing technology reach the mainstream media and make headlines. That’s probably why you’ve heard of gene-edited “CRISPR babies.” These splashy and sometimes scary situations are more the exception, but illustrate an important point: We should all be paying more attention. That includes students, who are the technologists and ethicists of tomorrow.

Yet while these are important topics to be familiar with, only a handful of students will go into fields like synthetic biology. The real question is: How do we increase access and participation in the creation of emerging technology so that it represents and works for all of us? After all, when it comes to emerging technology, equity in terms of factors like gender and race is crucial.

Schools can start laying the groundwork now. Educators can facilitate conversations around ethics in technology with students so that these technologies develop equitably. In fact, educators have a special role to play in fostering these discussions for students, and design can be the methodology.

Design focuses on identifying challenges and rapidly coming up with solutions and ideas to address them. Using design as a framework allows for greater participation by identifying multiple entry points, circumventing technical jargon, and creating a sense of participation and agency in evolving technology.

Start with the End

For many of us, the term “synthetic biology” is less captivating than “gene–edited babies,” and there’s a reason. The end products of a given technology are more accessible and relevant than any introduction to the technology itself. Centering the conversation on the tech invites participation from enthusiasts, evangelists, and skeptics, sure. But it leaves out huge swaths of the population—those who are indifferent, or apathetic, or don’t feel like the tech is relevant to them.

Young people—our students— are no different. They occupy the same spaces along the spectrum of engagement when it comes to emerging technologies. Some will be fascinated by the topic; others will evince only a passing interest at first. But we can engage students in the creation of tech by starting with implications.

Centering learning on the first–, second–, third–order implications puts the student directly into the design challenge. Once they’re invested in making an impact or creating change about an issue they care about, they can navigate the layers of opportunity within the space to determine their role. Are they:

Interested in crafting the system governing privacy–protection policy? Building anti-racist datasets? Making novel products with their perspective in mind?

Regardless of where students want to effect change, a layered understanding of the technology and potential implications shows there is a place for everyone in creating well-rounded solutions.

When we lead with implications, students learn what they need to know to form an opinion. Not all students need to become specialists in code, gene sequencing, or logic boards, but it is critical that all students consider the impact of what they’re creating on humans and the broader world.

By accessing a technology through a human-centered lens, we bypass exclusionary jargon and high-tech barriers to entry and have students ask the essential questions:

Is this the best use of the technology? Is it appropriate use of the tech or are there other options? What is gained? What is lost?

Like It or Not, You’re Building Emerging Tech

As new technologies evolve, the range of people impacted expands, whether we are aware of it or not. It’s a fallacy that ambivalence or rejection of technology means neutrality. There is no neutral space to occupy. There is no black and white, but there is a lot of gray area, and that offers room to consider potential impacts, change course and charter new pathways.

All around emerging technology, there is a sense of inevitability. But there is also a sense of helplessness, frustrated resignation, or even panic that tech is something that “just happens” to people. But even if these technologies are inevitable, how they evolve is not. That’s where schools come in, as they help instill in students a sense of agency. Since we’re all participating—whether we like it or not—let’s build technology that serves all of us.

Find the Part You Want to Play

When we use design, we can more easily discuss applications that are about humans and stakeholders in the system, rather than just the tech itself. Design helps you consider why your perspective is important and necessary, and why the perspective of others is just as critical.

Creating with technology doesn’t have to be about coding or gene editing. It can be about coming up with implications to see the potential impacts. It can be about building new systems to create equitable access, collecting new sources of data to represent more users and participants, creating more inclusive experiences, and so much more. In other words, it’s not about the code; it’s about what the code can do.

It is imperative that we help learners find their agency and the opportunities to participate in the systems in which they exist. The next generation may not call into question whether or not they will participate, but as they are a more diverse, educated, change-tolerant group than those that preceded them, design offers a way to actively create what comes next.

Once we have a starting point, we can start to uncover how we got here and how we can get to where we’d like to go, given what we are experiencing now.

Emerging technology is just that: emerging. Its existence may be inevitable, but we have the agency to determine the impact it has. Design gives us a map to find our own agency in the landscape. Once we’re engaged, we can figure out what to create and what type of impact we, as designers, could initiate.

Since we’re all participating, whether we like it or not, let’s build technology that serves all of us.

By Scott Doorley

Don’t Throw Out the Joy

Don’t Out the Joy

Creative Direction at the d.school

Don’t Throw Out the Joy

There’s a euphemism that has always bothered me, mostly because it’s so ludicrously unlikely: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

ack in the day, I bathed my kids in a little tub that we plopped in our kitchen sink. But there is just no possible way I’d accidentally toss out my baby when I dumped out the bathwater. The tub was just too damn unwieldy to gloss over the baby sitting amongst the cloudy liquid. But I get it. And to be clear, I understand the phrase isn’t meant literally. Still, it's just too implausible to be a useful metaphor.

Nevertheless, it sparked a new metaphor for me. I’d like to propose a derivative phrase, one that is far less drastic, but way more likely (if a bit less snappy): Don’t throw the joy out in the name of consistency.

When people think of branding, they immediately think of consistency. By now, we’ve all drunk the juice. That’s not to say consistency isn't important. Consistency is important. It helps an audience find their way. It lessens the cognitive load and makes it easier to connect. But consistency lives in the realm of style. The d.school lives in the realm of personality. Of course, consistency and personality can go hand-in-hand—I’m creating a false dichotomy for effect. But if perchance, it must come down to it, I'll take exuberance over style any day.

Maybe what I’m talking about is a kind of branding devoted to accommodating the multitudes of what we really are— not one monolithic, singular notion, but the radiant mixture of many. Maybe we can call it mixed branding or branditudes! (Or maybe not—I’m open to ideas.) Either way, please don’t throw the joy out in the name of consistency.

And let’s just say it: this year (and then some) has brought with it a lot of strife. No doubt. But I have also seen so much joy. Not perfectly consistent, but full of exuberance, personality, and hope.

I've seen joy spread across the pages of REP magazine. I've seen triumph in the display of the Black Panther photo exhibit. I've seen spirit in the class banners and cards that graced our most recent pitch night and the delicious posters for make/ shift events. I’ve seen optimism and conviction in the movements that animate the illustrations of the K12’s Get Down with the Mission deck. I've seen silly hearts smiling behind the reverse confetti explosions on our Instagram account. I've seen personality—with an emphasis on the personal—in each and every book we published. I've seen giggles in the bright colors looping behind the MOC speaker’s headshots. I've seen care and wonder grace the murals on our bathroom walls. And I've seen magic in the moving light that dances across the home–spun Future(s) exhibit now at the Smithsonian.

Lots of joy. Some consistency. No bathwater. The d.school!

began my JEDI work at the d.school with the intent of adding to and possibly augmenting the multiple energies around equity currently practiced by the d.school. The approach I used is a prototype that encourages me, as the contractor, to get to know the people in the organization before I engage in a d.school-wide training. What this does is that it allows me to gain a better understanding of the wonderings, desires, and needs of the folks in the organization as well as the unique nuances that shape the overall movement of the culture to be considered when engaged in equity leadership experiences. I learned from the folks with whom I engaged and, hopefully, they learned something from me.

This year I had the wonderful opportunity to connect with the d.school, a group of brilliant minds and caring souls, for the purposes of engaging in Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion ( JEDI) work through my firm LifeGuardian Worldwide.

Courtlandt Courtlandt Courtlandt

Courtlandt Courtlandt Courtlandt

I was able to connect with the d.school through a few different recurring opportunities including, “Coffee with Courtlandt,” one-on-one coaching sessions, and design meetings with some of the school's leadership.

The Coffee with Courtlandt sessions were once–a–month, forty–five–minute jam sessions. Anywhere from two to eighteen folks would join to take a deeper dive into the core of our humanity by exploring an equity–related topic inspired by a song. In this “building space” we explored and grappled with various ways in which some of our social norms impede growth and transformation within our human condition.

The one-on-one sessions were up to sixty minutes and were scheduled through a Calendly link shared with the entire d.school team. I personally grew with each engagement of these sessions, which were intended for

JEDI Training at the d.school

By Courtlandt Butts

coaching specifically around equity, but which also touched on how to navigate around COVID, research projects, and student impact.

The design meetings included considerations of how we move through school–wide equity training experiences in ways that are aligned with the current efforts of the d.school. As one of the co–designers, I always left with a feeling of fruitful possibility and hopefulness.

Although it was not school–wide, I did have an opportunity to lead sessions with the awesome coaches in the Designing for Social Systems program, as well as the University Innovation Fellows program. In both spaces we explored Knowledge of Self and the Shadow Aspects of the Self. Understanding this nature of our being is the precursor to understanding the implicit biases one has around one’s self and others.

In the way of key insights and hopeful takeaways, I would often tell folks, “You are the best design for the transformation needed in the world.”

Once we learn of an innovative approach toward a goal, we need to make the effort to commit to continual and sustainable practice for lasting change to come about. For example, the tools that I introduce in a learning session are not just for the training space. They are for home,

community, and for all time, until that work is internalized as part of one’s being. This work we do around equity is rarely about “us vs. them”; it’s about all of us coming together to interrupt institutional norms that do not serve our collective humanity.

When we transform ourselves we transform the universe. Practice is key. There is no getting around it.

Bridges Bridges Bridges Designing Designing Designing

Designing Bridges is the d.school’s effort to cultivate more inclusive environments for marginalized instructors and students. Our focus has been on building brave spaces where authentic community and belonging can flourish. It has been my honor to lead this journey for the d.school through storytelling, reflecting, and listening with others.

Designing Designing Designing

Bridges Bridges Bridges

Building Belonging and Community at the d.school

By Milan Drake

uthentic community–building requires that we have courageous conversations with both potential instructors and the students who are interested in the d.school and who are seeking encouragement to be included in the community.

When I made it a goal to have more honest and transparent conversations about community, design, race, racism, mental health, and more with the broader Stanford community (faculty and students on campus, those familiar with the d.school, and those outside of the d.school/ design community) a recurring theme emerged. Students overwhelmingly

conveyed a sense of not belonging in the world of design; of not feeling welcome to learn what design is or what designers do; and of diminishing their own potential to work in design due to their life experience, gender, color of their skin, college major, and/or geographical location.

It was through these conversations that I knew something had to change about how I was approaching and defining community-building. In that moment of clarity I went from designing SAFE SPACES to designing BRAVE SPACES

I asked students, I asked faculty, I asked my network, I asked anyone who would listen: “What kind of community do you actually want?” “What truly matters to you?”

“What is community to you?”

Then I asked myself, “Am I interested in gathering a bunch of people into a bunch of rooms who do not respect each other and/or are not empathetic to how each person arrived in the room, or am I about designing deep connections that will require looking and listening to people’s stories and looking in the mirror at our own stories?”

his very valuable, external and internal insight—along with being in tune with happenings on campus and the world around us— was the glue to every thought and action applied to building community throughout this academic year.

The idea and process of Designing Bridges focuses on our community’s culture and how we might gain more empathy and understanding, with the goal of dismantling systemic and oppressive barriers around us and instead create a sustainable pathway toward equity for all who come to learn with us.

These conversations and initiatives are our compass guiding us toward building and sustaining the dynamics

of campus inclusion. We are focused on understanding the extent to which students and practitioners HEAR us saying they belong, BELIEVE they belong, and BECOME an active part of the community that in turn designs more support and representation. Over the last year, these conversations have taken place in multiple ways. Here’s a look at just a few of the projects and initiatives that were my way to build bridges at the d.school.

The Black Community Services Center (BCSC) Admit Weekend + Black Community Welcome

Stanford’s Black student population is just shy of 8 percent. That’s why Admit Weekend for The Black community is important to the incoming students and families and for current student participation as well.

An in–person version of Admit Weekend has not happened on campus since April of 2019 due to COVID –19. The Black Community Services Center (BCSC), also known as The Black House, has worked endlessly to maintain community, even while in a remote state.

However, in 2022, we were able to collaborate and welcome admitted students to the d.school atrium for an in-person experience that provided a brief introduction to Black staff/faculty, Black student organizations and academic resources, and the d.school.

(in)VISIBLE Designers Series

The (in)VISIBLE Designers is a series created to build community between Black and Brown leaders of organizations that represent and serve marginalized communities and whose work/service deserves to be made VISIBLE

Season One consisted of two sessions, with leaders disrupting traditional forms of education, technology creation, art/fashion, and the digital divide.

In collaboration with George Hofstetter, Founder and CEO of GH Tech, we had the opportunity to sit with Akinatunde Ahmad, a writer, podcaster, and filmmaker, and the legendary Dr. Angela Davis, educator, community activist, and former Black Panther Party member.

The community heard the speakers reflect on a series of questions posed by George and me at the beginning of each session. The questions incorporated reflections on life experiences and applied community and human-centered frameworks that each speaker has applied in their daily problem–solving while also giving the speakers metaphorical “roses” for their accomplishments and contributions to the community and world abroad.

The design sprints for each session focused on supporting and challenging attendees to incorporate new frameworks into their daily problem–solving while also encouraging them to create and build their own products, apps, services, and general ideas through community and human centered design work.

Black Panther Party Photo Exhibit with African and African American Studies (AAAS)

The program in African and African American Studies (AAAS) presented the “We Want A Free Planet” Black Panther Party photo exhibition, which was displayed in various spaces on Stanford’s campus in collaboration with community partners, including the Department of Art and Art History, Department of History, Stanford Arts Institute, Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), Black Community Services Center (BCSC), Black Studies Collective (BSC), the d.school and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE).

The photo exhibition coincided with the 55th-anniversary celebration of the Party's founding. AAAS–PostDoc, Dr. Kimberly McNair, curated the photo exhibit with Mr. Billy X Jennings, a Panther veteran and historian, former personal bodyguard to Huey P. Newton, and the chair of this year's BPP Anniversary committee.

I co–curated the show with Charlotte Burgess-Auburn and Amanda Tiet. Together we printed the photos and displayed them in the d.school atrium. The Black Panther Party photo exhibition opening reception happened at the McMurty Building for the Department of Art and Art History.

All of this represents just some of the work that goes into Designing Bridges. It requires not just one bridge and not just one topic of discussion. It requires working with multiple communities, addressing multiple challenges, and sustaining construction on multiple bridges that bravely and safely make space for the community to engage with the world of design thinking and that, most importantly, ensure all feel welcome to contribute to design for generations to come.

The Beginning (not the end).

& & &

Access Access Access

Sharing Design Ideas and Tools

As designers, we are often quick to move on to the next thing we want to create, build, teach, or imagine. Attending to whatever new challenge or needs are emerging inspires and fuels us. Yet recent months have seen d.school team members engaged in an intense period of documentation: reflecting on what we’ve learned and shaping new tools and publications meant to travel far beyond the d.school’s physical footprint. Our work is aimed at sparking confidence in

young people grappling with what new technologies mean for them as creators, school leaders in need of new ways to address the school safety crisis in the US, innovators in the social sector tackling systemic challenges, and more. This section features a range of new releases from the d.school team in a wide variety of formats and mediums.

REP Magazine REP Magazine REP Magazine

By Ariam Mogos

esigners hold many responsibilities; this is true in any field but particularly in the field of technology due to the way it’s rapidly shaping human societies and the environment. REP magazine was created for young people as a way to explore the ethical and moral implications of tech design. Discovering the impact these decisions can have on various communities and the public can lead to more equitable design.

The first issue of REP, “Build a Bot,” was released in 2021 and is now available for purchase on Amazon and Lulu. Since its launch, the team has been exploring bigger distribution channels with K12 publishers to reach schools, libraries,

and other learning communities. As a result, 2021-2022 was a big year for REP content production, testing, and distribution.

The REP team also continues to test content for new issues with diverse audiences. One exciting crowd we tested with in-person this year was at SXSW. We held a packed session with over sixty participants called “Designing with Emerging Implications.” We also facilitated an activity from the second issue of REP called “Design a Cow,” which is all about synthetic biology. Participants had insightful questions and critiques about the implications of gene editing on the agriculture industry and animal welfare. The REP team also received great feedback for the next iteration of the issue before it goes to print.

At the d.school we think that it’s critical for young people to understand the impact that their work can have in the world. REP magazine aims to support students and educators in their understanding of the responsibilities designers hold in many of the decisions they make.

“I was excited when I ordered this, but woah! This magazine is so much better than I could have imagined. My innovation and design students will love it.”—Alexis Lecznar

Creative Acts for Curious People

Creative Acts for Curious People Acts for Curious People

By Sarah Stein Greenberg

hrough the history of the d.school hundreds of people have left a lasting gift: deliberately designed learning experiences. These experiences were created in response to a need to teach a skill or method in a personal, collaborative, or experiential way, and many then evolved over the years through student feedback, iteration, and interpretation by the other instructors who adopted and adapted them.

When I set out to write Creative Acts for Curious People, I aimed to collect and curate a wide range of the assignments we give to learners, and highlight the many different perspectives and ideas that intersect and overlap at the d.school. I hoped that readers would resonate immediately with some, and that others would provoke them to think, act, and make in ways they hadn’t yet considered or mastered. I deliberately mixed old favorites with new gems; a few time–tested practices along with fresh takes from some of our newest instructors.

I also had a major problem to solve. We teach in such a vibrant, improvisational, experiential way: How

on earth could that come to life on the pages of a static object like a book? I realized that the quality (and qualities) of the art on each page would do a lot of this work, and collaborating with illustrator Michael Hirschon was an exceptionally fun part of the creative process. Mike’s sense of the absurd, and his ability to juxtapose images that are tender and sweet with ones that are playful and raucous was incredible fuel for the project, as you can see from the spreads here.

A few people have asked me if the book has achieved the goals we set for it. I’m happy to say yes! Part of the aim of our entire d.school book series is to evolve what we’re known for and help a broad audience learn about the wide range of design practices and ideas in play at the d.school. When I think back to the fifty or so podcasts and articles that were generated about Creative Acts in the first months after it was published, in only one of them was I asked to talk about the old five-hexagon design process model. That gave me forty–nine opportunities to tell the public about everything else we do. And, I’ve seen many unexpected moments of impact unfold in a way that helps paint a picture of all the folks we’re now reaching: the recent grad who self-organized a Creative Acts book club on LinkedIn, the public library in

Over the past fifteen+ years, d.school classroom experiences have been defined by an extraordinary array of designers, educators, academics, and topical or industry experts. Creative Acts for Curious People is a collection of their work—and much more.

Johnson County, Kansas who shared it with all the attendees of their free, annual writers conference, the guy in Australia who wrote me out of excited frustration that his local bookstore wasn’t yet stocking any copies.

It’s been a tremendous honor to create a vehicle that could feature so many different d.school voices. The work of many, many people had to happen first for this book to be possible, and I am grateful that along with Charlotte Burgess–Auburn and Scott Doorley, I got to shepherd this particular creative act out into the world.

Introducing d.school Introducing d.school Introducing d school

Introducing the Guides Introducing the Guides Introducing the

Creative Ways of Cultivating Resource–fulness and Inventiveness

By Scott Doorley and Charlotte Burgess Auburn

Way back in 1947, design pioneer Lászlo Moholy-Nagy predicted the inclusive power of design when he said it should be seen as a “general attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness” instead of a specialized field only for the few. We love craft and experts, but who doesn’t want to be a little more resourceful and inventive?

In this new series of ten books, “The Stanford d.school Guides,” each book introduces unexpected fundamentals, creative mindsets, and practical methods that are destined to become a brick in every reader’s creative foundation. As a set, they are equal parts “how to” and “how come.” They are filled with tactics to help navigate the ambiguous, sticky challenges you face in your life’s work—whatever your field. At the same time, they are full of spirit. These are guides. Like any good guide, they are confident, helpful, full of personality, and at your service. But there’s a small twist: these books are not for designers. They are by designers, but they are for designing. They are about making change for others, with intention, no matter who you are, no matter where you are.

a Collaboration a Collaboration

By Scott Doorley

Collaboration is the only way to make big things happen, but let’s be honest—sometimes you wish it weren’t. Getting everyone to agree on what to do at any given moment is always a trick, and not always a fun one. In a tough collaboration, the sum of the collective work isn’t a sum at all it’s division.

Collaboration

hen a collaboration comes to fruition with grace and gusto, when everyone pitches in their talents and it all adds up—few things are more delightful.

The creation of our recent d.school books, which includes two stand–alone titles and a ten-book series, some of which are not yet published, required (and still requires!) many layers and waves of collaborative effort. We lucked into a delightful “it all adds up” collaboration with the authors and artists generating the content and also with the editors and designers at our publishing partner, Ten Speed Press. With Ten Speed, we all shared the same goal: to etch each author’s ethos onto the page through words and pictures. And they know how to do it. We were also lucky enough to work with a group of artists with diverse talents and backgrounds, who didn’t just augment the work, but transcended it. Each artist took the text to a new level, creating a whole that was truly far beyond the parts. We’re celebrating that beautiful effort on these pages.

Art Is Harmony

There are ten d.school guides, written by twelve authors, with art by a baker’s dozen of illustrators. One of the titles is half–full of comics; one is filled with custom–made manifestos, each in its own style; yet another is filled with giant gatefold murals that spread twenty-two inches wide. That is to say, the interior of each book does its own thing. Wrangling all that delicious, but far-flung exuberance into a coherent set is a tall order.

Enter Hope Meng. Hope is a typography and brand designer based in the Bay. To package this delightful mayhem, she created a custom typeface for the series covers (nicknamed d.sign). Its unwavering

line weight is clean and legible while its curvy and quirky details hint that it’s not so straightforward after all. The vibe is a bit like classic Swiss typography squeezed through a Play–Doh noodle extruder.

Hope’s typeface brings harmony to the series, even as the type treatment varies from cover to cover. Each unique cover lockup is built on the foundation of Hope’s crisp and playful font with varied arrangements that introduce the books on their own terms, and enough consistency to make sure the sleeves don’t clash when they sit next to each other on the shelf.

Who ever said you can’t have consistency and exuberance at the same time? (I did, see page 34).

Art Is Content

In most books, art supports the content. That’s the definition of an illustration— a picture that illuminates the content in the book. In several of the d.school books, the art doesn’t just illuminate the content, it is the content.

For a book on infographics, art is certainly key. But when you fold in a murder mystery, the art takes on many more layers. Part storytelling, part hard–working examples, the art in The Secret Language of Maps by Carissa Carter required two artists with two very different points of view to express the dual aspects of the book.

Charlotte Burgess–Auburn’s book, You Need a Manifesto, shows how to put your values to work by crafting a personal manifesto. The art by Rick Griffith goes one step further—each is a manifesto about what it takes to make a manifesto.

The word “drawing” in the title of Ashish Goel’s book, Drawing on Courage, is a double entendre. It describes the need to summon your courage, but the impetus for “drawing” was actually the more than fifty hand-drawn comics by Ruby Ellis that cover half of the book’s pages.

Designing the d.sign Font

By Hope Meng

When we began our collaboration on this group of covers, the sky was blue! Any and every relevant bit of pasta was thrown at the wall—existing typefaces were used, type was integrated with illustration, there were gradients! But it quickly became clear that the covers required cohesion greater than just black type on a solid background—we needed a consistent font, one that was basic enough to absorb a universe of expressive manipulation, but charismatic enough to provide an identifiable personality. It had to be capable of growing vertically or horizontally, get bold or light, and provide every letter width between ultra condensed and extra wide. That’s a tall order for a font!

Formally, I knew what this meant: a sans serif typeface that provides a straight area on both the vertical and horizontal axes. On the vertical axis, this would allow the letterform to grow or shrink in height as needed for the composition. Similarly, the area on the horizontal axis would allow the width to change.

Once these constraints were identified, I set about designing some fairly standard letterforms and their exuberant alternates, fully expecting a request to dial back the personality. Anticipating that I’d inevitably get called out on that weird R or that funky N, I’d have a more straitlaced version in my back pocket.

But the d.school’s laces are anything but straight! I was delighted when the team not only approved the quirky letterforms, but wholeheartedly embraced them. They were a feature, not a bug!

The quirky yet simple nature of this font primed the canvas for a visually expressive and instantly identifiable set of covers. Though each book ranges in mood, content, and style, d.sign conceptually unifies the series under a singular umbrella: bold ideas with an unapologetic dash of personality.

The artists The artists The artists include include include

Alphabetical by last name:

Ruby Ellis London–based comic artist focusing on mental health

Rose Jaffe

D.C. area muralist and activist

Rick Griffith Graphic designer, activist, and letterpress printer

Celia Leung Hong Kong-based graphic designer

Michael Hirshon University of Utah art professor and illustrator

Andria Lo Product, still life, and portrait photographer

Che Lovelace Trinidadian painter and surfing champion

Gabriela Sanchez Uruguayan art director and illustrator

Scott Teplin Maniacally detailed, NY-based fine artist

Hope Meng Typeface and brand designer

Khristopher “Squint” Sandifer Storyteller, photographer, and creative director

Jori Tytus Bioengineer and collage artist

Jeremy Nguyen New Yorker cartoonist

Reina Takahashi Intricate cut paper artist

Art Is Design

One of the wonderful things about working with d.school authors is that they don’t think of a book as something to be written. Rather, they see it as something to be designed. Each part communicates the message: the words, of course, but also the layout, the font, and the art. It all adds up and works together, part and parcel of an integrated whole.

In Navigating Ambiguity, Reina Takahashi’s exquisite cut-paper art in grayscale sets the tone and tempo for a book about finding your way through ambiguity.

For Design for Belonging, Rose Jaffe brought the spirit of her large mural work to the project by creating gatefolds that grow and expand beyond the bounds of the book.

Her work brings a sense of flow and energy that extends off the page as an invitation to the reader.

This is a Prototype is what happens when (wacky and wonderful) minds team up with a shared vision. Scott Witthoft’s precision, wit, and love of puns is perfectly amplified by the humor, whimsy, and attention to detail found in the work of fine artist Scott Teplin.

With lines like “Be the badass bouncer of your mind,” the art and design of Grace Hawthorne’s Happen needed to be bold. Celia Leung, a Hong Kong-based designer, brings a strong and innovative design to the book—and she uses neon orange ink!

Art Is Connection

The obvious role of art is to help explain the ideas in the book. Great art nails that role and adds an extra layer of context and meaning. When it works well, art can express feelings of joy, identity, and heritage. In several books, the art opened up opportunities to connect to community and culture, people and home.

In Design for Social Change, Lesley Ann-Noel is working with an old friend, Che Lovelace, to integrate his original paintings of their home country of Trinidad and Tobago. His art from their shared home complements writing that delves into how identity and design are intertwined.

Leticia Britos Cavagnaro’s book, Experiments in Reflection is about how we make meaning from experience. She’s taken this message beyond the text to the artwork itself. Hiring an artist from her home country of Uruguay was just the start. Leticia then connected artist Gabriela Sanchez to her father, who gave Gaby stacks of family photos to incorporate in her collage work—adding layers of personal meaning within the art itself.

Creative Hustle by sam seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of makers at the top of their game. The collection of profiles feels like the gathering of a community, and this feeling connects to the collaborative effort of the three artists who created the visuals for this book: photographer Khristopher “Squint” Sandifer, type designer Hope Meng, and collage artist Jori Tytus.

Faces of Change Faces of Change Faces of Change

Work from the University Innovation Fellows

By Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Humera Fasihuddin, Lupe Makasyuk, Laurie Moore, and Ghanashyam Shankar

The first line of the University Innovation Fellows manifesto is “We believe students can change the world.” This belief is at the heart of our program. Each year, we work with hundreds of students and educators to help them make a difference in higher education.

hen we founded the University Innovation Fellows program a decade ago, we wanted to give students access to tools and mindsets so that they could contribute to the future of higher ed. Our belief was (and still is) that students know what they and their peers need in order to be forward–thinking, creative leaders in any field after they graduate. So we teach them to use design approaches to identify and address real needs and opportunities in their own contexts. Over time, we’ve created experiences for new communities—faculty, staff and school leaders—to learn the same change-making strategies as their students.

Today, our network extends to thousands of people who are applying human-centered design to challenges at their schools and in the world. Our community members are creating new majors and minors, building maker spaces, designing feedback systems between students and administration, starting K12 and community outreach programs, hosting events and workshops, teaching classes that address real world problems, and much more. The four stories below are just a sample of what students and faculty in our programs worked on in the last year.

My UIF team (Shafeqah Mordecai, Syeedah White, and myself) have been working on increasing student engagement and support for students who commute. We’ve done this by looking at three areas: commuter student lounges on campus; support for students who have children; and updating the BSU app/event calendar. We engaged with campus stakeholders and administrators and adjusted our plans based on their feedback. We worked with the dean of the College of Business to suggest ideas for the lounge. We conducted a survey centered around our suggested improvements to determine what ideas students would like to see happen. We participated in a focus group and interviews with students who are parents, which helped provide more insight and gauge interest in having an on–campus childcare center. Finally, our group was also asked to join a committee that is working to get a childcare center on our campus.

As part of our UIF training, we were taught to analyze problems and find solutions through design thinking. The problem we identified was around student depression and anxiety—both before the pandemic, but especially during it. The COVID –19 pandemic has caused social isolation, yet as we are social creatures, meaningful connection is vital to us. We organized the Meet & Greet so both students and employees could casually gather and connect with one another while abiding by the COVID regulations. We created safe opportunities for students to make meaningful connections. Four Meet & Greet locations were open every day for the duration of the project, and people could walk in anytime as long as it was within the opening hours of the building. We arranged standing coffee tables with conversational cards to help get people talking. This project is expected to continue and improve over time. Before we created this, I used to think that fostering communication always leads to community building. Now I think that communication is only the first step to community building. Engagement, exchange, and mutual experiences are equally as important.

I embarked on this University Innovation Fellows journey as a faculty champion two years ago out of the need I felt to open up spaces where my students could explore solutions to some of the big challenges we are facing. Although the Sophia Fellows have just recently embarked on their journey as changemakers, they are already contributing to their community. Among their initiatives they are facilitating cross-discipline discussions on sustainability between faculty and students; hosting youth-empowerment workshops at secondary education institutions; creating workshops and programs to tackle sustainability issues; and creating events that help participants apply design thinking to campus challenges. Starting on a journey like this with your students may seem daunting. It did for me! At first, all I could see were limitations and obstacles. But throughout any period of self-questioning and self-doubt, I kept reminding myself: “My students need this! And our communities need them!”

Britnee McCauley University Innovation Fellow Bowie State University (Maryland, USA)

Radhika Kapoor University Innovation Fellow University of Twente (The Netherlands)

Magdalena Ionescu Faculty Innovation Fellow Sophia University (Japan)

Malott Teaching & Learning Studio Fanshawe College (Canada)

During the pandemic, we identified a gap between the skills gained through college programs and future work opportunities for Indigenous learners. Initially, the challenge we were working on was to create a program to help students who struggled academically from the pivot to online learning because of COVID –19. We tried and refined several iterations and versions. The current version of the Niisitaug: Community Innovation program looks to provide students with authentic learning experiences in community design, providing opportunities to practice collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and Indigenous ways of thinking. Being engaged in an online video environment is tough. The design mindsets and tools I learned during the vTLS helped break down the learning process for learners in a way that got them to be more reflective and engaged. I like bringing design mindsets and toolsets to my work because they help me create space for students to be reflective and curious, and they show that I am on the same footing—I’m also curious and not the expert professor.

“Who are you in this moment?” 400 higher ed students and faculty collaged portraits of themselves in response to this prompt at the University Innovation Fellows Silicon Valley Meetup in March 2022. The UIF team partnered with Aisha Bain and Meredith Hutchison of Resistance Communications for the session, which demonstrated the power of storytelling and artistic expression for individuals who are trying to make a difference in the world. The session resulted in a public art installation showcasing each participant as an individual, as well as a member of a close-knit community. The UIF team and collaborators designed the 2022 Meetup to not only focus on helping community members drive change in higher ed, but also to focus on themselves—their mental health, their journey, their story. “They felt seen,” Aisha said, recalling some of the feedback she received afterwards. “They needed that.”

Brian

Conversation Conversation Conversation Changing Changing Changing

About School Safety

By sam seidel and Barry Svigals

The d.school’s K12 Lab has been investigating the role design can play in helping make schools safe and joyful spaces for learning. Our work aims to help us think about safety in holistic and creative ways.

Conversation Conversation Conversation Changing the Changing the Changing the

ver the last three years, through statistics, articles, and interviews, architect and artist Barry Svigals and I have been intensely immersed in studying school safety together. This work has taken many shapes, including the design and distribution of the “Questions to Your Answers About School Safety” Post–It packs. Twenty thousand packs of Post-It notes were distributed to be used as a collaboration tool for students, parents, teachers, administrators, and everyone invested in creating safe schools. We also created a course which united graduate students at Stanford and middle school students in Oakland and created prototypes of physical and conceptual interventions for schools.

While offering the “Questions to Your Answers About School Safety” Post–It

packs may be our most valuable contribution, we received many requests asking for help answering those questions. Out of this work, we were able to create the Changing the Conversation About School Safety guidebook, which offers answers to some of those questions. We hope the guidebook and our broader portfolio of work on reimagining school safety helps make schools safer and more delightful learning environments for communities everywhere.

What follows is an excerpt from the guidebook.

Welcome to changing the conversation about school safety!

Not too long ago, conversations about school safety immediately conjured up incidents of extreme violence: the active shooter, the locked-down classroom, students huddled in corners under desks.

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With the pandemic, the focus quite understandably moved from guns to a deadly virus. Conversations that had been about bulletproof glass and metal detectors shifted to discussions about plexiglass around desks and protocols for social distancing.

Although seemingly different, both of those conversations share a similar perspective...They are too narrowly focused. A much larger and deadlier problem exists.

These two points of data are particularly striking:

It is 200 times more likely that a student will take their own life than have it be taken by another.

Pre–pandemic, over 160,000 students stayed away from school each day for fear of bullying.

Schools must feel safe as well as be safe.

Mental health problems and bullying seriously threaten student safety. More of us need to be involved, working together to address this crisis that simmers beneath the headlines highlighting extreme and extremely rare acts of violence in our schools. This is the conversation we need to change. While we need to value traditional safety features and protocols, we must see them in the larger context of a school’s and a community’s well–being.

Before we begin to understand how the whole school community might be engaged in school safety, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room, something that has often derailed the best of intentions

and clouded the vision of those hoping to make rational, informed decisions: fear.

Once you have it, it is very difficult to avoid its effect on our ability to live freely and happily in the world. We need to find ways to transcend our fears. Part of the aim of this guide is to offer ways in which that might happen. Primary among them is to remember to hold close what we most deeply wish for our students: to discover and rediscover the joy of learning.

The primary aim for all educators is to enhance the quality of learning in our schools. Sadly, this goal can be marginalized in our earnest attempts to make schools safe. In addressing our fears, we can put aside the fundamental aspirations we have for schools, solving a narrowly focused

problem of physical safety while leaving behind the overarching need for schools to feel safe as well as be safe. Nourishing the well–being of all students is essential, serving a fundamental purpose: allowing a joyful experience of learning.

What is at stake is our most valuable resource: the creative minds and hearts of our children so they might become engaged members of our communities. We all share the responsibility to care for their learning environment and we must answer the call to work together to meet the unique challenges of the communities in which we live.

Let your voice be heard and make a joyful noise!

Values that Transcend Strategy

The three primary interdependent elements that assure a safe and vibrant learning environment are: community, equity, and well–being.

Community: We are all in this together. How does our school safety plan invite meaningful participation from the community? The development of any school safety initiative grows out of community engagement. All decisions should be considered collaboratively by a broad cross–section of both school and neighborhood communities. They are inextricably connected. The complex and emotional issues of school safety can only be addressed if we understand how those relationships can be mutually nourishing.

Equity: Our schools must serve all people. Not all of our students feel welcome at school. How can we tell? How can we fix this? With respect to school safety, understanding the diversity of student experiences is the key to generating solutions that will be effective and sustainable. When considering any strategy or program, we need greater sensitivity for those who are marginalized or feel that they are disregarded or unfairly treated.

Well-being: The ability to learn is founded upon a sense of well-being. We talk a lot about making things safer, but what is the relationship between safety and well–being? Without it, the quality of our educational environment profoundly suffers. This means that our students and teachers must both be safe and feel safe. Beyond health, well–being is the commitment to a much wider embrace: the joy of learning.

Strategies that Bring Values to Life

We begin by holding close the three elements of all successful strategies for school safety: community, equity, and well–being.

From that, three interrelated dimensions emerge as we design the school environment, select products, and train people to address our particular safety needs—always in the context of supporting the quality of the learning environment.

The Place for Safety. Read the first part of your safety plan. What message is it sending? Does it carry a feeling of warmth and care? The school campus—the building(s) and grounds—is the most visible dimension of a safety plan. Designs that emerge from collaborative community engagement can be more effective and sustainable while also being strategic, targeted investments. Most importantly, if seen holistically in the context of educational goals, they can also support the quality of learning.

Technology and Systems. At what point does protection from threat become more important than enjoying life? Security products need to be integrated with all other strategies in order to be effective. Considering every decision in the context of the architecture and the personnel will allow the design team to select the most appropriate solutions for the school’s particular needs. More is not necessarily better.

People and Protocols. How do we motivate our students to participate in school safety? Knowing what to do, when, and how requires an understanding of the two previous dimensions. Training, personnel capabilities, and protocols can then allow building strategies and electronic systems to effectively align with the three key elements of the school’s educational mission: nourishing community, advancing equity, and promoting well-being.

We cannot return to the narrow focus of school safety where bulletproof glass is seen as the answer.

Students must feel safe in order to be free to learn. They can’t be hungry, they can’t be lonely, they can’t be bullied, they can’t be singled out because of their differences. Safety can simply become a natural by–product of a healthy school environment and a supportive school community. Seen in this holistic light, school safety strategies can be transformative, demanding a far greater investment in the emotional lives of our children. All studies show that this investment yields exponential results in the long–term quality of learning at every level while creating a safer school.

Students then can be free to discover their own joy in learning, being safe, and feeling safe. Every decision, every interaction, every collaboration should aim to strengthen the school community as a whole, inspire inclusion and equity, and nourish the well-being of students and teachers alike. Everyone participates, everyone contributes, everyone is responsible for well-being, and every student is cared for.

Students then can be free to discover their own joy in learning, being safe, and feeling safe. Every decision, every interaction, every collaboration should aim to strengthen the school community as a whole, inspire inclusion and equity, and nourish the well–being of students and teachers alike. Everyone participates, everyone contributes, everyone is responsible for well–being, and every student is cared for.

in Action in Action in Action Design Design Design

A Case Study from Designing for Social Systems

By Thomas Both, Nadia Roumani, and Susie Chang

Social impact organizations worldwide are tackling some of society’s most challenging problems. We’ve had the opportunity to work with leaders taking on issues including food insecurity, housing and homelessness, sexual violence, and the opioid epidemic in their non–profit, government, and for–profit organizations.

n the Designing for Social Systems program at the d.school, we develop and teach design practices that integrate methods from human centered design, systems thinking, and strategic planning, all grounded in a commitment to equity and anti–racism. Our mission is to support leaders and their organizations to bring about positive change in the world. We have seen how adopting design practices can help create that change.

With limited resources, social impact organizations must understand complex challenges and innovate on their approaches and interventions, all while running their existing day–to–day programs. This is where the d.school can help.

Designing a Sex Ed Program for Students with Developmental Disabilities: How Denver Public Schools Used Human Centered Design to Reinvent Sex Ed

When sex education specialist Rose Barcklow joined Denver Public Schools (DPS) in 2017, she knew she was taking on a big job. DPS is the largest school district in Colorado with over 200 schools, 90,000 students, and 4,700 classroom teachers. In Colorado, there is no statewide mandate or unified curriculum for sex education. However, there is a policy which states that if students do receive sex education, it’s required to be age–appropriate, medically accurate, and comprehensive in nature.

Studies around sex education are clear: Students who receive comprehensive sex education are less likely to experience unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and students who receive

education on healthy relationships and consent experience less sexual violence and teen dating violence.

Studies also show that students with disabilities benefit from sex ed just as much as their peers. These are students who are growing up, going through puberty, and experiencing sexual feelings like all young adults. Yet they are often told that they are not sexual beings or that if they act on these feelings something bad will happen. Often they are disregarded completely around sexuality. So why is sex education not more of a priority for this group of students?

Applying a Human Centered Design Approach

Rose recognized that a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach was an ideal methodology to create a sustainable, comprehensive system for sex education in DPS. Sex education is a sensitive topic: She needed to approach the design by centering students and teachers rather than basing the program on external curriculum mandates. Early on in her tenure, Rose completed a round of ethnographic research by interviewing teachers, students, and parents. Rose learned that teachers’ comfort with teaching the subject is often the barrier to providing comprehensive sex education to students. This provided her with a launching point to begin to redesign a comprehensive sex education program for DPS.

Her research, however, also revealed a surprising insight related to sex education for students with disabilities. While most teachers showed some interest in finding ways to fit sex education into their full schedules, teachers of students with disabilities were extremely interested. They shared that sex education was one of the biggest pain points and needs in their special education classrooms.

Rose also heard from students with disabilities that they were interested in learning about adolescence and puberty. They want to understand the changes occurring within their bodies, how to develop romantic relationships and friendships, and understand how to say no to unwanted advances. She discovered that students wanted to learn about where they could go for sexual health services like birth control, condoms, and menstruation management. It was clear there was a need for more inclusive sex education.

Building Rose and Her Team’s HCD Capacity

In December 2019, Rose attended the Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems workshop. The workshop provided frameworks and methods for how to integrate Human Centered Design, Systems Thinking, and Strategic Planning approaches with her unique work. It also brought clarity to the benefits of completing full cycles of design where research leads to insights, idea generation, experimentation, and implementation—a path to create a sustainable program.

Following the workshop, Rose prioritized using the HCD process for comprehensive sex education for students with disabilities because

of the high need, high interest, and unique opportunity to work alongside students with disabilities to create a program for and with them.

The d.school program helped Rose figure out how to move past some of the barriers she was facing in applying an HCD approach within a large organization. She realized a number of organizational factors were preventing successful design work, such as making decisions without substantial input from teachers and students, a lengthy approval process to move forward with prototyping, and competing priorities that often demanded immediate attention and took time away from the HCD process.

Rose wrote several grants to expand the team to three individuals so that they could engage deeply in a design process and provide adequate staffing for comprehensive sex education for students with disabilities. Rose hired Rebekkah Abeyta who would specifically focus on creating Adapted Sex Education for students with disabilities. Also recognizing the difficulties to complete robust design work in a large system, Rose included a consultancy budget in the grant to bring someone on to prioritize completing the process. With her team in place, Rose was able to move forward with the capacity to take on the challenge.

A Design Process: Designing for Students with Disabilities

Starting with an Ethnography Phase, the team interviewed a total of thirty–one individuals: nine students with disabilities and twenty-two adults with roles such as paraprofessionals, teachers, social workers, health educators, parents, and a speech and language pathologist. As interviews were completed, Rose and Rebekkah did deep synthesis work to make sense of all the information.

Through this process, one fundamental insight became clear: Students with disabilities are often left behind or left out of sex education because it is assumed that students with disabilities won’t have opportunities to form healthy, romantic relationships.

To kick off an Ideation Phase, the team invited key adults to participate in two, two–hour working sessions via Zoom. In these sessions, the group brainstormed possible solutions, mapped ideas according to their feasibility, and ranked and prioritized the ideas they collectively decided would be easy to implement and have the most impact on student learning. The team concluded with several key ideas to prototype.

In Fall 2020, seven months after starting the design research, Rose and her team prototyped and tested an Adapted Sex Ed Program. The program was piloted in five middle and high school classrooms serving fifty-one students. Over the course

of the next year, Rose and her team continued to iterate and improve the programming.

Conclusion

The demand for the Adapted Sex Ed Program is at an all–time high, and DPS continues to have a waitlist for schools to receive programming. As of Spring 2022, programming is taking place in twenty classrooms, and there’s a waitlist of nine classrooms wanting programming to start as soon as possible. As the program continues to evolve, Rose and her team continue to improve their offerings. The success of the program can be traced back to Rose’s belief that a design approach was beneficial and worth investing in to do the work. The challenge demanded that Rose and her team understand the experience and needs of different people, imagine new possibilities, and take a very iterative approach to shaping the program— and it paid off.

Masters Creativity Masters Creativity Masters

Stanford’s Masters of Creativity is a new format for engaging learners everywhere. Launched by the executive education team, the initial aim of the series was to share inspiring stories and insights from entrepreneurs, artists, and authors with alumni.

By Jeremy Utley

Masters of Creativity asters Creativityof Masters Creativityof Connecting Alumni and Worldwide Learners with a Creative Community

s a free event that is both in-person and a web series, the Masters of Creativity (MOC) program has worked its tentacles into many corners of the d.school and beyond. Students of design all around the world gather each month to explore the question: “How do I advance along my own journey of creative mastery?”

The series has featured artists and actors, authors and activists, all of whom come and share their stories of creative practice across domains. It has sparked conversation and community, and is a celebration of creativity and design.

Becky Mariotta, author of Impact with Integrity: Repair the World Without Breaking Yourself, former head of the 100,000 Homes Campaign, and the current leader of the Billions Institute,

taught us a remarkable strategy for dealing with critics. She shared a story about how, when her campaign to end homelessness was attacked by President Bush’s homelessness czar, her highly adrenalized state kept her from responding from a creative place. Becky squandered days stewing in unproductive reactivity. She was, as her wife playfully called it, “the Angry Penguin,” named after the way she moved angrily about the house in those days.

Based on this experience, she offered to do a live demo with the community, if anyone happened to find themself in a similar state. In true improvisational style, we asked if anyone wanted to practice the “Blurt, Breathe, Move” tactic live in front of the hundreds of folks gathered. An executive from an Irish bank spoke up, “I’ll give it a try.”

We all listened, spellbound, as Becky asked him to blurt. He began pouring his heart out about a memoir he was working on as a side project. He’d learned he had Asperger's in his fifties, and the thing that was triggering a reactive state for him was the fear of what might happen when people heard his story.

A visible change transformed our friend, as he surrendered to the exercise. As he finished the minute of breathing, he was a changed person, from the outside at least. The entire session erupted in applause, and he ended up sharing a few previously–unread chapters of his manuscript with the community for feedback.

The thing that’s special about the MOC community is that it’s truly a community of practice. When Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want By Saying What You Mean, shared her framework for feedback, she invited a couple of participants to join her on stage for 1:1 “candor consultations.” The head of a major coffee company’s regional office talked through how to give feedback on cultural differences across geographies to the folks back at headquarters.

These are just two of countless examples of real learners seeking to implement the life-changing tools of design wherever they happen to be. Since last March, we’ve seen over 25,000 learners register for these monthly events from nearly 100 different countries. Many of them wake up to join us in the middle of the night from their homes, whether that’s in Jakarta, Mumbai, or Tokyo, and many more interrupt their dinner plans to join us from Portugal, Rio, and the Middle East.

Some of the origin stories, like Navy SEAL–turned–fitness revolutionary Randy Hetrick’s creation of the TRX Training System, follow a clear narrative format. Others, like the birth of Jon Acuff’s most recent book, which he co-authored with his two teenage daughters, Soundtracks for Teenagers, are delightfully unexpected and filled with the kind of serendipity and human whimsy folks have come to expect from a d.school spotlight.

The thing that’s been most rewarding to the team has been the opportunity to offer not only a service to, but a community of support for, the many learners worldwide who may never be able to visit the d.school. The community boasts vibrant WhatsApp discussion groups that continue to marinate on subjects for weeks after the session has been run, and there’s now a robust referral system for learners to nominate folks they’d want to learn from.

Early on, we learned that educators in particular were hungry for just such a community, and so in collaboration with the K12 Lab and the UIF Program, we created a series of educator-oriented events to equip the educators in our network looking to take their craft to the next level.

In our next series of events, we’re looking forward to shining the spotlight on a rocket scientist, a world-famous chef, and legendary author Dan Pink.

Becky has since realized that “Every minute wasted worrying about how to respond to a critic was a minute I wasn’t fighting the real enemy: homelessness,” and has learned to practice a technique called “Blurt, Breathe, Move” whenever she finds herself in a non–creative, reactive mode instead.

Imagine Imagine Imagine & & & Explore Explore Explore

Building the Future Foundations of Design

Since the design program began at Stanford roughly sixty years ago, the one constant in our field has been change. Advances in methods and philosophy have led to major paradigm shifts within the field. The embrace of human values, drawing on creativity in lieu of predictable solutions, and using rapid prototypes to develop early-stage ideas are some of the best known.

When the d.school was founded in 2004, it focused on design practices that reach across discipline, school, and sector. Students and other learners benefited from the deliberate cultivation of team cultures and mindsets that enable collaboration.

Foundations Foundations Foundations Building Building Building

By Scott Doorley, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, and Lisa Kay Solomon

“Future Foundations of Design”

—the nickname of one of our new endeavors—is an oxymoron. By definition, the future comes later, but a foundation goes down first. Future foundations are the “next, first thing”; they are the beginnings yet to come and that’s precisely the point.

Future

Foundations Foundations Foundations

Future

Future

The d.school’s Future Foundations of Design is guided by two questions: How do we get good at seeing new beginnings before they arrive? How do we choose what to build on them when they get here?

That’s the general posture of our Future Foundations studio. It’s a place for us to experiment and search, a commitment to possibilities and changes, a willingness to alter our foundations even before circumstances require it.

One early nudge toward this way of thinking came from John Arnold, a founder of Stanford’s “Design Division” (as it was known when it began back in the 1960s). Seeking to goose his students’ creative side, John created an imaginary world on a planet called Arcturus IV. He challenged students to design products for the planet’s long-armed, three-fingered, methane-breathing, x-ray vision capable inhabitants. These strange details made sure the students couldn’t rely on preconceived notions. To design anything to suit these unfamiliar creatures, they would have to make creative leaps instead. John realized the creative leap itself was the work of design.

In John’s mind, products of the age—from car interiors to electronic interfaces—posed questions with no obvious best answer and raised design challenges that intertwined with complex human needs. This made them unpredictable. Straightforward technical engineering and optimization were no longer enough. The circumstances were shifting. He shifted the learning accordingly.

Now is another one of those times when the circumstances are shifting so much that it’s again time to inspect the foundations. Or time to seek new ones. And so we look ahead.

Oftentimes, people fixate on the future when the present feels off-kilter. That’s because the future leaves room for an optimism that the present can’t seem to accommodate. It is also a place where we can put our ideals on display in hope that we will meet them when the time comes.

For example, the inflation-laden, pollution-heavy, and politically dicey 1960s and 70s brought future–forward, sustainable architecture and far–flung sci–fi theatrics. Those were the days of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome acolytes, not to mention Parliament–Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection, filled with lyrics like, “Light years in time, ahead of our time.” Fuller’s followers tried to fashion sustainable homes in harmony with Mother Earth. P–Funk’s Mothership was an imaginary place that those with outcast identities could call home.

Dreams of the future like these are a kind of nostalgia for a better time— it just so happens to be one that doesn’t exist yet. Usually the visions arrive a little skewed: The Mothership has yet to land but the funky music and inclusive ideals are very much intact. Permanent geodesic homes are still an anomaly, but their portability and durability makes them indispensable as pop-up shelters for refugees. The wholesale adoption of these inventions are as elusive as the future itself, yet their underlying values such as inclusion, service, and environmental stewardship guide our actions to this day.

It’s not too surprising that the future is back in vogue. Once again, the present feels fraught while the past remains unresolved. All the troubles seem to be coming at once, so much so that there’s no need to call them out here—each of us already has a list of the troubles we see.

So we set our sights on the future as a way to help us course-correct the present. Design belongs to the future—it is naturally a future–looking endeavor, always in service of moments to come. Like it or not, the things we create always end up in our futures via the most reliable and relentless delivery system there is: the passage of time.

As we kick off our Future Foundations endeavor, we are looking at what emerging technologies can do for learning, but in a decidedly d.school way. Not by exploring how emergent technology can help deliver information more efficiently, but how it can help students become more adaptive learners. It’s less about what they learn than about how they learn to learn. That’s a future foundation. How will we learn to make the most of what’s to come?

We’re also out to discover what’s possible. At the d.school we tend to think of prototypes as experiments that teach us what to do next. There’s another kind of prototype: a demonstration of what could be, our own creative leaps that allow us to rehearse the future beyond the bounds of the present. These demonstrative prototypes live in past examples like the mid-twentieth century case study houses: full scale, livable homes, each devoted to an exploration of what might be within reach. An example is Case Study House #8, where Ray and Charles Eames showed how to build a simple, charming, useful structure using mainly surplus materials. We have decidedly different questions than they did, but the spirit of exploring possibility is the same.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we’re on a hunt. A search for ideas and ideals worth pursuing. A search for people and places that are doing good work. A search for partners that can help us build those future foundations. And finally, a search for the search itself. Our goal is to build a better capacity to locate, listen, and learn. We want to grow our ability to see what’s missing and act on it.

So, to new beginnings. To room for ideals. To better times yet to come. To work in progress. To work on progress.

To future foundations.

Becoming Good Ancestors Becoming Good Ancestors Becoming Good Ancestors

By Lisa Kay Solomon

The Urgency of Long–Term Thinking

As a Designer and Futurist in Residence at the d.school, part of my role is to bring in new perspectives to our home team to spark new connections, learning opportunities, generative relationships, and expansive thinking.

oman Krznaric’s new book, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long–Term Thinking, offers a perspective that has resonance for all of us.

It’s more than a book, really. It’s a philosophical perspective that communicates a revolutionary point of view. It’s one of those books that conveys a powerful idea in such a compelling and vivid way, it changes your whole perspective on the world around you. And, once you see the world differently, you can’t unsee it.

The showstopper is right under the title, with a provocative quote from the famous immunologist, Jonas Salk, inventor of the vaccine for polio. “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’”

Let’s pause on that for a second...Are we being good ancestors? Today. At this moment. Are we making choices that will be good for our children and our children’s children, and our children’s children’s children?

Roman’s provocation is that we need to do better at long-term thinking and to urgently consider future, unborn generations in our decision–making today. Thinking about the long–term is increasingly challenging to do in a world that prioritizes speed, efficiency, immediate feedback, and measurable ROI.

However, as the future seems to come at us faster and faster, the urgency of valuing and investing in the long term is more important than ever. As Roman says, “We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please.”

I’ve spent nearly twenty years practicing, writing, and teaching practices of futures thinking, strategic foresight, and design, orienting my work around the question: “What does the future need from us?”

Reevaluating How We Spend Time Today to Honor Tomorrow

According to Roman, we are all wired to have both the acorn brain and the marshmallow brain. The acorn brain makes the more contemplative, longer-term connections, and the marshmallow brain likes the quick reward. All of us have this circuitry, not just the select few who seem to be gifted with “big ideas.” That’s important to remember.

Given the cultural and technological pressures that we experience daily, we’re much more practiced at using our marshmallow brain—and the external world rewards those quick amygdala hits much more intensely (hello...emails, texts, likes, pings, snaps, and so on). As such, we’re lured into constant attention hijacking, and then rely on (get addicted to?) the emotional zingers that those beeps, tweets, notifications provide. No one gives you a reward, thumbs–up, or “like” for taking things off your schedule to think deeply, meditate, read, walk, daydream, or appreciate art, do they?

This idea made me revisit my calendar with a new lens: If I went back to color code my days based on the time I’m investing in “acorn thinking”— planting seeds and ideas for the long term—and “marshmallow thinking”— things that might feel good in the moment to do or complete—how would that change the way I valued time, and what I did with that time? And, by not doing that, how am I letting down future generations?

“The most important question we must ask ourselves is,

we being good ancestors

—Jonas Salk

‘Are

?’”

t the d.school, we call that “designing your design work.” Being intentional about the conditions, environment, and culture that bring out your best work. This includes physical and digital environments—the stimuli that are often invisible, but critical to our state of mind and capacity for creative and critical thinking.

One immediate step to becoming a good ancestor is to start paying attention to the environments that bring out slower, longer term, imaginative thinking about the choices we’re making for ourselves, and for our future generations.

Practicing Gratitude for Good Ancestors: Past, Present, and Future

Roman has an extraordinary list of concrete examples of what he calls “legacy mindset” projects, and reminds us that we are capable of investing in projects that won’t deliver payoff for decades, if not hundreds of years to come. The 135–year–old Sagrada Familia church still being built in Barcelona, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, and the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock are just a few of the examples explored in the book.

Yet you probably don’t study the Sagrada Familia unless you’re an architect or a tourist, or look at the importance of the seed farm unless you’re studying biology. And, if you’re like me, you probably talk mostly about time through the lens of not having enough of it today.

This idea resonates strongly with my belief that we are all capable of thinking more deeply about the future—we just haven’t seen enough visible examples of it in action and

haven’t been given the intentional practice time to do it. For example, we don’t walk around forests and say, “I wonder who planted that for us?” Or, when we ourselves plant a seed, think “I can’t wait for my children’s children to enjoy this.”

Imagine if we took time to notice the investments that past generations made for us in our everyday life, and acknowledge them through the lens of imagination, courage, and empathetic care.

Feeling Shared Accountability for the Future

Roman asserts that by not considering the future impact of our choices, we are, in essence, colonizing the future. It got me thinking more seriously about the lack of accountability for the future and the void of shared responsibility we have in fostering better decisions. Our tools for measuring future accountability and responsibility fall woefully short to support the type of aligned action we desperately need for global and cross–sector cooperation.

Our lack of shared accountability and underdeveloped ways of measuring future harm are particularly glaring when there’s no single organization that has to account for the decision— like in the case of climate change. So many people, governments, and organizations share responsibility for decisions that will have both individual and collective impacts, yet none are truly held to account. When Greta Thumberg started her movement, Fridays for Future, she was demanding accountability from politicians and corporate leaders.

Roman believes that the key to unlocking our long-term thinking and shared care for future generations may be empathy—one of our most

unique and human traits. “How do we make a personal, empathic connection with future generations whom we can never meet and whose lives we can barely imagine?”

(It’s worth noting that Roman wrote an earlier book, Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It, which is also fantastic.)

Such questions offer transformational moments that break us out of the constraints of legacy thinking and three- to five-year planning horizons. They give us the chance to surface our fears and hopes for the future and discuss the pro–future mindset that we want to leave as our legacy for our families, community, and the world.

The good news? We can all enact this perspective—it doesn’t require any special technology, access to certain resources, or expertise. Just a willingness to do things differently.

It’s time to start thinking more urgently about the kind of good ancestors that our future generations deserve.

Grateful to Roman Krznaric, Tim Fish, Nancy Murphy, Denise Brosseau, Bonnie Kay, Laurie Moore, Carissa Carter, and Laura McBain for their contributions to this article and their constant inspiration for me to become a Good Ancestor (or at least a much better one).

Visions the FutureVisions the FutureVisions the Future

By Ariel Raz, Louie Montoya, Lisa Kay Solomon, and Laura McBain

We can’t build a future we haven’t imagined. It is time to disrupt the legacies of an industrial education system that fails our future. We must reimagine new futures that reward deep learning over content consumption, experiential discovery over efficiency, holistic well–being over measurable metrics.

Visions of FutureVisions of FutureVisions of Future

e are the dreamers and builders of those new futures. The future belongs to all of us. The K12 Lab is in the midst of an initiative that explores the intersection of futures, design, and equity.

Throughout the year we prototyped with immersive experiences to help educators imagine and design futures of learning with their own communities. We wanted to push the boundaries of not just what we learn, but how we learn, and when we learn. How do we learn from the future? How do we learn with the future? How do we learn for the future?

The d.school Future(s) Museum and the Hall of Descendants are immersive prototypes that are ways we are thinking about supporting educators to imagine and design futures of learning with their own communities.

A Radical Invitation toward Shaping Collective Futures for Education and Beyond

Both of these explorations are grounded in crafting physical artifacts—objects that serve as a nexus between us, our futures, and our present–day actions. These experiences engage educators in maker experiences that make the abstract thinking of futures work more tangible. The K12 Lab partnered with celebrated and diverse futurists to collaboratively pioneer new directions of community–based, multi–disciplinary, accessible, immersive learning experiences.

Future(s) Museum

Debuting at the SXSW EDU conference, the Stanford d.school Future(s) Museum is a radical invitation to shaping collective futures for education and beyond. Supported by the Siegel Family Endowment, our Museum featured artifacts from the future created by our workshop participants. These interactive

workshops transported participants into the future to practice collective visioning of just societies and intimate individual visioning of the stories from the futures we want for generations to come.

At our SXSW immersion, Meredith Hutchison and Aisha Bain of Resistance Communications facilitated the co–creation of artifacts as a mechanism of time travel, connecting ancestral intelligence with future empathy. What can we honor from our elders to bestow to our descendants? Dr. Lonny J Avi Brooks, Ahmed Best, and Jade Fabello from Afro–Rithms from the Future led participants through a collaborative world–building game designed to create new contexts and inspirations for artifacts and products yet to come.

Our team carefully curated a pop–up installation, illuminated with light animation from a smart projector. The artists were encouraged to visit their featured pieces with guests to foster deeper reflection and conversation.

Our hope with the Future(s) Museum is that it helps educators think concretely about the future and expand what they deem possible for their students, their schools, and the world.

The Hall of Descendants

The d.school Futures(s) Museum at SXSW culminated in the Hall of Descendants, a self-directed maker experience designed to help participants imagine and immerse themselves in the lives of their descendants’ descendants’ descendants. We can’t build a future we haven’t imagined. Yet when we are asked to design for our descendants, our thinking gets fuzzy, and our brain powers down. It’s as if we’re thinking about a stranger.

The Hall of Descendants project calls upon the maker to think about their future lineage in a real and tangible way: What might the world look like? What is the context and conditions of their environment? Who are they in this world? What is their identity? Their appearance? Their position in this world? It then asks the participant to bring this future descendant to life through a tangible representation— an interpretative visualization grounded in empathy, connection, and love. Finally, the participant is asked to create an artist's statement that reflects on how imagining a distant descendant evoked new insights or priorities.

The Hall of Descendants at SXSW featured portraits that were an intervention into this process. Students imagined their descendants in vivid detail, which were then further brought to life with light animation. Through this work, we endeavor to foster empathy for these future descendants as a way to help inform the decisions we make today.

This project has continued on beyond SXSW and was recently featured at the Smithsonian Museum. The Hall of Descendants work provides tools to help educators think concretely about the future and expand what they deem possible for their students, their schools, and the world.

Are you ready to bring futures thinking to your classroom? Your school? Your community? How might you activate your community to imagine and build the future together?

1 2 3 4 5

Consider using these questions as starting points for your own design work:

How can we build empathy for the future?

What are ways we can start to trace change over time to understand how the world will change?

What can we do to craft visions of coexistence where everyone in our community is heard, seen, and valued?

How might we find multiple pathways toward the future, honoring the plurality and ambiguity of creating something new?

How can we engage in world–building to explore what our future communities might look like?

“This was good for my soul. The future has felt so scary and existential, but this space allowed me to experience it in a way that felt approachable and centering.”

—SXSW Educator

Positive Positive Positive Deviance Deviance Deviance for for for Educators Educators

By Devon Young, Jessica Brown, Marc Chun, Peter Worth

he problems that we use positive deviance (PD) to address are intractable. They are ones that are felt throughout the community. Ones that educators have tried to solve previously, but that continue to reemerge. These problems may have known practices that address them, but these practices have not been effective or have not taken hold.

Positive deviance offers a path to explore why. The bright spots that educators are finding have had success without extra resources or outside expertise. They have had an impact where all other solutions have failed. Seeing this success and having confidence that it could be replicated has created a natural curiosity and excitement to explore what other problems can be explored and potentially ameliorated with a positive deviance process. Here’s an overview of PD and how we’re using this practice with educators.

What happens when you move from “how might we?” to “how are we?”

From “what’s wrong here?” to “what’s right here, already?”

Over the past two years, we have been exploring the potential for positive deviance in K12 education. We have engaged over 100 educators from around the globe, working with schools that each represent the complexity, diversity, and opportunity we see across the education sector.

We are grateful for the work of Marian Zeitlin and her colleagues at Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy for their foundational work, and for Richard Pascale, Monique Sternin, and Jerry Sternin for their 2010 book The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, which inspired our team in this project.

Positive deviance is a practice based on the belief that there is a bright spot within your community that has already found a solution for a sticky, intractable problem you are facing. In using this method to help educators find solutions to challenges in their community, we’ve seen a shift in how folks approach problems.

This is the positive deviance process:

Problem Identification Data Analysis

Bright Spot Seeking Community Spreading and Scaling

Resources for Educators

The K12 Lab’s Positive Deviance Toolkit for Educators brings together a suite of tools designed to help school teams identify and solve intractable problems by discovering and scaling their own existing local solutions.

This work is informed by what we learned through working with educators in applying PD tools in their classes. These educators provided insight and feedback on the tools, process, and relevance in their community. We are so grateful for the support they provided, and are excited to share this toolkit as a reflection of their thoughtful work integrating positive deviance in their communities.

We hope that with the Positive Deviance Toolkit, communities will be able to embark on the journey of observation, data collection, conversation, and finding solutions to share. We hope that educators will be able to use it to dismantle inequity and barriers to students’ success, inclusion, growth, and joy.

We hope that educators will be able to use it to further appreciate the brilliance that surrounds them—to recognize both what we need to end and what we need to amplify. The toolkit is not perfect (in fact, we’d still say it’s a prototype). However it has been a labor filled with intention, grace, and learning. We sincerely hope it offers the same (and more) to educators and their students.

Here’s How the Toolkit Was Created

After teaching a d.school class for university students and short-cycle testing some of the positive deviance tools in isolation, the K12 Lab brought the tools together to test them in sequence, as part of a complete toolkit. We put out a call to the community of educators who have engaged with the Lab. We offered educators the opportunity to come together in school teams to test a new set of prototypes in the service of trying to solve an intractable problem in one of four areas:

1 2 3 4

Belonging: Our school needs to develop ways to ensure our students are safe and feel a sense of belonging.

Assessment: Our school needs a way to enable our educators to use new and existing assessment methods to improve students’ learning and personal growth.

Civic Engagement: Our school needs to develop ways to enable more students to participate (in quality and quantity) in community and civic life.

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Our school needs to better integrate experiences and materials that are culturally diverse and relevant to our students.

Schools applied to address their own problems within one of these areas, and adapted the problem statement to better fit their context and needs. We were not looking for problems with technical solutions (like something a school could purchase or implement), but rather adaptive solutions, which would require most or all of the staff in the school to change their behavior. Also, in some cases, the general solution may already be known (e.g., students are more engaged when there are opportunities for authentic learning), in which case authentic learning might not be the solution, but rather the outlier.

Here’s What Teams Did

Fifteen schools from eleven countries were selected to participate in the prototype testing. This included trying the prototypes in their schools and engaging in weekly group sessions and team check-in calls. Schools included elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as public/ district schools, charter schools, and independent schools. Teams included individuals in a variety of roles and responsibilities across the school.

Together, they engaged in a process that took them from identifying a problem to finding local examples of people solving that problem to exploring how they might spread and scale those solutions internally.

Bright Spots

Using the positive deviance process, each team was able to identify a problem, uncover bright spots, and then make a plan to scale these bright spots.

The practices were identified by educators in their own contexts, but we believe there may be value in sharing them with educators more broadly as authentic, home-grown solutions to common problems that might be adapted by educators or used for inspiration. Before sharing the practices widely, we worked with a team of advisors to apply three types of filters: researcher, practitioner, and sorting.

To provide additional information and better understand the nature of the practices, we then coded the bright spots with sorting filters: who each was designed for (targeted universalism); who identified it (student or practitioner); whether the practice made purposeful use of digital technology; ability to be adapted for differentiated instruction; whether an equity lens was apparent to the team; and whether the bright spot was a practice (as opposed to a person or idea).

The Issues that Continue to Emerge in Education Call for Urgent, Intentional Action

As the ones closest to the problem, we may have relevant solutions that we haven’t taken the time to examine. Educators are humble, and don’t always want a spotlight on the incredible work currently being done to impact students.

Positive deviance helps us uncover how significant these practices, behaviors, and mindsets can be. It creates a pathway to share, learn, and create fuller educational and social spaces for students (and the rest of us too). We hope these resources will provide your school community with a new way of seeing the bright spots that already exist around you.

Get Down with the Mission Get Down with the Mission Get Down with the Mission

By Jessica Brown, Louie Montoya, and sam seidel

The K12 Lab’s New Learning Deck on Taking Action toward Racial Justice

Racism is our country’s perpetual sin. We believe education is how we address it. As part of our work at the K12 Lab, we created Get Down with the Mission, a learning deck focusing on building creative courage and racial justice for educators in our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools.

t is in these schools where we see the same patterns of disparities based on race in resource allocation, disciplinary actions, special education referrals, and graduation rates. These disparities appear as gaps on graphs but represent violence on children.

Now imagine living in a community where differences in skin color and culture are celebrated, where discrimination is nonexistent, where greed is replaced by generosity, hatred by harmony, anger by abundance. This is the aim of our work.

Our Reflections:

The work is driven by our hearts and passion.

We are grateful to be able to share this learning deck. Grateful for having had the opportunity to do this work, grateful to our students and

collaborators with whom we shaped it, grateful to Lala Openi who helped bring it to life visually, and grateful to you for making time and space to engage with it. In order to share this work publicly, we need to share a bit about how it feels to do so. We hope this gives you a peek at who we are and how we come to this work.

Louie

Montoya

What does it mean to share this work? It’s honestly a little like sharing a piece of my heart. I can’t help but feel super vulnerable, a little raw. This work has changed and shaped me in so many ways. Reflecting on the journey, it makes me a little embarrassed about where I was when I started, gives me confidence about how far I’ve progressed, and keeps me humble about how much more I need to do for the world and myself. It’s emotional for me to share this work because it’s more than a list of workshops and activities, it’s the relationships I’ve made along the way, the challenging realizations I’ve had, and the formation of new visions for what could be.

I hope that this work speaks to others in a deep way. I hope sharing it invites folks who are curious and creative to come join us in building something meaningful, something that will continue to help us grow and love one another. I fear this work will be passed off as yet another DEI framework that companies/orgs/schools half–heartedly try and abandon. I know some of this is inevitable, and also that this work is and forever will be for those who seek justice and liberation in their hearts and communities.

Jess Brown

As I wrote my intentions for this year a few words rose to the top—ease, joy, and abundance. I deeply believe that building a world that honors people who have been historically excluded and marginalized cannot be done in isolation. We need each other. We don’t have to like each other, we don’t always have to agree on tactics, but we do need each other. We need one another to create communities of trust and care. We need one another to strategize, organize, and disrupt powerful, oppressive systems. Our work came from the depths of these needs—from being burnt out, hitting the wall of white supremacy again and again, and feeling alone in championing equity within entrenched organizations.

This work is an offering to our former selves and to others who don’t yet have the language to describe the pain of being unheard and under appreciated. At their best, the tools that we have built and are building will foster ease, joy, and abundance. Ease by offering a community to support us both when we are activated and when we need rest. Joy as we begin to model the behaviors that deeply honor our humanity—and because there is so much release and laughter in liberatory work. Abundance as we realize we all have so much to contribute and we can join together with our knowledge, gifts, and resources to bend our futures towards justice.

sam seidel I wonder if it would be easier to keep passion–work and work–work separate—punching a clock enough hours each week to pay the bills and then engaging in actions with the audacity and desperation to change the world ‘on my own time.’ Nevertheless, I find myself with the privilege and challenge of doing work I care about deeply as my full–time job. With that comes moments of trepidation and joy—like when it is time to publicly share work that has been close to my heart: What if it is misinterpreted, abused, or ignored?

Sharing some of my fears and hopes for what will happen as we float this particular piece of work out into the world helps me release it…

An (incomplete) list of fears: that this work will be taken out of context; that larger conclusions will be drawn than we are trying to suggest; that it will somehow ‘position’ us and the institutions we represent as experts on matters upon which we are learners; that it will be viewed as a commodity (‘intellectual property’) that can be owned, stolen, or sold.

An (incomplete) list of hopes: that this work will inspire action; that we will get to learn from those we share it with; that they will teach us what we got wrong or don’t understand yet; that it will be sampled, remixed, and taken forward; that we will look back at it in a few years and feel a mix of pride for the quantity and quality of the work we put into it, nostalgia for the time we shared as we created it, and that good kind of embarrassment you feel when you look back at something you made and realize how far you’ve come since.

The Work: If educators learn about racism, they’ll take anti–racist action.

The

Through conversations with educators and young people, and through experiments with tools and resources in the field, we've developed three experiences to support people as they address racial inequity.

Teachers for Equity was a yearlong fellowship we ran in partnership with Pacific Educational Group (PEG). It included 20 educators from three different regions. The Fellowship provided learning experiences on critical race theory and design thinking to support educators as they addressed inequity in their schools through communities of practice.

Islands in the Storm is a workshop and curriculum designed by Jessica Brown and Louie Montoya intended to support equity leaders with a focus on self care and collective organizing. We ran this workshop at several different conferences and as a Stanford d.school elective class in 2019.

Designing (Ourselves) 4 Racial Equity was a Stanford course designed and facilitated by Jessica Brown, Louie Montoya, and sam seidel. It included Stanford students, staff, and community organizers across the country. It focused on the intersection of racial equity and design and was centered on tools and resources to push students’ equity work.

After we built and tested these pieces, we wanted to bring them together.

We created the Get Down with the Mission Learning Deck to present focused actions and resources for the path forward:

Tools and Trainings for Anti–Racist Action. What we want to make: We want to curate, refine, and design our racial justice resources so that they are accessible, cohesive, and easily translate to action for educators. The change we want to see: educators building their equity design capacity; educators creating more relevant and transformative educational experiences for young people.

Strategies for Self Care. What we want to make: We want to build out self care resources for educators to use whenever they need. These might include resources such as a reflective journal and a self care starter kit. The change we want to see: Educators having space to move equity work forward without being burnt out; self care being a more central theme in equity work.

Communities of Support. What we want to make: We want to co–design and prototype new experiments to help us identify how to make communities of practice scalable and more sustainable. The change we want to see: Educators relying on their collective experiences and expertise to tackle complex social issues; equity work becoming more decentralized so that when there are changes in a school or organization (such as changes in leadership), equity work will still continue.

Work: If educators learn about racism, they’ll take anti-racist action.

The Goal: We will transform the education system. When we transform the education system, we transform society.

Help us make this vision a reality.

Data Data

In 2021–2022, our Academic Collective welcomed new members to our community and expanded our offerings. It was a year of transition. As we laid the groundwork for the new design degrees, we welcomed the old ones into the fold, and administered them en route to their relaunch in fall 2022.

Therefore, our class offerings for 2021–2022 included degree courses for those enrolled in the BS Product Design and MS Design Impact programs, in addition to our suite of d.school offerings. The latter we now refer to as electives. They are still open to students across all of Stanford’s seven schools. They are project–based, and experiential–a pedagogical innovation engine.

The Data Shared Here:

Historically, we’ve collected and shared data and demographics on d.school electives, and the graphics on the following pages are the 2021–2022 share of these same variables. We have high level information on the degree courses, as shared in the next paragraph. In future years, we’ll report on students and instructors in the new BS and MS Design degrees using the same metrics as our elective classes.

Degree Classes

We administered 18 degree course offerings in 2021–2022. There were 31 instructors and another 21 coaches in our degree courses. Forty students graduated with undergraduate BS Product Design degrees, and an additional eight students graduated from the MS Design Impact program.

Elective Classes

In 2021–2022 we taught 28 elective courses. These courses brought us back into the classroom after a year of virtual teaching and learning. As in past years, they were a mix of new and returning offerings. The number of classes was in line with our pre-pandemic volume of for–credit courses. We didn’t offer a pop–out program.

Overall student enrollment increased about 12% from the prior year to 467, but the ratio of graduate to undergraduate students has stayed quite similar at approximately 3:1.

Students

Enrolled For–Credit Classes:

63% Graduate

37% Undergraduate

Instructors

Total Instructors

66 % Returning Instructors

54% New to teaching at the d.school

Diversity in Discipline

Graduate Students

The d.school serves the graduate student population across Stanford’s seven schools. In 2021–2022 we had a higher percentage of students from three of the seven schools, compared to their representation in the overall student body. Within Stanford’s graduate student population, we have an overrepresentation of students from the School of Earth (now the Doerr School of Sustainability), Education, and Business. Engineering enrollment at the d.school remained proportionate to the overall Stanford population.

Undergraduate Students

As in prior years, the main difference between undergraduate enrollment at the d.school versus Stanford as a whole is in the percentage of students undeclared. In our courses we see a much smaller percentage of undeclared students. Stanford students are required to declare a major by the end of their sophomore year, meaning many of the first and second year students are undeclared. The comparatively lower percentage of undeclared d.school students likely means that our enrollments skew towards juniors and seniors.

d.school Students

Stanford Students

Instructor Home Disciplines

We had 63 instructors teach with us this year. Almost all of our instructors are lecturers who work in industry or the nonprofit sectors, elsewhere at Stanford, or as designers either within organizations, in consultancies, or independent firms. This mix of life experience brings a rich texture to the classroom. This year, 40% of our instructors hold design–specific roles. 33% have other industry roles. 27% come from academia, both Stanford and beyond. This year, 66% of instructors were returning.

Instructor # Classes Taught

By Gender

Instructor Home Disciplines

33% Design

40% Academia

27%

We continue to operate counter to the narrative of design as a male–dominated space and traditionally serve more female–identifying students than male. This is also reflected in our d.school instructor population. The number of teaching team members who identify as female is generally over 50% each year.

Racial Diversity of Instructors

d.school Instructors

Faculty

The diversity of our teaching teams continues to remain somewhat similar to those in the university as a whole. The d.school employed comparatively (by percentage) more instructors identifying as Black or African American and White (non–Hispanic) and fewer Asian or Asian American and Hispanic or Latino identifying individuals than the university as a whole.

Black or African American Asian or Asian American

American Indian or Alaska Native

Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander

Hispanic or Latino

White (non–Hispanic)

Two or more races

Unknown/ Declined to Say

Racial Diversity of Students

Among students, the percentages are even closer. While it is not our intention to mirror the university, we do want all students to find connection with their instructors. One way of bridging that connection is through a racially diverse instructor population. Continuing to push the diversity of our instructor population is a goal.

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2021 2022 d.school Contributors

Khyati Agarwal

Khandker Ahamed

Rick Akkerman

Nora al Haider

Jessica Aldrich

Lindsey Armeen

Ignacio Arriaga

Ilya Avdeev

Michael Barry

Alastair Bate

Patrick Beaudouin

Ida Benedetto

Marissa Berrong

Serhat Bilge

Robin Bonatesta

Thomas Both

Bruce Boyd

Brendan Boyle

Leticia Britos

Cavagnaro

Lonny Brooks

Jennifer Brown

Jessica Brown

Maggie Brown

Charlotte Burgess–Auburn

Whitney Burks

Courtlandt Butts

Josh Cadorette

Bruce Cahan

Emily Callaghan

Julieta Caputo

Michelle Carney

Carissa Carter

Nathan Carter

John Cassidy

Susie Chang

Renée Chao

Joanne Cheung

Vicky Chung

Trevor Clevenger

Katherine Cobb

Powell Coleman

Stuart Coulson

Brayden Cutler

Scott Doorley

Steven Downs

Milan Drake

Kirk Eklund

Joséphine El Balaa

Drew Endy

Erica Estrada–Liou

Isaac Ewell

Glenn Fajardo

Humera Fasihuddin

Jon Feiber

Elysa Fenenbock

Nelson Fernandes

Justin Ferrell

Brenda Flores–Reyes

Hollie Fortkamp

Daniel Frumhoff

Nell Garcia

Kelly Garrett Zeigler

Parker Gates

Nariman Gathers

Stacey Gray

Priscilla Grille

Ann Grimes

Saul Gurdus

Margaret Hagan

Ahmed Hanan

Grace Hawthorne

Aleta Hayes

Nick Hennigan

Malliron Hodge

Marcus Hollinger

Kevin Hsu

Isabel Huff

Miriam Iliohan

David Janka

Rohit Jatana

Sachal Jogi

David Johnson

Tiara Johnson

Torin Johnson

Hannah Jones

CJ Jung

Jill Kasser

David Kelley

Kim Kendall–

Humphreys

Jess Kessin

Saara Khan

Perry Klebahn

Dan Klein

Marlo Kohn

Koffi Korha

Katie Krummeck

Pavan Kumar Gandi

Tomohiro Loeer

Ise Lyfe

Kate Maher

Lupe Makasyuk

David Martinez

Josefina Martinez

Maria Josefina

Martínez Calero

Lauren Matz

Laura McBain

Gina Mendolia

Austin Meyer

Brandon Middleton

Ryan Middleton

Ariam Mogos

Nimesh

Mohanakrishnan

Reeth Mohta

Nina Montgomery

Louie Montoya

Laurie Moore

Myisha Moore

Diego Muñoz

Judith Ned

Jess Nickerson

Trevor Nicks

Kerry O'Connor

Titi Osisanlu

Zişan Özdemir

Kursat Ozenc

Bill Pacheco

Hesam Panahi

Sean Park

Ryan Phillips

Satya Pranavi

Gangapuri

Bre Przestrzelski

Jill Puckett

Jonathan Puhl

Mary Raber

Tara Rahmani

Catherine Randle

Matthew Rascoff

Ariel Raz

Juan Rivas Espinosa

Lucia Rodriguez

Hannah Joy Root

Bernie Roth

Nadia Roumani

Lisa Rowland

Josh Ruff

Meghana

Sakalabhaktula

Scott Sanchez

Lee Sanders

Londa Schiebinger

Kelly Schmutte

Megan Schoendorf

Thyne Scholte

Tina Seelig

Sam Seidel

Debbie Senesky

Deena Shakir

Ghanashyam Shankar

Jaclynn Siler–Dearring

Madlen Simon

Sara Singer

Meenu Singh

Ria Singh

Andrea Small

Olatunde Sobomehin

Miki Sode

Lisa Kay Solomon

Venkata Srivatsa

Srikar Naredla

Sabrina Stangler

Megan Stariha

Sarah Stein Greenberg

Debbe Stern

Gerald Suarez

Natalia Suarez

Kehlin Swain

Nick Swayne

Michael Thuis

Amanda Tiet

Anand Upender

Jeremy Utley

Nick Varney

Carolina Vassallucci

Kathryn Velcich

Chitra Venugopal

Jill Vialet

Morgan Vien

Shree Vijayaraj

Sam Warach

Jeni Weber

Nyssa Wedgeworth

Adam Weiler

Josh Weiss

Felipe Wilson

Tyler Winick

Susie Wise

Peter Worth

Alan Xia

Manasa Yeturu

Selin Yilmaz

Devon Young

Seamus Yu Harte

Yuri Zaitsev