d.school Teaching + Learning Yearbook 2020-2021

Teaching & Learning YE ARBO O K 2 0 2 0 – 2 0 2 1

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D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

o our instructors, staff, supporters, and students: thank you. The feat of teaching and learning through a fully remote year is nothing short of extraordinary.

You leveraged the constraints of virtual learning and discovered new opportunities for design, new ways to build community, and new possibilities for our programs. Whatever your role in the d.school ecosystem, your contributions are felt. In a year where we were more separated than ever, we came together more than ever.

It’s not simple to teach or learn during a time of crisis. Thank you for all you do to make the d.school and Stanford a thriving institution.

Sarah Stein Greenberg Executive Director Carissa Carter Academic Director

Table of Contents A global pandemic kept us from campus in 2020-2021 and led to three quarters of fully distributed teaching and learning. This context was ripe with challenges and opportunities that ultimately pushed us to new insights and illuminated ways to strengthen our community. This yearbook is divided into the following three sections: Yearbook Credits: Editor in Chief: Carissa Carter Executive Editor: Adrienne Baer Content Curation: Megan Stariha Creative Direction, Art Direction, + Graphic Design: Daniel Frumhoff Art Direction + Photography: Han Gibbons + Patrick Beaudouin With Design Consulting support from: Nan Cao + Erica Holeman All of the work we do is a collective effort and made possible by the d.school team, our teaching community, and the students we serve.

1 Redefining Interaction | 1

23 Pursuing Intention | 101

Pushing Interdisciplinarity | 177

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Redefining Interaction About: Without a physical space, but with a whole new world of digital tools, our community found creative ways to reimagine meaningful interaction.

In this section, we delve into how we took on the challenge of remote learning and working by building new ways to connect with one another, from within classrooms to behind the scenes. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot we’re going to take forward.

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A YEAR OF RE– MOTE

By Glenn Fajardo

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en years from now, when we look back at the 202021 school year, we’ll remember the extraordinary times in which we lived. An unprecedented global pandemic. An energized struggle for racial justice. A consequential US presidential election. An insurrection.

In addition to all those things, we will also remember that it was a full year of remote everything, requiring the world to figure out new ways for people to interact meaningfully.

Today, as we write this yearbook, we remember how we were inspired by the work of students, instructors, and staff as everyone bravely navigated an unfamiliar and emerging virtual world.

As we start gathering in-person again, we know that we’re not going back to the way things were in 2019. We’ve changed. We’re going forward to a new world that incorporates what we’ve learned from 2020 and 2021. As virtual eventually becomes a choice instead of a necessity, the psychology of the opportunity changes.

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What might we learn from the past remote year that we can take forward?

Our extreme experience can help us surface lessons about the practice of design education.

Yes, there were many tactical technology lessons we learned. We’ll remember the experiences we had learning the nuances of muting, blips in internet bandwidth, and getting used to tools such as video calls and digital whiteboards.

But if we take a step back, we can notice more profound lessons. The experience of a remote year exposed five challenges and opportunities in the teaching, learning, and practice of design.

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irst, we might more deeply empathize with our students on just how difficult the practice of design optimism can be. We strive to support our students to take an optimistic, generative, and possibility-focused stance. We help our students develop their self-identity as problem solvers, and we draw inspiration from a growth mindset and grit. All of this is important!

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

And after last year, we can more deeply empathize with just how hard this can be.

Let’s not forget the difficulty, uncertainty, and frustration we felt at times as we had to design our way through a remote year! Remember what it was like when you were trying to figure out how to tell if students were engaged when you couldn’t simply look at them across the room? You might not have had a terribly optimistic mindset at first! But eventually, you figured some things out.

What did it feel like to navigate that journey? Perhaps we might take something forward from our personal experiences of what it was like to try to stay optimistic and generative during difficult times.

Questions to consider going forward on design optimism: 1 What did I learn about having an optimistic mindset when trying to design remote interactions during a pandemic?

2 What surprised me? What hadn’t I fully considered before?

3 How would I change my instruction going forward, based on what I’ve learned about this?

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econd, we might reflect on how design can feel different depending on your proximity to the problem. What happens when it’s a challenge that you have to engage versus you want to engage? How does it feel when you don’t pick the challenge but the challenge picks you?

Note that “have to” and “want to” are not in direct opposition to each other.

We could imagine them in a 2x2 matrix with low and high for each. Proximity to a problem is related to the “have to.”

Passion for the problem is related to the “want to.”

When you are in closer proximity to a problem and you have to deal with it, that can affect the emotional experience of designing solutions.

And after this year, we might appreciate that this can have different effects on different people in different contexts.

Just because you have to doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll want to.

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For example, this past year, you might have had a moment where you logically knew that you had to engage with the problem of finding better ways to interact with people at a distance…but you really didn’t want to. You might have logically accepted that, yes, this is a reality you have to deal with. But at the same time you might have felt,

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“This sucks!” or “Why do I have to deal with this?” or “When will this just go away?” and/or “F*** this.”

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We should reflect on proximity to the problem from our own experiences as design educators in a remote year, and use those reflections to inform how we support students as they engage different problems where different people have different proximities.

We have some great go-to moves with attitude changes, such as flipping frustration to curiosity or framing necessary challenges in interesting ways.

And perhaps after this year, we might further appreciate that we need to expand our playbook - and our empathy for each other - when different designers have different proximities to a problem.

Let’s find ways to support each other.

Questions to consider going forward on proximity to problems: 1 What changes as our proximity to a problem changes?

2 In what ways can we alter our proximity? In what ways can we not?

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How can we respectfully acknowledge each of our proximities, while keeping everyone engaged in collaborative problem-solving?

4 How can we make the experience of asking for and offering help feel empowering for all involved?

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hird, we might reorient our (design) relationship to technology. It can be easy to fall into an assumption that technology has to be purpose-built. “I need to get better at Zoom/MURAL/Nearpod/etc.” and that “good” technology is frictionless. Technology should be seamless, intuitive, and magically meet my exact needs. (User delight, anyone?) Those qualities can certainly be useful, but what if we didn’t always have those expectations and were able to shift our mindset on technology for different contexts? For example, what if we push ourselves to find more ways to get low-res, scrappy, and emergent with ways we use digital technology in design?

Consider the history of the use of post-it notes. No, not the accidental discovery of what would become post-it notes at 3M

by Spencer Silver and Art Fry (which by the way is a great story). Instead, consider the history of the use of post-it notes in design thinking. It’s not like post-it notes were purpose-built for design thinking. Post-it notes weren’t designed to be intuitive for design thinking. That use emerged from noticing and experimentation. What if wetook a similar mindset towards the use of digital technology in design?

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To use a music analogy, when we use digital technology at the d.school, we tend to practice scales instead of making music. We tend to mechanically go through the steps and use every note in the same order (i.e. how do I optimize my use of this technology?) instead of being more expressive and quirky. Perhaps we can draw more inspiration from emergent uses of technology, such as the evolution of hashtags and mentions on Twitter, and the various ways they have been used and misused in interesting ways.

As design educators, what if we saw the boundary between analog and digital to be more permeable? What if we no longer saw one as “natural” and the other as “not natural?” What if we start noticing the nuances, tendencies, and dispositions of our different analog and digital mediums, appreciating the malleabilities and constraints of each one?

more lenses and tools at our disposal, and be able to choose from them intentionally for the context at hand.

Questions to consider going forward on design’s relationship to technology: 1 How can we loosen the association of analog-is-low-res and digital-is-high-res?

2 How can we loosen the assumption that technology necessarily has to be purpose-built?

3 How can we encourage experimentation with non-obvious uses of technology?

4 How can we get rougher and scrappier with how we experiment with the use of technology?

We might think of digital beyond its obvious capabilities to work at distance, at scale, and at data-ization. Perhaps we might find it worthwhile to become skillful at both analog and digital because it’s like being multilingual, or like being able to understand light as both waves and particles. We’ll have

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body language in a room, or that we might have been unintentionally disadvantaging students with different levels of introversion or of different cultural backgrounds.

ourth—and possibly most important— we need to stay curious about human connection, and continue to experiment around it. Perhaps more so than any other time in our lifetimes, we are appreciating that human connection matters. And human relationships matter in learning.

We might also reflect that when a virtual experience is designed well, there can be a particular power to video messages in response to a prompt, vulnerable thoughts expressed on a digital whiteboard, or in-the-moment reactions shared in a chat.

We can appreciate this not only from our experiences from the past year, but also from a wide range of scientific evidence. As Zaretta Hammond puts it, neuroscience tells us the brain feels safest and relaxed when we are connected to others we trust to treat us well. We’re in a much better position to learn and engage our higher-level thinking when our brains feel safe and are not preoccupied with processing potential threats.

We might realize that “looking someone in the eye in the same room” is one method of many to build human connection. By using our concrete to abstract muscles, we might focus on developing more ways for people to feel seen and heard, to be understood as unique individuals, to get a sense of what others are thinking and feeling, to feel like their contributions are valued, and to know that others care about their well-being.

We can more strongly appreciate both the power and limitations of in-person connection. And as we’ve developed a larger virtual vocabulary, we can also recognize that the in-person interactions we’ve used in the past aren’t the endall, be-all for everyone all the time. For example, we might realize that we’ve overrated our ability to read students’

By having to consider a broader range of contexts and possibilities this past year, if we reflect on our experiences, we can set ourselves up to design for more accessibility, inclusion, and belonging in our classes going forward.

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Questions to consider going forward on human connection: 1 How can we get more intentional and specific about the human connection we want to foster in our classes?

2 What are different things we might do to help students feel psychologically safe?

3 What are different ways in which we can help students feel seen and heard?

4 How can we help students develop accurate trust?

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What are different ways in which we can help students get a sense of each other (e.g. each other's context, what thinking/feeling)?

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What are many different ways to help students feel like they are part of something (i.e. shared identity in a class, across the d.school, etc)?

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ifth and finally, we can take a fresh look at what matters: What needs to be done differently and what can be usefully subtracted?

unexpected upsides with having to deal with Zoom fatigue. We had to reconfigure experiences to make them feel more engaging and less exhausting. We had to go next level in developing our tic-tocs and runs-of-show for our classes. Much of this was a pain in the butt at the time, but the useful learnings span way beyond this past remote year.

For example, you might have significantly reduced the amount of time spent on lectures. You might have increased the amount of time spent in pair work or small group work. You might have built in more individual work time into class time.

You might have redesigned accountability to be more peer-driven. Many of these experiments and learnings can have applicability beyond a pandemicallyremote year.

Questions to consider going forward on a fresh look at what matters: 1 What did you find yourself doing more of, and why?

2 What did you subtract and why?

3 What changes to your teaching approach will you carry forward?

4 What are you still puzzled by?

If we think about it, there were some

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Consider the lessons around these five challenges and opportunities in the teaching, learning, and practice of design.

1. Realizing the challenges of design optimism.

2. Considering different designer’s proximities to problems.

3. Reorienting our relationship to technology.

4. Staying curious about human connection.

5. Taking a fresh look at what matters.

Perhaps learning how to be remote wasn’t remotely the most important thing we learned this year.

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Mini Series: On Making, On Agency, On Gathering

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Part 1 The Dance of Synchronicity and Autonomy Part 2 The Empty Syllabus: When Everyone Gets an A+ Part 3 Reframing Gathering

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The Dance of

SYNCH– RONIC– ITY AND AUTO– NOMY In Conversation with Manasa Yeturu and Ise Lyfe

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Part 1

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g “Can we have shared experiences asynchronously?”

—Manasa Yeturu, co-instructor of Art as Activism, wondered.

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M anasa Yeturu, a design educator, and her co-instructor Ise Lyfe, an Oaklandbased artist, designed the class around three tenets: history matters, change begins with awareness, and art provides dialogue. Students would engage with these tenets through the act of making. But, the teaching team was aware that engaging with social issues and being asked to physically make things could each be overwhelming for students in different ways, let alone when they are combined. They hoped that students would gain “personal esteem about wrestling with social issues,” as Ise shared, but also give themselves “permission to authentically create more,” because “making anything of tangibility allows you to be here… and there’s a power and presence in that,” as Manasa explained.

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The physical act of making compelled students to be present as they created.

Though students were scattered across time zones and making uniquely personal artwork, they would still share this act of making each week. The teaching team knew that as students embarked on personal journeys, having shared experiences in creation would serve as strong connection points. During d.school Summer Camp they honed in on the themes and priorities they needed to bring to the class and Manasa created a curriculum arc structured as a “heartbeat” that leveraged reflection to frame an intentional, meaningful student experience of shared asynchronicity.

Structure The rhythm of each week was the same: students engaged with an artistic performance on a weekly topic and then reflected on what they had seen, heard, and felt. Later in the week, they received an inspirational and educational video to provoke thought. Then they were given an artistic medium, like poetry or digital collage, a prompt, and a time limit in which they had to finish the piece.

These constraints, along with the topic for the week, created a container in which students could be present within the topic, without overthinking.

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Art as Activism

During synchronous sessions, students again reflected, discussing their shared yet separate art explorations, and enjoyed the artist of the week to prompt further rumination and begin the cycle anew. The intentional and repetitive arc of the class created space each week for students to be in the right mindset to approach the topics and creative build each week. The type of making would be

a surprise and where the students might take the prompt is a surprise, but not the structure. In this way, the teaching team facilitated asynchronous magic by enabling a consistent container for surprise, allowing students to step into their own creative power and to be met with compassion when sharing synchronously.

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Autonomy “One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that students were not on campus, so not only were they making, they were making in an actual environment and created a whole new dynamic,” Ise shared. Though students were all given the same provocations, prompts, and constraints, they were able to explore the topics uniquely and personally.

One student “made a really memorable active hopscotch game in a park in the south, where he lives. It dealt with racial inequalities in this park that has become very divisive in his community.”

A marine biology student capitalized on the pandemic-safe activity of looking at Halloween decorations and “wrote a eulogy for the environment and projected it on the wall in this really dynamic and interesting way.” Students were encouraged to not only evoke interest through their artistic works, but to elicit “curiosity about the personal experiences that brought [them] to that space.” Another student, on Stanford’s campus, “a white male student...built a piece about the male gaze and it was very provocative and stirring, you know, but necessary. And I think it spoke to the broader social issue and also his own experience with wanting to be accountable.” Ultimately, students

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engaged in deep personal reflection and were pushed to clarify their thinking by making their ideas tangible. Then, they were able to reflect further by bringing their vulnerability to the safety of the synchronous community.

classmates. Sharing intimate creations and reflecting together gave students the opportunity to think critically, to be seen as their authentic selves, and to return to asynchronous personal creation with new self-awareness and perspectives.

Synchronicity

Conclusion

Taking a piece of your art into the world for critique or input, “helps you build that skill of awareness and understanding in a community,” Manasa described. “With what you create, can you use that as a point of dialogue? A point of connection?

How can making be a part of connection with others?” The teaching team created a synchronous space to empower vulnerability, authenticity and bravery, but the way that students showed up for one another still impressed the teaching team.

Ise noted, “We saw the students having a deep accountability and compassion and focus on one another as they were presenting.” Despite the virtual nature of the course, the learning environment allowed integrity to flourish, so students could be safely vulnerable in sharing their own experiences, their own interpretations, and their own humanity. Students resonated with different topics throughout the course, and the connected community created a way for students to celebrate and learn from the idiosyncrasies of their

Manasa explained why asynchronous making leads to connection. “We have all experienced it in our own way, through our own spaces,” she remarked on the act of making art under constraints in response to a social discourse. “You're coming out of it because you all went through that and it was incredibly uncomfortable, probably, and uncomfortable at different times and so...the heartbeat really represents like everyone has their own rhythm. How do you create a flow curriculum in which that rhythm is all understood, but you can be on your own beat, you can be on your own way, and that's okay...really creating both that autonomy, but also synchronicity.”

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THE EMPTY SYLL– ABUS

By Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Maureen Carroll, and Frederik G. Pferdt

When Everyone Gets an A+ 24

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Part 2

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It’s difficult

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to shed the roles we inhabit as teachers and students.

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�

icki arrived on Zoom at 8:30 am and was ready to jump into her first virtual class, Designing with Radical Agency at Stanford’s d.school. She was excited to hear from the professors and learn what the course expectations were.

The first step was getting her hands on the ten-week course syllabus. This is what she received.

The multiple empty cells took Micki by surprise, and heightened a sense of uncertainty about what lay ahead in the journey she had signed up for. Traditional schooling has conditioned students like Micki to expect clearly defined goals and predetermined activities, set in a syllabus.

In the real world, however, ambiguity abounds. As educators, our goal in this class was to help our students build the agency to develop their own goals and determine how to best accomplish them.

In our first session, we shared a metaphor to explain the mystery of the empty syllabus. We told the class that in most courses the instructor selects a vessel, whether it is a sailboat, a ferry, or a cruise ship, and the itinerary and final destination

Schedule

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Week

Tuesday

Learning Community Session + Coaching Sessions

Thursday

Coaching Sessions

1

Sept 15

Creating the DTS learning community and culture: Intros, Norms, & Mindsets

Sept 17

Individual Meetings with teaching Team

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Sept 22

Navigating Ambiguity

Sept 24

Coaching

3

Sept 29

Oct 1

Coaching

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Oct 6

Oct 8

Coaching

5

Oct 13

Oct 15

Coaching

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Oct 20

Oct 22

Coaching

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Oct 27

Oct 29

Coaching

8

Nov 3

Nov 5

Coaching

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Nov 10

Nov 12

Coaching

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Nov 17

Nov 19

Coaching

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are set from the start. In this course, they would choose their own vessels, build and possibly rebuild them, chart their own course as they set out to sea, and decide on their destinations. We shared the expectation that they would be navigating ambiguity in a myriad of ways as they embarked on their agency journeys and that we would be their support and allies.

In our planning meetings, we decided that we would be responsive to our students’ needs and that we would not know what these needs were or how they might evolve until we met with them each week. With this in mind, we asked ourselves, “How could we create a syllabus?” and realized we could not. The empty syllabus served as a reminder that the agency journey belonged not to us, but to them. In this article we highlight three insights from our ten-week classroom experiment about the nature of agency and how to best support students in their personal growth journeys.

Insights 1. It’s difficult to shed the roles we inhabit as teachers and students.

By challenging the expectations that these roles created, ownership of learning shifted to the students.

In the first weeks of the course it became evident that getting our class to unlearn the behaviors that defined them as students was going to take some persistence. Even when we led with the message that we were “putting them in the driver’s seat,” we had the sense that, deep down, they really didn’t believe it, and expected us to play our assigned role as teachers and tell them what to do. Perhaps we should not have been surprised by this. After all, they have been playing the student role since they entered the education system. Essentially, the question was: Who did they think they were doing their classwork for? From their student role perspective, they submit assignments for the teacher, and oftentimes those assignments make no sense to them.

We wanted them to step out of the student role, and do the work that made sense for themselves. But we, too, had been playing our teacher roles for a long time, and it was easy to inadvertently fall back into more traditional teacher behaviors that could undermine that shift in authority and ownership. Clearly, telling them they were in control was not enough to change their mindset and behaviors. So we decided to try something different. Our experiment was to disappear. Literally.

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At the beginning of one class we sent weren’t quite sure. We wanted our students students to breakout rooms for a checkto be comfortable sharing who they were in in pairs. When we brought them and knew that we had to be willing to do the back to the main room, we led them to same. One of the things we did to build a class believe that the three of us were having culture where courage and vulnerability could connection issues. In reality, we were emerge was to use rituals. During the twothere, behind a fake virtual background hour time period where we met as a whole with our microphones disconnected. class we began and ended each class with a After the first awkward moments, they “ritual in” and a “ritual out”. The rituals included came up with different hypotheses as to meditation, drawing, open-ended personal our disappearance. They figured out our connections, and improv games. By taking absence was probably intentional (what this time we wanted to show our students that are the odds of the three teachers, each building connections truly mattered to us. in a different city having connection issues at the same time, but not the students?)

We had three goals: we wanted everyone to When a few minutes passed without have a strong sense of belonging; we wanted any sounds from us, different behaviors the students to know that we cared about emerged. Some had clearly moved on to them; and we wanted our students to build doing something else on their computer, bonds with each other. Rituals provided a but didn’t leave the call, planning to reway to meet these goals. We saw the bonds engage when (or if) we showed up again. among us strengthen as we forged deeper Someone prompted a discussion about connections each time we met. We believe what they should do and a few proposed that rituals are a way to build connections and activities. Fifteen long minutes later, we community and that they are an essential part reappeared, and we had a rich debrief on of creating a meaningful learning environment. how their actions — in this experiment and They build trust and they allow us to get to in real life — connect with their evolving know each other as human beings. In our understanding of the nature of agency. classroom, rituals opened a space where courage and vulnerability flourished.

2. Agency requires courage and vulnerability. Using rituals created 3. A polished project outcome is an a culture of belonging where these artificial finish line that sends the wrong mindsets emerged. message to students. Reflecting on their learning journeys and setting their own We knew how to create a classroom assessment criteria shifted the focus culture when we were actually in the same to personal growth. room as our students, but virtually, we

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Example of a map, showing a student’s learning journey

Most project-based courses end in some sort of final presentation. We realized that this was not going to work in our class. While presentations can often be a useful forcing function that

accelerates students’ work, it can also send a message to the students that what one produces is what matters.

And in this case, we felt that message would undermine the goal we aspired

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to. We wanted the end goal to be the students’ growth, not an artificial finish line. As a result, none of our students ended the course with a completed project. This course was about student transformation and the growth the students showed as they defined the role that agency played in their projects, and more importantly, in their lives.

None of this growth was about rushing towards a finish line with respect to their projects. Instead, deep and meaningful insights about themselves emerged.

There was a lifting of pressure that allowed the students time to explore, meander and linger in ambiguous spaces. We wanted them to realize that it was about owning one’s agency.

When it came time to grade the course we asked our students to craft their own assessment rubric. We wanted them to take ownership of their learning, and this activity pushed them to reflect on what dimensions of growth were important to them. This was not an exercise for us to figure out how to give grades. Instead it was a way, once again, to redesign the relationship between a teacher and a student. After seeing these rubrics, and throughout the course as we watched the students’ growth, it became clear to us that it would feel inauthentic to put a grade on our students’ personal journeys.

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Moving Forward Our hope is that educators can reimagine their classrooms to put students’ growth at the center of the learning experience. To do so requires a willingness to be vulnerable, to take risks, and to linger in ambiguity. We tried several new ideas as we crafted this class experience. We invite you to experiment with what makes sense in your context, and offer the provocations below as a way to start a dialogue around how we might reimagine the possibilities of what education could achieve.

The “empty syllabus” represented a different approach to learning. And on the last day of class, Micki and her peers received their grades. They all got an A+. What if we created an education system where every student and every teacher got a grade of A+ based on their agency as learners?

Designing with Radical Agency is the Fall 2020 version of the Design Thinking Studio course, offered at the d.school.

Provocation 1: How might you create a classroom where your students take ownership of their learning?

Provocation 2: How might you use rituals to build community and a sense of belonging?

Provocation 3: How might you go beyond grades and find ways to capture growth and make it visible for the students?

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REFR– AMING GATH– ERING

By Glenn Fajardo

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Part 3

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“I’ve enjoyed working with y’all late nights, staying cozy in all of our blankets.”

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was not expecting a student to describe her experience working with her classmates like that at the end of a remote quarter.

By the end of my Fall 2020 class, Reimagining Campus Life For Today’s World, students were reminiscing that there were so many— “So many!”—memorable moments that they never expected to feel with a group of virtual teammates.

I continue on a journey to unpack and understand some of the ingredients and techniques behind all of this. I've been working in virtual collaboration for 13 years because of my work with social changemakers around the world. And I’ve developed a broader interest in learning how we can build social connection when we are far apart. How can we cook up creative togetherness across different physical and digital environments?

The dictionary defines “gather” as a verb that means “to come together.” Before 2020, most people probably thought of gathering as coming together in a single physical location. The pandemic circumstances of this past year compelled us to think differently.

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We quickly realized just hopping onto a Zoom call didn’t necessarily make us feel like we were together. Of course,

there were the obvious issues with Zoom fatigue and concerns about screen time.

But the challenges of designing a virtual gathering ran deeper, which makes sense in retrospect. After all, even with in-person contexts, feeling like we’re together isn’t as simple as showing up to the same location. There’s more to it than that!

Now is a great time to fundamentally reimagine how we can feel like we’re together, whether it’s online, in-person, or what will be an increasingly blurred combination of both. We can now have a broader palette of togetherness, in ways that can span space and time.

We can start with this REFRAME: Gathering is when we create, learn, and grow together.

(And let’s use this reframe as a refrain to keep us on point!)

As designers, we can bring a ton of creativity to this. We can develop foundational frameworks that can help generate many different possibilities and provide useful traction. Here are four principles and a starting list of levers: TEACHIN G AN D L EAR N IN G

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PRINCIPLES

1st 2nd Have a sense of “What makes our interactions feel human?”

Regardless of where we are. What are some of the underlying human needs in gathering? I’ve found it useful to focus on these five needs: 1) We want to be able to express ourselves (both publicly and privately), 2) We want to feel seen and heard. 3) We want to have a sense of what others are thinking and feeling, 4) We want to be able to direct and guide attention– and have our attention directed and guided–in helpful ways, and 5) We want to avoid being rude or insensitive.

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Do something together in small groups.

We’ve always used this principle at the d.school and it’s more important than ever to understand why this approach can be so effective. Well-structured active doing helps support learners’ intrinsic motivation by enabling autonomy, building competence, and facilitating connection with others. Doing things together also provides context for interaction, fosters interdependence, and builds relationships - this stuff of shared experience is even more important when we are not in the same physical room. And doing things in small groups ensures that everyone can be heard, everyone is needed, and everyone can contribute.

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3rd 4th Design for distributed space.

Convert frustration to curiosity.

Today, when we’re not in the same place, we often think about how we interact in terms of what happens on screens. What if we designed our interactions around not only what happens on screens (let's call that virtual space) but also what we're doing, sensing, and experiencing in each of our physical spaces? That holistic combination of virtual space and physical space is distributed space. How can we combine the benefits of what's possible on screens with what's possible in our physical environments, including moving around and activating our senses of touch, smell, and taste? What if we could literally feel warmth together when we were far apart? "Staying cozy in all of our blankets" can be a meaningful and memorable shared experience.

With the pandemic circumstances, it is quite understandable to fall into anger (“Arrgh!”) or resentment (“Why do I have to deal with this?) when it comes to figuring out how to design distributed learning experiences. It’s totally ok to feel that frustration. The key is to notice it as it happens and try converting it to curiosity, reminding yourself to have a growth mindset. For example, you might catch yourself thinking, “Ugh, I can’t read the room like I can when we’re together in person!”

After noticing that thought, you might reframe it to, “Hey, this is a great opportunity for me to design multiple ways to get a sense where students are at - and that might help me foster more inclusion and belonging.” When you find yourself thinking of remote as an unfair tax in the present, see if you can keep reframing it into a transformative opportunity to build the future now.

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LEVERS

�

ith these four principles to guide us, let’s develop a set of levers that people can play with in their distributed interactions. Spoiler alert: Most of these levers might be useful in-person too!

(And in hybrid!)

Think of a lever as a control that you can slide around to produce different effects that are desirable in different occasions and circumstances. It’s kind of like the adjustments you can make when editing photos on your phone - e.g. brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.

This is a lever list-in-progress that we’re developing for Reimagining Campus Life in Fall 2021:

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Time: sync to async What are the gradations and nuances of how synchronous or asynchronous an experience is, and what are the choices in durations, response time, cadence, and pauses?

Planned-ness: scheduled to spontaneous How specific or fuzzy are we about the intention of a moment?

Surprise: familiarity to novelty What is the mix of elements that are familiar and relatable with elements that are novel and surprising?

Transparency: identified to anonymous What choices are we making around the traceability and crediting of ideas for different circumstances?

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Social:

Resolution:

influence to independence How are we calibrating more or less social pressure in particular moments?

scrappy to polished In a particular moment, where would we like to be in the rough to refined spectrum?

Focus:

What do you think might be useful levers?

singular to multiple Metaphorically, are we in more of a full-screening moment or a several windows and tabs moment?

Sensory: sole sense to multisensory Which senses and how many senses are we activating?

Spatial: fixed to fluid Are we staying in one spot or moving through space?

Signal: analog to digital Like the behavior of light, are we interacting in ways that feel more like waves or particles?

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FORWARD

We’re in an interesting moment in human history where we are experiencing major changes in how we interact with each other. I believe design has a huge role to play in this if we’re serious about creating a broader spectrum of togetherness, building on many different possibilities and permutations in physical and digital environments. We can design this new “physi-digi” world. We can design new ways to create, learn, and grow together.

As we embark on the next phase of this journey, I think it helps to have three reminders.

1st

we can remind ourselves to root in understanding underlying human needs, and not in trying to mechanically re-create what we’ve been used to doing in-person. I think Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta nailed it back in 1992 in their paper “Beyond Being There,” where they made the case that it might be more generative to frame in-person interactions as one medium

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of many. (In their words, think of inperson interactions as a medium of “physically proximate reality.”)

This will help us to leverage and fully appreciate the strengths of different mediums for interaction (including in-person!).

2nd

we can remind ourselves that many things around human interaction that we think of as “natural” were actually invented at some point. Some of us may think of a paper book, a phone call, a handshake, or looking someone in the eye as “natural,” but those technologies and social norms were invented at some point, and they were probably a bit awkward when they were new. (And social norms around interaction are not universal around the world today. Some shake hands, some bow, some kiss.) Throughout history, we’ve always had to invent the future. Making the new is not new.

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3rd

we can remind ourselves that one thing about our times that is actually quite different (yes, actually unprecedented!) is that we were forced to rapidly learn new ways to communicate out of necessity.

The widespread adoption of email, text messages, and social media were not driven by a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The widespread adoption of something like video calls is still strongly associated with traumatic experiences, traumatic years. I believe that association will fade over time, but I think it’s healthy to remind ourselves of that context, so that we can eventually free ourselves of it in the way we design our interactions.

With these principles, levers, and reminders, let’s design the new together, together.

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CON– GRATS! YOU’RE IN THE JAZZ BAND

By Seamus Yu Harte

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eflecting on our culture at the d.school there are many similarities to a jazz band. We rely on both standards (like frameworks and methods and more) and we have the ability to improvise.

We rely on teamwork and team teaching.

We feed off the energy of the crowd (i.e. the students). These things are the most obvious at the surface level, but you continue to find similarities as you keep digging. For example, the physical space of a jazz club has just as much to do with your experience of jazz as does the music coming from the musicians. Dim lighting. Candles at each table. Bourbon neat. Smokey rooms. These elements allow you to get lost from the world and be fully immersed in the music. Our space at the d.school is designed to do much of the same by promoting creativity and collaboration.

Even further, most folks that make their way to a jazz club intended to make their way to a jazz club. d.school students intentionally seek out our community. In fall of 2020, when we made the sudden shift from our jazz club -- our physical space -- into a digital world, it became

immediately clear how reliant we were on our physical jazz club to communicate, “we play jazz here and this is how you can do it, too.”

Despite the challenges of suddenly switching to remote, the teaching and learning team decided to use this opportunity. We could now have people join the teaching and learning community regardless of location. We could open the doors to anyone and we did. In doing so, we quickly learned that not everyone knew this was a jazz club or that we played jazz or even really how to get here.

We learned a lot from fall quarter and identified the application to teach a course as an opportunity to help interested people understand what it is we do here, as well as why and how we do it. We thought of this as the directions to the jazz club. That way, if someone tried to hop on stage (i.e. teach a class) and they started playing heavy metal, it wouldn't be awkward to say “excuse me, this is a jazz club.” We had relied on our space to communicate that before and the shift to digital exposed the need to be more clear about how to join the teaching community.

Here's how we redesigned the course application to help people understand what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. Our goals were to model behavior and manage expectations.

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Format We shifted from a text form to Google Slides. The new format allowed for the application to be more visual and model how we want communication to be designed in our classrooms. Previously, the proposals were written, which was ironic considering that might be the only moment in the teaching and learning experience that you would write that much about an idea! If we truly believe in learning by doing and show don't tell, this was an opportunity to do that. The format also allowed us to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously with people throughout the process.

Phases

We visualized the phases of a teaching engagement at the d.school. Once you’ve taught here you realize far more goes into it than just showing up and teaching. Most of the people who come here to “play jazz,” want to do what it takes to design and deliver a transformative learning experience -- they just need to know the set time (i.e. when do I go on and how long do I play for). In the fall, we heard frustration with the pre-quarter ramp-up and post-quarter ramp-down. It wasn't that they were upset about the work within those periods, but rather about not having clarity around what to expect.

By visualizing the entire cycle of the

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teaching and learning engagement, we were able to communicate and manage expectations.

Abilities We often found in reading through proposals that people made little mention of what or how we expect people to teach at the d.school. Though we thought it was covered on the d.school website, we saw little reflection of it in written proposals. We frontloaded the course application with the necessary components of a d.school class so that everyone had to consume that information before writing their proposal. In addition to making it clear the abilities we want them to teach, we also emphasized our values with which we want candidates to be aligned and explained how we leverage those values as criteria for their proposals.

Criteria

We became more transparent about the criteria we use to evaluate proposals.

The new system had the criteria listed in the slides, which increased the ability of prospective teachers to propose their idea in alignment with how we teach and made it easier for us to give feedback as to why or why not a course would be accepted. We transitioned our review process to a very clear rubric that informs decisions with a mix of quantitative and qualitative data.

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Constraints We also introduced constraints through the Google Slides format. Giving people limited space (by design) was another way we were able to show not tell when it comes to leveraging constraints in design work. The application asked them to really consider what they wanted to say in the proposal, which of course is also what we want our design students to do. Ideas had to be honed, trimmed, and refined. By making this simple constraint, we asked applicants to do that work before submitting a proposal.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Our Responsibility As we continue to be a world-class jazz club of teaching and learning, whether we find ourselves in studio 2 or the resume room, we can all think about the privilege we have in being in that room. We meet and interact with a lot of people—teaching team members, project partners, students - who are still figuring out that this is a jazz club and may not know how to play jazz. We need to think about our role and responsibilities in helping them understand that this is a jazz club.

We can say, “If you’d like, I would love the opportunity to teach you how to play jazz.”

All of this adds up to shifting our jazz club from a situation where one, you had to figure out where it was, and two, you had to know the guy at the door to get in.

This shift made the application process far more accessible and equitable, helping us bring diversity, equity, and inclusion into the teaching and learning team community.

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EX– TREME THE LOCAL JOUR– NEY

By Manasa Yeturu

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hen I looked at the curriculum whiteboard for Design for Extreme Affordability as we started to dream of what 2021 might hold, one word kept flashing through my mind: unknown.

We didn’t know if the university would open. We didn’t know if students would want to join a demanding program like

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Extreme. We didn’t know if local partner organizations would be willing to take a chance on us. In short, we had even more constraints than the year before. Not only would this year be fully virtual, but we knew that there was about a 0% chance of in-person research and travel being permitted. In a space that is focused on the optimistic “yes, and” everywhere the Design for Extreme Affordability teaching team turned we were hearing “no, but.”

But...here is what we did know. That communities all around us, right here in the United States and immediately so in

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the Bay Area, were grappling with a host of socioeconomic inequities that had only been exacerbated by Covid. As one of our partners, Ashanti Branch, executive director of Ever Forward Club, put it, “knowing that there are needs all around the world, but knowing that right here – I imagine if you go down the street from Stanford University - you got some places that look like another world. So, how can we recognize that we don’t have to get on a plane to help, but that there are needs right here.” The need had always been here, but now was the moment to take that leap into the unknown. The decision

wasn’t a tough one: we were going to go local.

The main question that remained was: How? As I always say to our students, “I hope you leave Extreme asking better questions vs. having the answer.” We turned that line on ourselves, and wondered: What are the core questions we need to be asking ourselves to engage with local partners, to adapt curriculum and to create a virtually engaging launch of Extreme Local?

These are three main questions we asked and the lessons we learned by building and experiencing the answers together.

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What actually matters?

Building awareness & accountability We started the class with an understanding of ourselves, moved to learning sociopolitical history and context, and finally evolved to centering community culture. As I often share in our first few classes, “Design starts with you, it exists in the context of a messy complicated world, but it starts with you.

Because we aren’t unbiased - we look at the world through our lived experience.

So how do you want to show up in this work?” Beyond these individual and team reflections, a major shift we made in Extreme Local was tangibly commiting to show up in this work with an understanding of social-political context.

Students formed “immersion teams” for their first project, where they took on the task of developing a contextual landscape of the policies, people and initiatives that historically affected the issues they were about to tackle with their partners, which ranged from food access to education inequity. As one team stated, “It gave us the language and awareness to build trust and relationships, it showed that we already put in the work to understand.” Starting

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with awareness and accountability was a clear acknowledgement in Extreme Local: we can only do better in the design process if we know better.

How do we foster real connection?

Creating intentional culture The culture of Extreme 2021 can be summed up with a phrase we often used, “we can do hard things AND make time for joy”. From a virtual wheel-ofExtreme, zoom puppet shows, dance off with students and partners, to a nearly 5 minute (and very off tune) humming session of Eye of the Tiger, there were many moments of laughter, play, joy and meaningful connection. There was also regular reflection spaces in class and coaching sessions to share frustrations as we moved through personally and collectively difficult moments. It was this intentional culture, created to hold both challenge and joy, that helped us navigate uncertainty. In student Charlotte Schell’s words, "one day on a sunny afternoon I will bump into you...we will see how we look different from Zoom, but instantly know each other and give each other a

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huge hug". There were a lot of virtual hugs - where you could almost feel the need to lean on each other through the rollercoaster of a year.

What does “build with, not for” in a local context mean?

Checking yourself From partner co-design sessions to having access to local and design coaches - each team had to consistently involve others. This created a culture where they were forced to check themselves and project progress for unseen biases and needed context.

They explored the varied perspectives of coaches, partners and community members to move to a deeper understanding of the system in which the solutions would live. As one of our design coaches, Sarah Fatahallah, shared about the ethos of co-design “You acknowledge that your expertise, that your skills, are on equal footing as the expertise and the skills of the communities and the partners who have been breathing and living this problem for a lot longer than you have.” Our local coach, Bobby Jones Hanley, reflected

that this practice of continuously bringing multiple stakeholders to the table allowed students to “get a really good understanding of what the actual problem is and develop solutions that have compassion. And dignity towards humanity and individuals.”

In Extreme Local, “Build with” meant expanding the table.

There were a lot of twists and unexpected turns in the launch of the Extreme Local.

But more importantly, there was a visceral understanding that when we are faced with the unknown - we need to approach the journey with a deep humility and by stepping towards each other. We saw that throughout the experience. From the partners willingness to trust us in the first year of Local to our students' ability to navigate a myriad of virtual constraints to the phenomenal support from design & local coaches - the community repeatedly braved the unknown together.

As Casey Prohaska reflected, “It humbled me...as a human, getting to speak with those experiencing homelessness & understanding what that is like for them.

And to be outfitted with the tools that I’ve learned from Extreme. And thinking, how might we just take this little corner of the world and make it a little bit better?”

Manasa Yeturu, Design Lecturer & Curriculum Lead, Design for Extreme Affordability

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Mini Series: Designing Out Loud

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Part 1 Elevating Voices Part 2 Inviting Courage Part 3 Valid Beauty

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Eleva Voice D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

ating es

Part 1

In Conversations with Catherine Randle and Katarina Klett

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“Would you believe antiBlack racism happens at Stanford?”

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hat if we told you yes, it does and quite often? Based on the lived experiences of two Black women on our team, we know that it is absolutely crucial to change the culture at Stanford, particularly for Black staff. It is no secret that staff are often forgotten on university campuses, with much of the attention on students and faculty. Yet, without staff the university would grind to a halt. Recognizing this, our team felt it essential to answer the question: how can we protect staff against anti-Black racism?

In answering this question, our team wanted to ensure that the solution we developed was not for the Black community to shoulder but for allies of the Black community to be activated.”

–Excerpt from Goodbye Bystanders, Hello Active Upstanders, a piece by Catherine Randle, Judith Ned, and Katarina Klett, published on Medium

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Courage is defined as the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In the course Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact, students harnessed this strength to not only discuss systemic and interpersonal racism, but to take bold action towards disassembling the institutionalized racism that runs rampant in our communities. Yes, at Stanford.

During the course, Catherine Randle, Judith Ned, and Katarina Klett created Pivot, a training program that helps bystanders who witness racist acts become upstanders who know how to intervene. They were encouraged to see themselves as changemakers from the very beginning, Catherine shared. She said: “There’s a momentum gained from zeroing in on the thing that you want to tackle, so it can seem so large you’re going ‘I can’t do anything with this’ or ‘can I really make a difference in this space?’...But then when you’re narrowing it down, you’re really focused in this one area, you start to think ‘I can really do this. I can make some impact. This is a real thing.’

In embracing their inner courageous changemakers and narrowing in on the topic of protecting Black staff at Stanford, the Pivot team encountered the role of voice at the intersection of design and

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anti-racist activism, as they utilized their own voices to elevate the voices of others. Throughout the project, the importance of voice emerged in collaboration, in iteration, in stewardship, and in activation.

Our goal is to shift the culture on our campus by activating upstanders against racism throughout the university.

Upstanders are individuals who speak up in the moment when they see or hear racism. We recognize that although many people may want to speak up in the moment, most of us are not equipped with the tools to do so. To this end, we developed Pivot, an 8-week program that teaches individuals how to identify and respond to racist behavior.

In Collaboration

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During the class, the Pivot team began utilizing their voices during collaborative activities. For Katarina, this meant “getting over the vulnerability of some of my ideas are going to be bad, and that’s normal and just airing with the group for feedback.” She added that in terms of sharing ideas and getting feedback they, “dove right into it...ripping the Band-Aid off of like ‘oh, wow I feel silly’ or ‘oh, I feel like this isn’t ready to be moved forward.”

Catherine similarly felt that the idea of designing out loud extended to “a lot..of our process where we were in groups and in teams together sharing all our voices and adding to the process.”

For the team, their collaboration was not merely an opportunity to share ideas, but a relationship-builder that really encouraged each of them to use their voice, knowing they’d be heard. Catherine explains, “we’re still working together, almost a year later.

So gaining them was one of the greatest things that I got from the class...This experience of collaboration and how much it really helped me open up.” The feeling is mutual. Katarina shared, “Having the opportunity to really listen and learn from the two of them has been everything to me...having those relationships that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to form is just incredibly meaningful to me.”

In Iteration Beyond team dynamics, the Pivot crew also shared their work-in-progress with various campus stakeholders to gain valuable feedback. Katarina commented, “We’ve made so much progress because we haven’t waited until every single piece of it is perfect. We go in recognizing and saying from the beginning, ‘this is not perfect.’ It’s a work in progress, we hope one day it is perfect, but we’re just not there yet...Without getting that sort of feedback out loud from others and putting ourselves in a position to receive that feedback, where would we be?

I don’t know.”

Through iteration, the team balanced learning from instructors and finding their own design voices. They created four TEACHIN G AN D L EAR N IN G

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prototypes! Catherine explained, “On one hand, you want to go through the instructors’ process because you’re trying to learn something from them, but in allowing our own viewpoints to come to the surface, we were learning something from each other.”

As a first step in our design process, we convened a focus group with diverse university staff to discuss anti-Black racism on our campus. Together, we brainstormed ways of confronting racism in the moment. During this focus group, we saw the power of storytelling to propel allies into action against antiBlack racism. We also learned that upstander behavior needs to be the standard and in order to achieve this goal we must normalize giving and receiving feedback.

In our next focus group, we united allies from across the university. Some attended our first focus group, while others were new to the conversation.

We worked together to brainstorm ways to further initiate upstander behavior.

We all agreed building a shared language framework that includes terminology, such as microaggressions and stereotypes, is critical to laying a foundation for people to have conversations about racism. We also agreed that being comfortable with

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being uncomfortable would have to be central to the Pivot program. Following the focus group, we collectively created anti-racist spaces by leveraging the current virtual format and changing our video conference backgrounds to include the anti-racism ribbon or Black lives matter emblem. After over 400 reviews of the backgrounds, there were zero negative responses. Thus far, 20 individuals have reached out to participants after seeing the backgrounds to discuss racism on campus.

In Amplification A major piece of the Pivot training is the literal use of voice to amplify the “lived experience of anti-black racism at Stanford,” as Catherine explained.

Participants listen to those stories and “have this full experience of knowing that it happened, knowing that the people who were a part of it are likely still on campus.”

Catherine gave further information, “We use those lived experiences to one, without a doubt say this happened here, this happened in your community, this happened to your student, this happened to your staff member, your colleague, your faculty member. Racism is here.

And to also say...How would you have stood up in the moment here and said something, right, knowing the tools now that pivot has equipped you with.”

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When Catherine first prototyped the idea of using voice, it was in reading a prepared narrative of racist encounters to the provost and other senior leaders.

She was affirmed in having those stories be acknowledged, and additionally, “being encouraged in saying ‘hey, we’re glad you’re here’ lifted me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.” She hopes, “that for people who were generous enough, gracious enough to share their experience, that they also got some lift from having a safe space to share as well.”

She added, “Often, we might think about design as being something visual, but we know that it’s so much more than that, and we can touch any and all of our senses. And when you’re sharing this human component, I think voice carries something personal.”

The culmination of our design process included a formal presentation with senior administrators showcasing our plan to activate and train upstanders at Stanford starting in January 2021.

We concluded with four clear asks: 1) pilot the Pivot program in teams or departments, 2) visually create antiracist spaces on (virtual) campus, 3) continue to collect stories of antiBlack racism, and 4) share a flyer with departments outlining steps to stand up

to racism. After hearing our presentation, a senior administrator stated: “Their presentations were carefully planned and perfectly delivered, and the products of their work showed attention to detail and strong alignment to the needs/ users they identified. I’m sure these will move forward, and we at [university department] are happy to help however we can.” We are currently meeting with various senior administrators to discuss piloting our idea in their departments.

In Activation At the end of the course, all teams wrote Medium articles expressing the evolution of their ideas. The Pivot team reflected on their journey, sharing progress pictures of virtual whiteboards and sticky notes, noting moments of redirection, and celebrating real steps towards impact. Students wrote individual reflections as well.

Catherine shared her hopes in using her voice in yet another way, to discuss the Pivot design journey: “I say a couple things a lot. I say that people want to be activated. I say that, and you should start where you’re at. No one is expecting you to suddenly start leading marches if that’s not where your heart is. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing

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to make an impact...I want you to be inspired to just start where you’re at.”

For her part, Katarina felt that the course helped her understand how to strategically approach changemaking within institutions, despite institutions often fighting change. She felt that the course provided her with a supportive bubble, but that writing the Medium pieces, “was our opportunity to share with the rest of the world...we did a lot of work on this project.” She continued, “I talked about pulling the Band Aid of vulnerability off within that safe space, but now pulling that Band Aid of vulnerability off publicly...I think, for me, it was really about, again, the vulnerability and demonstrating that it’s okay to not know exactly what we’re doing, right.

Because nobody else is going to do it, so better to not know what you’re doing and try to do something than just to do nothing about it at all.”

In order for Pivot to become an embedded piece of Stanford’s cultural fabric, lived experiences from Black staff must be acknowledged and valued.

It is incumbent upon the Stanford community to prepare for and respond to anti-Black racism so that all people are empowered to drive change for a more inclusive environment. Pivot was not an academic exercise, it is an intentional model to create and enact new cultural norms.

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The time is now for Stanford to unequivocally address anti-Black racism.

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Invit Cour D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

iting rage

Part 2

By Humera Fasihuddin

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lift them up in a lasting way. We wanted them to be able to look back and point to a tangible artifact of their founder's story, like founders of many types of ventures have done before. So for their final projects, we asked them to publish an article about their team project for a shared Medium publication. But, we also asked each of them to share an individual reflection on the publication as well. he importance of reflection has long been understood in d.school circles.

That’s where the learning happens.

Indeed, there is great power in having students think deeply about the journey as they are on it. Showcases and final presentations are a useful way to share about a team’s project more broadly, but what about their learning insights and internal quandaries? How might we share those more broadly?

In our Fall 2020 class, the teaching team for Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact attempted to have students apply design thinking to address racism at Stanford. The summer of 2020 had brought on a racial reckoning and students entering the first quarter of the year yearned to take action. We aimed to have students design projects they could lead beyond the quarter… projects that didn’t require seeking permission or advocacy. To set them up for success, we wanted to

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In some respects, this was harder…more personal. Writing a reflection that one or two people might see is different from writing one the whole world can see.

Reflecting publicly requires a higher order level of sense making and a level of polish.

It requires students to really dig and ask why they used to think a certain way and now they think another way. It requires taking stock of what inside of you may have changed. Reflecting out loud was a lever students could use to communicate the intensity of their feelings designing toward an antiracist Stanford.

Ilana Raskind learned she was hiding behind the imperative to center, listen to, and amplify Black voices as a way to avoid engaging in hard work and the inevitability of making mistakes. Design helped her overcome that. Isha Kumar learned that courage is a communal practice…all you need is one brave person in a conversation to show you the power of words for you

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to speak yourself. Judith Ned found that taking time to sit in the process provides opportunities to self-assess on the goals at hand and embrace the learning that is unfolding. And, Katarina Klett learned that once you realize your institution is not going to get onboard, you need to get creative and ask how you can achieve your goal without having to ask key holders for permission.

The teaching team wanted to boost student projects. We wrote a joint piece documenting our methods for the class to inspire other colleges and universities, while also lending our credibility to the student endeavors. We also invited senior leaders from across Stanford to hear about the student projects and shared zoom recordings with those who could not attend. We’re excited to report one of the teams has continued beyond the class! They worked with the Haas School to pilot Pivot, an 8-week training which trains employees on creating a culture that addresses microaggressions with upstanders rather than bystanders.

This course has evolved into the more aptly named Designing Towards an Antiracist Stanford and will be offered in Fall 2021.

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Valid Beaut D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

d uty

Part 3

By Adrienne Baer

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g

“Valid Beauty,” Ise Lyfe, co-facilitator of Art as Activism responded, when I asked, “When I say the phrase, “Designing Out Loud,” what comes to mind?”

“When you design out loud, people get to see the flaws and the design, you know.

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g But it’s still valid, the process is valid. And everyone gets to see it and it’s beautiful...

When I think of the phrase design out loud I think of designing in a way that is not siloed...and that is welcoming.”

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se and co-teacher, Manasa Yeturu, built their course around reflection, giving students the space to turn inward and reflect, as well as the opportunity to reflect through community discussions.

I was fortunate to be a student in their class. They set up the course to foster psychological safety and vulnerability, but not as a shelter from the real world, which in the Fall of 2020 was in tumult with a major presidential election, a difficult wildfire season, protests for racial injustice, and a global pandemic.

Rather, the teaching team used reflection to guide us through the necessary work of actually understanding the sociopolitical environment and wrestling with our personal relationships to various complex issues. Some weeks, Manasa acknowledged, “would be deeply uncomfortable for some people and maybe deeply in the experience of others.” I can attest that this was true.

She explained to me that her goals for the course were to have students walk away with a “deeper understanding of self, deeper connection to community, and a deeper commitment to reflection and vulnerability.”

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Designing out loud was a core tenet of the class. Each week, we created art as tangible embodiments of our current thoughts. Sometimes the “out loud” part was more literal: one week we were tasked with creating a voiceover to music after learning about the ways in which different voices and perspectives show up in social movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, and reflecting on our own experiences in centering or shunning voices. In our week focusing on gender equity, those of us who were female-identifying practiced taking up space through art. It was freeing and joyful. I was so emboldened by the care of the teaching team that for my final project, which needed to be public in some way, I posted a vulnerable spoken word poem to my Instagram.

By the end of the course, I felt a new courage in being seen and heard. In owning my stories and experiences.

In engaging in activism authentically.

In being flawed, and still beautifully valid.

In speaking to Ise and Manasa, I learned more about the ways they hoped students would benefit from finding their voices, and designing out loud.

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Waking Yourself Up: What matters to you?

“I think reflection is deeply important because it's our form of waking up.”

Manasa shared. Design starts with understanding how we each interpret observations differently and how our experiences impact our decisions. “It’s much easier said than done in that it takes...a lot of courage. Reflection takes a lot of courage to sit and think about what matters to you.,” she added. Gaining this self-awareness helps students become better, more intentional designers. “It’s a journey to intentionality.”

Building Esteem: Take a stance Understanding what you stand for is not always easy. “We can be fleeing in our belief system, not because we’re not committed or not integral, but we don’t often have the environment to test those things in,” Ise explained. The course

created an environment for students to experiment with their beliefs. “When we say something out loud and commit to it or build something out loud and commit to it, it really calls us to [think]...Do I really believe this thing? Do I really feel this way?” he expressed. “If you land on ‘yeah, I do feel this way’ it helps build the confidence in standing on the square.”

He further endorses the idea of sharing publicly: “Not only did it build individual esteem in the student, but also helped set an example for others around ways to wrestle with it…[an example] that everyday people make up change.”

Slowing Your Ego Take your time Exploring your beliefs on social issues is not always a linear journey and it requires dialogue. Being vulnerable in sharing means embracing feedback and challenges to your ideas. Ise points out: “When [people] think they believe something and they put it out in the world and then it's challenged, I think the first thing it does is it slows us down from this egoic need to come to a conclusion right away.” In academia, we are socialized to have an answer to

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questions or to expect answers from instructors. “I think if [challenging] is done in a safe academic environment, when it plays out in the world, it creates leaders and workers and innovators who don’t feel the need to lead with conclusion.”

Connecting to Community Engage in dialogue Art as Activism heavily leaned on the notion that becoming more self-aware, curious, and courageous activists, artists and designers requires community and connection. “‘How do you reflect in community?’ was a question we were trying to ask in this class,” Manasa remarked. “How do art and activism come together?” she continued.

“It’s because art sparks dialogue in community to then bring reflection and justice together.” The course enabled students to “listen, learn, reflect, and engage meaningfully” on their journeys because of the support of a highly connected community.

“I think we created a genuine community through a five-week class and people actually showed up in different moments, as themselves…

Creating a space where folks felt comfortable to take off their masks.”

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Step into Your Power: Be authentic (Art as a medium) Ultimately, the course helped students find their authentic voices and they explored and expressed their beliefs, as well as the courage to start conversation and build community outside of the class. Manasa wondered, “How does the spark that is you ignite community?” For Manasa, the more we show up as our authentic selves, the more we seek community, and the more we understand our own interconnectedness, the better we do for ourselves and the world.

She expressed, “One thing that I wanted for all of you, is for each of you to step into your own power.”

In the final project, students created art pieces to be shared publicly beyond the virtual walls of the class, so students could determine what matters to them and then show up with those values. Manasa explained further: “The final project is really like, be yourself. What is the dialogue you want to spark in the world?”

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Stepping into that authenticity to start that dialogue is living out loud, right, or designing out loud.”

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OLD PRO– FESSOR NEW TRICKS

By Bernie Roth

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ast year was different! It was the first time in 59 years that I did not set foot in any Stanford University building for a full academic year. Yet I taught a full load of courses. Like most Stanford faculty, I taught from home. I thought I would hate it. Surprisingly, there was much I enjoyed. That got me thinking about my different teaching experiences and how varied they were as my life transitioned during a teaching career that has lasted over 65 years.

During my junior year at the City College of New York I realized that I liked to teach, and I started my career by tutoring a blind student in atomic physics. I no longer recall what I taught the student.

At any rate, it was soon out of date.

However, I do vividly recall the things I learned from the student about his mindsets and the ways he managed his life. Those lessons are still relevant to my life, and the experience taught me I could learn a lot from the people I teach.

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Another useful survival trick was to teach a lab section. Since the labs were previously set up, it required little or no preparation time. However, sitting there just watching the students run the lab tests felt awful. Again, just putting in the time to get paid. As bad as these “tricks” were, the experiences that nearly killed my love of teaching were the surprise-inspection visits by senior professors several times a year. I still find it unbelievable when I recall the duplicity of the department’s most senior full professor sitting in the back row of my class smoking a cigar, and then “writing me up” for allowing smoking in the classroom.

During my graduate school years at Columbia University, I worked as a lecturer at the City College of New York.

There were about eight lecturers sharing a large bullpen-like open office, teaching three or four courses a semester while working on graduate degrees at Columbia. The trick to survival was teaching multiple sections of the same course. I hated it! The first section was okay. However, when I repeated myself an hour or two later to the second section, the magic was gone. I was a different person, just putting in the time to get paid.

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After my graduate work, I came to Stanford. That was a breath of fresh air. No inspections: just you and the students (and an ever-changing set of optional evaluations forms at end of the term). One of the first classes I taught was Engineering 9. It was a drafting class, required for freshman or sophomores by several of the engineering departments.

The class was basically a studio course, we taught drafting by use of student designed projects. There was some lecturing on my part from the podium, however most of my time was spent moving from student to student and talking with each about their work and life. I thrived with that type of direct student contact.

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At Stanford, I started offering a series of graduate courses in kinematics, my research specialty. These were basically lecture courses which also included at least one homework project in which the students created a working model made of metal or cardboard. I enjoyed lecturing and had a lot of fun being my version of the “sage on the stage.”

A big transition in my teaching life occurred when my friend and colleague Bob McKim invited me to participate in what became the (short lived) Esalen at Stanford program. Out of this experience I co-created, with Doug Wilde, a one-unit course called People Dynamics Lab. It took place in a Stern Hall dorm where Doug and his wife Jane were faculty residents. For over 10 years we offered the course in fall, winter, and spring quarters.

This was a completely different type of teaching. Almost no lecturing!

It always started with everyone sitting on the floor in a large circle. It was truly student centered. We started with what was on the student’s minds and then used experiential techniques to explore issues and create lessons. Doug and I had absorbed useful techniques from the Esalen program and were soon able to build on those to develop our own voices in this type of teaching. I found it a very appealing way to deal with students

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do interpersonal exercises, and one or two term projects. We still start by sitting in a circle, but nowadays we are in chairs–no longer on the floor. This is not a lecture class, there is no stage, and the students do a lot of the talking. It is basically a seminar format with a lot of experiential exercises. I have taught this class for over 50 years, and because the content is very student dependent, each offering is still an exciting adventure for me.

and their lives and I realized it added something important to the student’s development. So, I decided to expand the People Dynamics Lab class into a graduate course. I kept many of the exercises and added readings.

I named the course The Individual and Technology, and some years later changed the name to the current version: The Designer in Society. The course requires students to read about 200 pages a week,

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Originally, I taught the class by myself.

However when I decided to bring it into the d.school, where all courses must be team taught, I needed to find a teaching partner. I was joined by Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley who took turns in co-teaching.

When I had co-taught classes before, they were like relay races. Each professor took turns being the one teacher in the classroom. When that professor finished their stint, they left the class forever, and the next professor took over. The only coordination took place in preparing the schedule of who covers what topics.

I once co-taught a course with another professor who handed in “our” final grades without even consulting me. In the d.school co-teaching is different. Most of the teaching team is in the room most of the time. When I co-teach with either Perry or Jeremy, we are both in the classroom all the time for every class. And although one of us may take the lead, the other feels free

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to elaborate, disagree, support, or interject at any time. Unlike the relay type of team teaching, it is the type of sport where we are both always in the game, fully alert, and either of us can carry or pass the ball at any time.

I first fully experienced this type of coteaching when the late Rolf Faste and I did our two-week summer creativity workshops for faculty. I found that the symbiosis of two different beings aligned toward the same goals truly creates results that are much greater than the sum of the two parts. At the d.school I have co-led many workshops, classes and events where I am part of a teaching team. There is a power inherent in a wellfunctioning teaching team that is hard to match by a single teacher. In addition, there is a strong supportive bond that forms between members of the teaching team that the participants sense, and that positivity infuses into the entire interpersonal environment.

I used to have a nominal teaching schedule that consisted of three graduate courses: in Fall Quarter I taught Introduction to Robotics, in Winter Quarter I taught The Designer in Society and in Spring Quarter I taught either Kinematic Synthesis or Advanced Kinematics. The ground rules for each of these courses were different, and my classroom persona was different too. I was often told by students that took two or three of the

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courses that it seemed as though I was a different person in each class. They felt like they had experienced three different people. I knew what they were referring to. For me each class represented different challenges and called for a different set of behaviors. For example, the most important aspect of The Designer in Society is what happens in the classroom and how you apply that to your life. So, if you miss a class, you change both your own and everyone else’s learning and there is no way to make it up. So, of course “no absences” is a rule. In Advanced Kinematics you need to master the details of calculations. So, of course, the rule is “no course credit until you hand in all the homework.”

Although I enter each class session with a rough idea of what I would like to cover, I very much enjoy creating the actual material in real time. For each course my relationship to the material is different.

The special gift of The Designer in Society is that what the students say triggers what happens. That makes the teaching challenging and exciting for me, and the class useful and relevant for the students. The idea of creating the material is more subtle in classes with mainly predetermined technical content.

Twenty years ago, I had an experience that led me to understand how important my teaching style is to me.

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Here is what happened: I had originated the Introduction to Robotics course, and for many years enjoyed teaching it in a large auditorium. There were always some of my grad students in the class and we often played pranks on each other that enlivened the class. Then one of my postdocs, Oussama Khatib, joined the faculty and took over the course.

Some ten years later, Oussama went on sabbatical leave and asked me to substitute. He assured me that it would be relatively easy since he would give me a copy of the beautiful set of PowerPoint slides that he had made for the course.

The slides were beautiful, and the course was easy to teach. I hated the experience and did a lousy job. I never taught the course again.

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hat went wrong was that I was not creating my lectures in real time. The PowerPoint slides made it feel as though I was reading a book to the class. The experience made it clear to me how much I valued treating teaching as a problem solving activity, and how important real-time content generation was to me. All this came back to me last year as I adapted to teaching on-line due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

I had taught on TV with courses on the Stanford instructional Television Network.

However, the TV part was incidental to my usual teaching. I did what I always did, and the technicians captured it and sent the video images to distant corporate sites for rebroadcast to select employees. My main student audience was at Stanford in the room with me, and I hardly noticed that the TV viewers existed. This time things were different; it was all about teaching on-line.

During the COVID shutdown, I taught on-line for the 2020-21 academic year.

(I was on sabbatical leave for the 2019-20 school year.) I did not look forward to it.

I kept hoping that I would be able to be with my students in person. My courses

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were Transformative Design in fall, The Designer in Society in winter and spring, and Advanced Kinematics in winter.

Transformative Design was being cotaught with Jeremy Utley and Logan Deans. It is a very interactive studentcentered course, similar in format to The Designer in Society. I was concerned that it simply would not work remotely.

It turns out I was wrong. Transformative Design worked extremely well. The teaching team felt that in terms of the amount and quality of participation, it was one of the best student responses we have ever had. It also had the benefit that Logan did not have to fly in from Utah and Jeremy did not need to drive from the far end of mountain View twice a week. Mainly though people seemed more open than usual. I sensed an increased kindness in everyone.

Certainly, I missed seeing the whole person. Seeing the names and heads and shoulders made it easy to call on students and make sure everyone participated, yet I felt something was missing in that I could not trust my image of that person as a true picture of who they were. I also found that the student names and faces did not stay in my memory as long as they usually do.

For the first time The Designer in Society was offered twice in the same academic year. Perry Klebahn and I taught both classes and had similarly

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surprising successes as I had seen in Transformative Design. In both the winter and spring student participation was remarkable in terms of both quantity and quality. The kindness I had noticed in Fall quarter seemed to endure for the whole year. Perry and I had always had close personal interactions and somehow the video interactions coupled with occasional in-person visits seemed to bring us even closer. In retrospect, I realize that the year had also brought Jeremy and me closer.

In this connection a remarkable thing happened in the Spring Quarter: In The Designer in Society class, students frequently suggest that we hold a class reunion after the class is ended. It turns out that the reunion does not actually happen most of the time. When it does happen, it is a pleasant event. However, in general, it is poorly attended. Usually, the reunion is weeks or months after the last class. This time it was set for the day after class. It was held off campus and everyone that lived locally attended. The event was scheduled from 7 to 9 pm; it broke up at 11 pm. To me this was an expression of the desire to be with the whole person, not just the head and shoulders, and an ultimate expression of the kindness students felt for each other.

My winter quarter Advanced Kinematics class was a totally different experience than my other remote courses.

Surprisingly, it was the online course that

felt the most different than when it is delivered in-person. For years, I would walk into the classroom, pick up the chalk or a dry-erase marker, take care of any questions and then start filling the board with equations. An hour and a quarter later the class would leave, and I would spend several minutes erasing the boards. Clearly that would not transfer easily to a class delivered via the Zoom app. Although I did hear about a Stanford math professor who rolled white boards from campus to his home and then set up a camera filming himself filling the boards with equations, it did not seem like the best thing for me.

I “bit the bullet” and decided to prepare PowerPoint lectures before each class.

It was a herculean undertaking! In addition to the actual work, there was the nagging thought of how stupid this was. Here I was going to use a huge amount of time preparing slides that I probably would not use ever again or use at most one more time. If I was going to do this, I should have done it years ago! Despite myself, I went ahead with preparing the slides. I relied heavily on my scanner and cut and pasted from digital files of previous years’ class handouts. It turned out it was a very satisfying activity—once I started ignoring the stupidity of doing it. I found a lot of clever tricks that gave me satisfaction, and most of all it rekindled my love of the subject.

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efore each class session I put the PowerPoint slides on Canvass and after each lecture I put the recorded session on Canvass. So, for the students these were two big pluses for the class being online. I had a very capable class, the students seemed to enjoy it, and they gave the class high ratings.

For me it was especially satisfying that two of the women were among the best students I have ever had. Yet there was something missing. I was lecturing from slides to people I could not really experience. They were like postage stamps. Even when I paused my lecturing and got some student participation, I could not get a sense of being with them.

Since I had made the slides myself, using the slides felt a little better than in my disastrous robotics class experience. However, for me the experience was a far cry from the pleasure of being with my class in person.

I would have never expected that my strongly interactive student-centered classes would have gone so well online, and that my professor-centered lecture class would have felt so lacking online. One of the great things about teaching is that it is full of surprises, and if you are lucky even bad stuff like a pandemic can teach an old prof new tricks.

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Pursuing Intention About: Design is not a static process, but a dynamic, evolving set of methods to understand and tackle problems in the world. We must hold ourselves accountable to reflecting on and questioning the ever-changing ways in which we approach design and to the intended and unintended impacts of our work. Here we share our strides towards improving equity and inclusion and equipping students to be intentional, reflective designers.

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Maki Spac

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Adrienne Baer in Conversation with Brandon Middleton

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he d.school class Community College: Designing Black and Brown Spaces felt like “family dinner on a Sunday afternoon...on the porch or in your living room or something more than it did, an Ivy league class,” according to Brandon Middleton, one of the leaders of the class. When the novel coronavirus coincided with growing social unrest due to heightened public awareness of police brutality, during an election year, Brandon knew the time was right to enact his idea of creating a psychologically safe space for Black and Brown people to learn, grow, and create community together. The space would be virtual - leveraging the unique circumstances of the time to create a community where access was more available than ever.

For the teaching team, the mantra of “making space” had two meanings. It served as both a guide for intentionally designing a nurturing environment for those outside the mainstream and as a call to action: the teaching team was also compelled to make a “bold

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statement”, according to Middleton. The team challenged traditional notions of elite education by inviting others to share in the experience of a Stanford class— free of charge.

The success of Community College highlighted a number of important factors in making space.

Challenging the Status Quo Community College and the teaching team opened the virtual doors of the d.school and Stanford to host a course in which folks from the “community” - across the nation and as far as South Africa - joined Stanford students on Zoom to learn from trailblazers across industries about the ways in which those leaders made space in their respective sectors for themselves and those behind them. Leveraging the technological accessibility of a world on Zoom and a spirited, welcoming Instagram, the teaching team enacted a vision of accessibility by saying to all, “come on in.”

For Brandon, decolonizing design is about democratizing access to design and restoring an equilibrium. There may be a typical image that comes to mind when we

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think of a designer, maybe someone with fancy shoes or a particular aesthetic, but we can move away from that narrow embodiment and instead allow anybody to say, “I’m a designer, too”. In designing a Black and Brown space at Stanford, with doors open to the community at large, Brandon and his team are living their vision of widening access and creating a space where people can be a part of something. He says, “that's a little bit of what decolonizing design means to me...Give [design] an on ramp so that more people can own it and say I'm a part of that too, I can do that too.”

Creating Opportunity Brandon describes his “why” for creating the class: “to provide just education and a pathway to help people do better, who haven't had anybody advocate for them.” He had been thinking for years about ways to use the privilege, access, and opportunities that he has as an individual to build a bridge for students to connect to resources and is particularly driven to increase access and opportunities for people who have been historically limited by oppressive systems. He sees his role as

a connector, gathering wisdom through conversations, and delivering it to people with less opportunity. This is evident in the structure of the class, which brought so many people together to share knowledge.

He shared his gratitude for guests by illustrating their willingness to contribute wisdom: “Hey, you know you're part of my extended family, and I want to give you these gems so that you can do better than I did. Because I scraped my knees a lot, I bumped my head a lot, but we go through those experiences so that we can make it better for the next generation of people.”

As far as design goes, creating opportunity is about “restoring equal equilibrium,” as Brandon noted. He sees a need to pay less attention to what we typically hear about in the design field, and to focus on elevating the voices, cultures, and stories of marginalized people. In Community College, not only were unique voices elevated, but the teaching team also created opportunities for students to co-facilitate discussions with those speakers, many of whom were notable actors, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

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Enabling Authenticity In building on their bold, warm invitation and achieving their vision, the teaching team created room for real authenticity.

According to Middleton, after six or seven months of people feeling generally isolated from the world as we adjusted to pandemic life, students came to the class ready to make real connections and “started to open up from the very, very beginning.”

In making space, Community College brought people together to be welcomed, to be heard, to and to learn together. Brandon shared, “What brought me the most joy was probably listening to people just kind of let their hair down and... be like themselves without having any fear of being misunderstood or misrepresented.”

As Brandon noted, “to have people be able to be themselves, especially during a rough time in society made me really happy….to say that I was part of the team that curated and crafted an experience like this.” This welcoming space also enabled candor from guests, who often showed vulnerability, opening up about family, upbringing, things that scared them, courageous moments, immigration stories, and more. This transparency was an act of caring. Guests offered genuine experiences to which students could relate and students celebrated these bits of wisdom in deeply reflective and effortful final projects. In all, everyone embraced authenticity.

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Learning from indigenous fire management practices

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LIGHT– ING FIRES OF CHANGE

By Meenu Singh and Holly Truitt

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Once a burn starts, there is no control.

Even with great planning.

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n our Fall 2020 Designing the Taboo: Control Burn class (co-taught by Meenu Singh, Holly Truitt, Nariman Gathers, Omri Gal, and Hanan Ahmad), we explored fire as a metaphor and framework for designing for change in our lives and world.

Specifically, we dove into the indigenous fire management practice of "control burns," setting small prescribed fires to prevent destructive, out-of-control wildfires. Before we launched students into designing for change, we wanted to deepen our collective understanding of “control burns” as a metaphorical framework: How can characteristics of control burns help us better develop design experiments and make change in our own lives? What might fire teach us about designing for change?

We set out to answer these questions with the help of three experts.

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Bill Swaney, a member of the Confederated Salish-Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes who is a scientist and educator and cultural leader for the Flathead Nation, provided an indigenous perspective on ecology, fire, culture, and changemaking. Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist (a professional who studies tree rings to determine dates and the chronological order of past events) and author of Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, shared how fire was a natural and regular occurrence until the application of Western fire suppression methods. Jim Steele, a fire specialist who has spent most of his career working as a Forester, Fuels Manager, and Fire Management Officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, shared the complex nature of urban wildlands where people are building homes in high-risk areas believing that fire suppression will keep them safe.

Our role as designers was to synthesize the knowledge our three experts brought to the class and translate it into a design mindset for transformative change. While we had initially framed design experiments as a series of “control burns,” we quickly learned from our expert collaborators that the phrase “control burn” is a misnomer!

Instead when it comes to fire management - western and tribal - the proper translation and technical concept is a “prescribed

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burn.” Jim shared, “when the burn walks out the front door, it's no longer a controlled burn” – the fire’s behavior is subject to external variables, such as changes in wind, that make it too complex to be entirely predictable.

And yet – embracing this ambiguity is necessary to regenerate a site and prevent a catastrophic future burn.

This is a profound analog to designing experiments in change.

When we create and conduct design experiments, we can only control so much in the setup, but ultimately, what makes it a true experiment is the ambiguity and our lack of control in what happens after the experiment is deployed. In the case of both prescribed burns and design experiments, this sort of ambiguity is natural, scary...and necessary for making change.

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o help our students and other designers navigate the unknown and un– predictable nature of designing for change, we developed a “Control Burn” mindset (or should we say “Prescribed Burn” mindset?).

The sparks build on each other: Fire and life are intricately interconnected. They are both constant and natural.

Design lesson: Conflict and tension are natural when designing for change.

Go into this design work with your eyes wide open.

Suppression does not result in a healthy ecosystem.

Design lesson: Avoiding/suppressing tension and conflict will not allow for healthy change and growth. Knowing this, some of our students, in their design, intentionally invited and created pathways to navigate and even provoke tension and conflict to ensure the right conversations were had and change was made.

You can’t create a control burn without fuel.

Design lesson: We need to reflect critically on areas that are not working and opportunities for transformation in ourselves and our communities. They are often the fuel for change. Many students realized that under every problem was an opportunity ripe for change. One going so far as to create a book to help them break old ways of thinking and being.

Control burns require thoughtfulness and the ability to read the landscape.

Design lesson: Before conducting design experiments, it’s important to understand our intention, the history and context, and potential implications of trying to make change. Students interviewed those who might have insights into the change they were designing for to ensure they better understood the landscape and soils.

Control burns allow you to harness the heat and enable new growth.

Design lesson: Design experiments are an active way to help us learn, change, and regenerate. Our students, in their framing around opportunity, focused on the growth that would be possible even if the process of change created disorder. They kept the faith that out of this disorder would come reorder. Higher order.

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Control burns are set with intentionality and invite the emergent.

Design lesson: Design experiments require us to embrace ambiguity.

No matter how much you plan, you can’t control a fire after it's set.

Design lesson: We can control our hypotheses and setup for our design experiments; we can’t and shouldn’t expect to control the outcome (and we should consider potential implications/ risks). For two students, the change they were inviting had to do with their parents’ acceptance. They knew this may or may not happen, but it was time to light a control burn.

Control burns are communal.

They don’t happen in isolation and they can’t be managed alone.

Design lesson: Experimentation and changemaking can and should be a collective process. In our class, we worked together to workshop, hold space, and support each other in our control burns for 10 weeks.

This made our experiments richer and the risk less scary.

As designers, we can learn from nature and the forces that have always been designing, redesigning, and transforming the world around us. We need to listen, especially to voices who are not always invited to the design table, such as tribal members and scientists.

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Step out the door. Find inspiration in nature. Seek new ways of knowing from new voices and perspectives.

You just might find a new mindset.

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Utilizations of Equity in Design Series TEACHIN G AN D L EAR N IN G

In Conversation with Susie Wise

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“The more you learn in a context about diversity and people’s experiences of

belonging or feeling othered...

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and the more concretely and fully you’re able to investigate that, the more you have potential

to see it in another context.”

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usie Wise shared this as she explained how liberatory design principles guide her class, Design for Belonging: Autism Care. The class, which Susie co-taught with Jennifer Goldstein is an eye-opener in many ways. The course expanded student ideas of what can be designed, but also how to approach design. By helping students build strong foundations in design practices that introduce the concept of equity, Susie and Jen aimed to set students up with transferable design skills so they can engage in subsequent projects with a mindful lens.

Reframing the Goal

equity, like stock equity. And for other folks, even if they are paying attention, it can sometimes trigger kind of a technocratic response...about numbers or data. And not that those things aren’t important, those can be important markers...and can help people set goals.” With that thought, Susie instead framed the class around belonging.

“Using the notion of belonging is actually a feeling that people can understand... wherever you are positioned within white supremacy culture.” She adds, “You have had times in your life, where you’ve had a feeling of belonging or not belonging, and maybe even explicitly of being othered.

That can be across different dimensions of identities, it can be very situational...but if you help people to recognize belonging as the real goal of all of our equity work... it can often get you to then explore ‘what are the moments from an experiential design lens to design for?’”

With this framing, the course explored the context of autism care and neurodiversity.

Designing with the lens of belonging was not only an academic exercise, but had real world implications. Jen recently founded an autism care clinic in Denver, CO, so students were able to collaborate with families of children with autism and front-line clinicians to design for belonging.

“Sometimes the word equity bogs people down,” Susie shared, as she reflected on her work in racial equity. “People that aren’t paying attention think it might be...

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Getting Grounded In a class on belonging, it is no surprise that the teaching team emphasized a need for students to be grounded by mindsets that encourage perspectivetaking. Susie shared that to approach the intersection of belonging and autism, “everyone needed a grounding in really imagining how we were going to learn with and from others...There’s a whole range of felt experience...if belonging is something that we all feel and don’t feel in different contexts, [then] we needed to be grounded in the liberatory mindsets of paying attention to fear and discomfort and attending to healing.”

The teaching team turned to the newly revised Liberatory Mindsets deck (which Susie co-created with Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, and the National Equity Project [Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey]).

At various times throughout the course, Susie would refer to the deck, asking, “Are you exercising creative courage?” or “What are you doing to work to transform power?”

Exposing students to liberatory mindsets was more important than just introducing another tool. Susie acknowledged, “there’s the potential

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for new designers to cause harm and… the flip side is a potential openness and receptivity for understanding".

She continued, “If you’re just exploring design abilities and ways of working, you can actually get grounded in the things that really matter [for] you to do it well, which is paying attention to who you are and how you’re showing up and having an eye towards what system of oppression [you are] working with.”

Thinking in Systems “Systems are not built to accommodate,” Susie commented. She shared a story of a Black mother whose son, Lincoln, is autistic and as his mom says, “a drummer.”

The mother shared that depending on the context, the confluence of her son’s autism and his skin color might lead to him getting in trouble. Using liberatory design was important “to see how those lenses of oppression actually intersect and multiply.”

Susie feels that there is room for the class to improve, by embracing systems perspectives even more. “Even though we talked a lot and…analyzed things from a systemic level, we didn’t actually ask them to design at a more systemic level, and I would like to do that.” There are opportunities to further work the tension between concrete and abstract.

“I think we ended up… talking systemic, reflecting systemic, but not building systemic…I’m a huge believer in the power of starting small and making things concrete, but I do think there’s a next piece there.”

With a frame of creating belonging, liberatory mindsets, and perspectives on oppressive system, Susie and Jen are leading students to imagine a future where everyone can be their authentic selves.

Further, Susie acknowledges that the current awakening around racial inequity in our culture has made it easier to have conversation about other differences, such as neurodiversity. Designing for belonging in the context of racial inequity is, of course, different than designing for belonging in the context of neurodiversity, but Susie thinks the learnings can flow between contexts.

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Desig Free In Conversation with Hanan Ahmed and Coleman Powell

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“Design can be extremely freeing if you don’t take it with a spoonful of rules...

If you free yourself from the expectations of what design is supposed to look like, I think that’s when we can really see the intersection of design and justice.”

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esigning for Communal Safety, led

by Hanan Ahmed and Coleman Powell, started with the tenet that everything has been designed, including and especially systems of oppression and inequity. Hanan explained, “Things that are a problem in our society are designed to be that way...they're not designed to serve a purpose for all and then accidentally, you know, create these terrible outcomes. They're meant to do exactly what they do, so certain people are...in unjust situations [where] certain people are excelling, are benefiting.”

Starting with this lens enabled students to approach design from a place of freedom. It would be impossible to design equitably within an inequitable system, and Coleman noted, “these systems we exist in could be the design problem, right?” With this in mind, Hanan and Coleman encouraged students to start fresh: What does design look like when we free ourselves from the confines of what already exists?

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Fighting For To help students design freely, the teaching team framed an important mindset shift: instead of focusing on problems, students would design towards their ideal world. Coleman shared, “you're often asked...what you're fighting against, but very rarely given spaces, to think about...what you're fighting for.” This shift in intentionality opened up an imaginative space beyond the constraints of existing systems and highlighted a gap between existing systems and the definitions of safety students created.

“If these big systems are meant to keep us safe, but they're not what comes up for us when we meditate on what safety actually is, there's a gap. There's something that needs to be done to address these things.”

The Past and Praxis In addressing the gap, the teaching team combined design frameworks with existing racial justice resources. They highlighted abolitionist thought leadership, showcased ongoing communal safety projects, and analyzed the historical struggle for black liberation. These resources demonstrate

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the importance of envisioning a better future. As Coleman described, “[I] magination and dreams are what orient us regardless of what's going on, so that was a really powerful framework to try and get the students to grapple with...I realized it's less a question of who taught you to freedom dream, who taught you to speculate and more a question of who taught you that you shouldn't.”

Further, the teaching team explored how each of these existing practices utilized imagination as a tool in an ongoing practice for tackling rethinking communal safety. Similarly, the class orients students to a freedom dream and guides them to think through the steps needed to put that dream into practice.

Creating Community The teaching team wanted to ensure that students carry their design work forward beyond the class to make designing for communal safety an ongoing practice. Hanan and Coleman focused the final project on designing spaces necessary to uplift current abolition work, to foster conversations about safety, and to imagine a future

beyond the carceral state. The project was quite personal, as students considered their own communities.

Coleman elaborated, “It was just really cool to see how people were really thoughtful about... ‘okay, how would I actually talk to someone I care about this particular issue.’ Because it's not it's not as abstract as we make it out to be.

These are practices we're already doing, every day.” At the core of the project was the idea of centering community voices and being accountable in enacting design practices. As Hanan explained, “It's about accountability... you're accountable to the process, you're accountable to the outcome, you're accountable to yourself and the community you're designing with.”

In Designing for Communal Safety, students were encouraged to imagine freely, to learn from historical contexts and to center community voices, all with intention of starting an ongoing practice of designing for justice. “How do we make this a living sort of project not something stagnant, not something that’s confined, but can….take flight” Coleman Powell

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In Conversation with Ann Grimes and Andrea Small

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W hen you peer through the opening of a kaleidoscope you’re greeted with a symphony of color. As you turn the instrument, the colors dance into continually changing patterns as different elements intersect with one another, disappear, and reappear in new combinations.

Ann Grimes, a member of the teaching team for Innovations in Inclusive Design, sees kaleidoscopes as a helpful metaphor for inclusive design. The class considers a variety of factors, such as gender, race, geography, disability, and more (12 in total), as essential considerations for design work. “If you put all these factors in and you, like a kaleidoscope, switch it… what is the view that you get in the end?” By seeking these new views and seeing how factors interact, Ann wonders, “how could we think about designing in a more sophisticated, nuanced way?”

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The Innovations in Inclusive Design team includes Ann Grimes, Andrea Small, Londa Schienbinger, and Hannah Jones. The class began as an exploration of the role gender plays in the design of technology products, but has since expanded to tackle inclusivity more broadly. As they’ve expanded the conceptual boundaries of the course, infusing the class with equity has been an “ongoing conversation,” shared Andrea Small. “It shows up in a variety of ways.” She added, “Because the class is about intersectional design, we are discussing all of those factors all the time. Equity is the goal of all of the work.”

Desire to Improve With equity as the goal, the teaching team is driven to expand their own insight.

Andrea shared that it is a consistent topic of conversation, and there is a “ desire to improve it constantly... There's no like, ‘we did equity and now we're done.’”

The team is continually updating their own knowledge and applying it to the class. “This is a thing that we're constantly learning about ourselves teaching the class...As I said, it started as gender innovations, you know, Beyond the Pink and Blue and we've come to understand that gender does not exist in a vacuum ever, and that is part of understanding equity.”

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More Questions than Answers In embracing growth and pushing forward conversations around equity, inclusivity, and design, the teaching team has developed a knack for questioning and challenging current design tools. “The main thing for me is just being critical of how we’ve come to the frameworks that we’ve relied upon and how we question the intersectionality of all those,” Andrea offered. In the class, this might start with definitions. She explained how this plays out: “Inclusion, we break that down and talk about what inclusion means and how to create inclusive products and inclusive spaces, inclusive cities.

Intersectionality, we break down what that means and the origins of that.” With a foundation in defining, understanding, and questioning, the hope is that students will transcend performative inclusion and instead learn to infuse their design practice with the intent to create things that are more equitable.

Andrea notes, “There is always going to be room for improvement in knowledge, so how do you learn how to accept that?

How do you learn how to be wrong?

How do you learn to question where the content came from? How do you learn to

question the... who are we? What is the goal? And being honest with those answers, to me, is the most important outcome.”

Approachable Nuance In addition to practicing growth mindsets and questioning the design canon, the teaching team hopes that their kaleidoscopic, layered approach to equity and inclusivity will spark nuanced conversations. Ann observed, “conversations can become quickly binary...people often get backed into a corner and those conversations become very difficult right out from the start.” In developing and applying their 12-factor, layered, open-ended process, Ann continued, “it gives people many openings in which to have conversations and by doing that, it creates a much more complicated, to be sure, but a more nuanced approach and a more solutions-oriented approach, and a more open approach to have these discussions.” The team acknowledged the challenge of meeting students where they are at in terms of understanding, and strove to create a safe, informed space for students to talk about these factors in order to work through their own journeys of improving their inclusive design practice.

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WHAT NOW? Reflections on Equity Design

By Adrienne Baer and Chris Rudd

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ou’ve probably heard the word equity more this year than any other year of your life, both within and outside of design conversations. In many ways, this is great. Awareness of systemic oppression has skyrocketed and students are more committed than ever to using their design skills for meaningful social change. But when equity becomes a trending topic, how do we as designers ensure that we’re engaging in impactful anti-oppressive work and not just starring in a performance of buzzwords?

Designing Forwards

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Design is always evolving - we not only find new areas in which to apply it, but also push forward the practices, frameworks, mindsets, and intentions that form the core of the discipline.

Within design communities, there is constant necessary questioning: What does it mean to design? Who does it serve? How can we make it better?

At the d.school, design educators think deeply about how to engage with

students in order to help them become empowered, thoughtful designers. They leverage the experimental culture of the d.school to engage in the larger conversations within the field by pushing design pedagogy in their classrooms, encouraging students to think about power dynamics, systemic racism, intersectional oppression and more.

But the conversation is always changing and there is always more to consider.

Chris Rudd, one of the article’s authors, is an esteemed designer and design educator who teaches at IIT’s Institute of Design and the d.school and runs the design firm Chi By Design. Adrienne Baer, the other author, is a PhD student studying organizations and is a graduate of Stanford’s Design Impact program. Together, we identified some considerations for teaching design as a tool for anti-oppression. Below, we’ll share those, offer provocations, and celebrate the ways in which the d.school has embraced and explored teaching design with equity in mind.

Adopting Systems Perspectives All experiences are situated within a system, often at the intersection of several systems. That situated, systems

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perspectives is what allows us to see the forces of inequity, without overfocusing on one experience at the expense of seeing the system. Further, the forces of inequity in our society are adaptive, morphing to disarm ideas aimed at dismantling the system.

Even the best intended designs can be swallowed by a system that is designed to propagate inequality, disenfranchisement, and marginalization, especially when students have not been able to fully research the context in which they’re designing.

Provocations: How might we help students consider the connected nature of experiences and dynamism inherent within systems? How might we encourage students to think about designing to disrupt systems or creating systems of services and ideas of their own?

Navigating Capitalist Tensions We live in a capitalist society that increasingly creates and feeds off inequity. At the least, we must acknowledge the tension between bringing ideas to fruition and perpetuating inequitable, capitalist

systems. We can demand that design takes a society-centered point of view, rather than a business-centered point of view. Design alone did not create all the problems in the world and design alone will not fix them all. But we can use design to bridge gaps created by inequitable systems and to chip away at oppressive institutions.

Provocations: How might we enable students to take society-centered points of view and explore alternative models for bringing ideas to life sustainably? How might we help students embark on projects that have personally meaningful impact?

Abandoning Neutrality and Championing Integrity Design is not neutral. The moment we think about a project, it is a political decision. Choosing to take a project means choosing a side. Despite the very real challenges and tensions of designing within a system, the force for good, positive, impactful change will be designers who take a stance.

Can students harness their abilities as designers to enable new futures to come to fruition? Further, design is

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not neutral for teaching team members either. Instructors must also think about the environment they foster and the political decisions inherent in their projects and pedagogy.

There is an opportunity to be intentional about who students are when they walk away from a course.

This is design at its core. Students can begin to find themselves: Who are you as a designer? What do you stand for? What will you not do?

Provocations: How might we help students discover what they stand for? How might we help them live their values through design?

Provocations: As students grow in self-efficacy, how might we amplify their endeavors to tackle the intersections of oppression in creative ways? How might we encourage them to critique and question design processes as we all strive to design in anti-oppressive ways?

Where We Are Now

Releasing the Equity Design Dream It may be a fantasy to design “for equity” and we might be doing ourselves an injustice by hoping to achieve an unrealistic target. Instead, we can be anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist, and overall, anti-oppressive in our design.

These terms acknowledge the system, acknowledge the constraints, yet still convey an equity-forward stance. We can achieve some of the hopes of equity and can use the positive framing to

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motivate our work, while being grounded in the reality of needing to design within a system that forces inequity. We can examine intersectionality of oppressive factors in pursuit of more just, more targeted, more impactful design practices and outcomes. We can suggest many methods of design, encouraging students to explore the ones that work for them and to create new ones.

The d.school is a place that invites change. It has continually redefined itself and its methodologies in pursuit of better student experiences, better design frameworks, better outcomes.

The pandemic, of course, spurred another round of redefinition. As our world became even more boundaryless and connected, the teaching staff grew, unencumbered by physical constraints, like needing to live near Stanford in order to walk into a classroom each week. The influx of fresh ideas from outside forces merged

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with existing d.school efforts to positively push the d.school pedagogy towards more inclusive, collaborative, equitable design practices.

Framing Challenges The framing of design challenges is expansive and nuanced. Classes have moved from more traditional, humancentered product design focuses to consider a plethora of impactful, intersectional topics. This shift has made project framing more nuanced.

Approaching Problems Previously, some design approaches might have encouraged insular project or design teams who worked paternalistically, cycling through stages of research, figure out, do. The current approaches have shaken up the notion of the team itself and the design process. Shifting from “design for” to “design with” expands design teams to be inclusive, while challenging the idea that a siloed, prescriptive process is best. The d.school teaches co-design and embraces “design abilities” and “design as learning” concepts to

allow for more collaborative, curious, flexible and inclusive approaches to design challenges.

Broadening Contexts The d.school has also moved towards introducing students to broader contexts.

Instead of narrowly focusing on detached slices of experience, their courses help situate students to see the societal contexts that influence those experiences.

Students may be exposed to a suite of issues that intersect to create certain conditions, and can walk away with a more holistic understanding of the challenges they are tackling.

With its blend of compassion for students, dedication to feedback and reflection, and unwavering commitment to positively impact the world, the d.school holds itself to a high standard. This year, courses were offered to invite in communities who are typically denied access to elite institutions, to consider ways to dismantle the carceral state, to create anti-racist learning environments, to activate anti-oppressive actions on Stanford’s campus, to increase telehealth access to marginalized populations, and much more.

This is just the beginning of an ongoing journey in teaching, learning, promoting and practicing anti-oppressive design.

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Hear the M

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ring Music

By Yuri Zaitsev

Thoughts on Remote Interviewing

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n the surface, remote interviewing seems straightforward. You pull up your favorite video chatting platform, sit in a comfortable chair in front of a semi-professional background, have an interview guide taking up half the screen and then squish the video chatting app on the other half. You have some paper ready for notes and a coffee that is placed just out of frame. As a d.school lecturer, I could spend entire classes on interviewing logistics and etiquette. One day I realized that these classes were missing a truth that was more important.

The truth is that the practical stuff can get in the way of forming the emotional connection you must have with the respondent. A good connection requires total concentration so the designer can actively listen. The truth is that it is hard to listen for needs when the subject is squished into a little square on a screen while notifications are going off,

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the laptop battery is slowly, yet visibly, draining, and the anxiety from having forgotten to hit the record button is setting in.

In remote interviewing, it is too easy to miss something important.

I was interviewing Dan, The Salesman.

This was during the pandemic and Dan works for a large, old hospital on the other side of the U.S., so of course I conducted it over video chat. Dan has words like “Vice” and “Director” in his title. His video was relegated to the right half of my screen and I could see he wore a baseball cap and a t-shirt. His background was a photo of Yosemite.

He was lamenting on how difficult it is to bring new technology into hospitals.

This is pretty typical for large, old, hospitals, like where he works. The thing is, all of that is about to change.

The old head of the hospital just retired and the new one has a plan to become more “nimble.” Overnight Dan is going to have more funds, more efficient processes, and new labs exploring treatments. More innovation, quickly.

I nodded in appreciation. Surely, this is good news. As I was looking at my interview guide to inspire my next question, out of the corner of my eye I could see that Dan looked unhappy.

I was going to move on except something was off.

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His voice was missing the excited little timbre that you can hear like music underneath the words when a person is happy.

“Wait a minute…

Dan, how do you, personally, feel about this?”

Turns out not well. Before, Dan’s team were measured on how innovative and safe they could be. Now they are measured by how “nimble” they are.

The changes mean that now Dan must report progress each quarter. Innovation now has a deadline. His team is feeling pressured, hurried, and worse: outdated.

I maximized his little square of video to full screen. There was nothing in my interview guide that could help me with this and I needed to focus. I leaned in and moved my coffee cup and notepad out of the way.

My lectures on remote interviewing now are about this leaning in and paying careful attention to all of the emotions that come up. No distractions. The fact is, in the remote world we are not there with the interviewee. We aren’t in their

space. There are limited social and body language cues. It doesn’t help that the subject is also reduced to a tiny portion of the screen while our own world is inundated with distractions.

To end, I’ll ask a set of questions that you can keep in the back of your mind the next time you are interviewing someone. In addition to your favorite chair, your notepad, and your video chatting program of choice, they will help you with the most important part of the interview: the connection that you and the subject share. This is what I teach about today. Remote interviewing is about forming a deep connection with someone occupying a tiny, twodimensional square on your computer.

Does the story make sense? Can I repeat back the heart of it? How does the subject feel about it? How do I feel about it? Do these emotions make sense in context or is something else happening? What emotion does the subject display right now, despite what they are saying?

If answering these questions is tough, then is there something in my world that is keeping me from listening?

What is the music underneath the words?

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Beyond the Interview:

LESSONS IN TEACH– ING CO– DESIGN In Conversation with Andrea Small and Ann Grimes

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The Innovations in Inclusive Design team (Ann Grimes, Andrea Small, Londa Schienbinger, and Hannah Jones), shares 3 considerations for bringing co-design into the classroom.

Getting Inspired By Placemaking Frameworks Co-design, or participatory design, might be spreading through the design world right now, but it is certainly not new. The teaching team looked to placemaking, a process for collaboratively designing public spaces, for inspiration on frameworking community engagement in design projects, particularly for their final project on designing intersectional cities. Cities have historically involved community members in the designing of places, compared to the typical process of designing an app, in which people are observed - mostly so the app can then be tweaked to get them to spend more time or money.

Placemaking is built around the idea that communities shape places. Because placemaking is a community-based activity and a participatory process, the

teaching team leveraged the existing framework to introduce co-design to their classroom.

Avoiding Performative Co-Design In both projects, the teaching team acknowledged that the short timeline of the class limits the ability of students to engage in true co-design. For students, going out and talking to people was just “dipping [their] toes” into the world of co-design and as they build on that they will bring in community members and stakeholders of all types in order to create an equitable co-design space.

Andrea Small speaks to this: “We did discuss...what is participatory design, what is co design and how that is not necessarily what's happening in the class when you just share your ideas briefly with another person to gain feedback on it. So because of the... briefness of the class and the fact the projects only [take] place over a couple of weeks, we talked to them about how you would equitably do participatory design.” Despite the brevity of the class, students are able to learn about and practice co-design techniques, while building understanding of the whole process.

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Intersectional Design Card deck, developed

by Londa Schienbinger, Hannah Jones, Ann Grimes, and Andrea Small.

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Fostering Students’ Co-Design Autonomy Throughout the class students are exposed to co-design activities, but the teaching team also wants to ensure they have the autonomy to engage in authentic, nonperformative co-design beyond the class. Within the final project, students were tasked with designing their own participatory design engagements to practice various ways of bringing community into a design process. Students thought through the logistical details of a co-design event, such as number of times to run a workshop, timing of the activities, and adequate compensation. They also engaged with more high-level planning concepts, such as avoiding paternalism, providing communities with the solutions they’ve designed, and truly listening. The goal of the exercise is to equip students to bring their co-design autonomy forward, wherever they may go.

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BACK TO THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

By Milan Drake

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To be, or not be...prepared Amidst a global health crisis, working and learning and teaching from home, soaring unemployment, loneliness, heightened academic stress and burnout, attacks on mental wellness, and deep wells of grief, we never stopped forging toward community solutions for the students and teachers we serve.

I have not seen a time like this before in education where being prepared required us to have a willingness to be patient, resilient, and embrace a certain amount of ambiguity along the way to preparation. To be prepared is truly to anticipate and embrace the unexpected.

It's not about the plan you spent hours or days doodling on paper. It's not about the strategy you brainstorm over multiple Zoom meetings with your team, nor is it about planning steps 4, 5, and 6 based on the success or the completion of steps 1, 2, and 3. It's about not knowing until you know, and being okay with that.

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Intentionality from the Outside In While we were focusing our intentions on supporting students in the classrooms, my focus also had to turn to the happenings outside the classroom that would surely impact how we teach and learn related to COVID-19 and beyond.

What our students and faculty saw happen to Breonna Taylor while she was sleeping in her own home and what followed, 74 days later, to George Floyd, became national news. Both of these lives were taken at the hands of police, both stories sparked frustration, protests, and a new visibility to social injustices, even while we sheltered in place.

In the midst of the universal concern, chaos, and calamity, I sought to build and maintain relationships with marginalized communities externally (on campus and beyond) as well as redefine, redesign, and realign the current community.

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Students

Past

Community Community Partners

Present Space– Continuum

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Back to the Past, Present, and Future In order to be intentional, we needed to understand communities over time.

There's no way to discuss “time and time travel” and not mention one of my favorite movies of all time, "Back to the Future." As the Community and Curriculum Lead here at the d.school I have become a time traveler and created my own “community time-continuum.”

For me, the medium in which I travel is not a 1982 DeLorean equipped with futuristic time traveling capabilities.

Though I made several attempts to get the red d.school truck in our lobby to double as a time traveling machine... that didn't work out. What did work was the recognition of the power that the past, present, and future hold as consistent, crucial, and contributing factors to how community is intentionally designed here.

I define the past, present, and the future as: three unique moments in time that every d.school community member and community leader participates in and contributes to with unusual speed and frequency during each of our blazing fast 10-week quarters.

3x3=9 Communities There is no universally agreed-upon definition of community. My working definition of community is: authentic and reciprocal relationships between groups of people that are created and sustained over time.

3 x 3 = 9 communities and or (students, teaching teams, and community partnerships) X (past, present, and the future) = (nine communities) In order to use the word “community” meaningfully, I decided to look through a lens of 3 types of community members: students, teaching teams, and community partners each crossing the “community space continuum” of the past, present and future.

Each community member crosses through each (past, present, and future) moment in the community space-continuum at least once forming 9 communities every quarter. In some instances, community members re-enter the community spacecontinuum and repeat the process. “Time traveling” to understand how community needs change framed our actions as we prepared for ambiguity.

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The 4 S’s Using the nine communities framework and considering how the happenings outside of the classroom might affect each of those communities, I created 4 "S" principles to ground our work whenever our context gradually or suddenly shifted: “Who are we building for and what do they need?”

The 4 “S” principles ask; Does our support of communities consider...

A sense of belonging? The feeling in which a person feels authentically accepted, respected, included, and supported by others, especially faculty and other adults in the school social environment.

Safety? A framework that is seen and heard that promotes and considers racial– cultural, gender identity, social–emotional, interpersonal, virtual, and physical safety for all community members.

Social identity? The experience of belonging through social relationships or through academic evidence (e.g. instructors, courses, staff, etc) of a shared identity that can be improved by increasing the spaces and number of people community members can confide in that have shared perspectives and/or matching social experiences.

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Self-efficacy? Supporting community member’s capabilities to feel institutional liberation within our community (both physical and virtual) in order to organize and execute actions in pursuit of human centered and equity-focused learning experiences.

In addition to the immediate shift to working and teaching virtually and the national pandemic, the racist events I mentioned earlier highlighted the need for me to focus on how I could support the 4 S’s in a world of visible systemic racism, the rise of COVID cases, and a seemingly unstable educational system.

In Closing I felt that thinking about those nine communities and the 4 "S" principles in mind in a shifting and ambiguous time helped ground the work. Again, who are we building for and what do they need?

Perhaps, even as the definition of words like "safety" morphed or as student realities became more obvious over the year, the emergence of these fundamental needs guided the work of helping people to show up as they are to all 9 communities, encouraged radical caring for each other even as we show up idiosyncratically, and created a sort of resilience to future change.

In the d.school community, we have the care to proceed with intention, the grace to roll with the unexpected, and the practiced resilience to adapt and morph together.

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EXPL– ORING JOY Intentionally Approaching Design

In conversation with De Nichols

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As the Notorious B.I.G once said,

“We can’t change the world unless we change ourselves.”

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D

e Nichols, one of the instructors of Designing With/By/ For Joy and Notorious B.I.G fan, believes that infusing design with joy can help us navigate unknown and challenging times and can help us create a more equitable, liberated world - but first, we have to look inward, outward, and around to understand what joy even means.

The teaching team, composed of Hanan Ahmed, Mallory Nezam, Nariman Gathers, and De Nichols (we’ll call them the Joy Squad), asked themselves and students: How do we design with joy? How do we design for joy? How do we integrate joy into our processes, systems, spaces, and experiences?

In exploring these questions, the Joy Squad took students through a reflective journey to help them prepare to design by, with, and for joy.

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Personal and Collective Definitions “We can’t think about how we might use design as a tool for joy or a process for joy, a space for joy, if we haven't done that gut check to really understand what is joy. How does it show up in our lives?

Is it an ever present experience? Is it something that is always there? Is it omnipresent? Or is joy something that's fleeting? And what's the difference between joy and happiness in the ways that it manifests?” De explained.

Students engaged in journaling and personal reflection as the Joy Squad guided them through the process of defining joy for themselves. They were sent out to do “joyspotting,” an activity in which they noticed what brought them joy and what killed their joy. The students calibrated their definitions of joy personally, but collectively as well. Together, the class and teaching team developed a working definition of joy to guide the course, a cycle that would repeat throughout the class as students zoomed in and out, understanding how joy manifests for themselves, for others, for communities, and for cultures.

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Unlearning In academic settings, students are often pushed to toxic extremes: feeling like they must embody perfection, must always show up and be on, must not make mistakes. De recalls, “I remember being solidly told ‘you are not allowed to not know.’” This pressure cooker in which young students swim perpetuates burnout culture, anxiety and selfsabotage that becomes internalized.

To put into practice the topic of joy and design, students must reflect on how culture and context might have influenced their worldview.

Through resources, videos, and music, the Joy Squad guided students to ask themselves: What have I learned?

What are the messages I have been told?

What are the things I need to unlearn?

Which of these must I unlearn to be better?

Creating Joyful Spaces The Joy Squad encouraged students to think about joy in the tangible and abstract spaces around them. They contemplated places they had visited and online realms, as well as how joy emerges “on a larger scale beyond that, like...cultural rituals of joy that show up, say, in non-western cultures and communities in spaces,” De described.

Space can also be considered in terms of boundaries. As De explained, “boundaries can be utilized for carving out space, for removing oneself or removing something in order to create space for joy.”

Of course, the Joy Squad considered students’ physical settings. Preparing to design with/by/for joy involves “creating an environment for yourself that gives you joy,” De noted. So, students were tasked with discovering what things they could keep at arm’s length as a joyful reminder and energy booster.

What are the tools I can instill in their place to get on a better path?

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Showing up with authenticity For De, joy is not an area where you can fake it.

“By being one’s full self, we are able to unearth more of ourselves, into our journey, into our spaces, in the ways that we show up. And that is an opportunity for joy to exist: by living our most liberated lives. When we suppress parts of our identity or when we lie to ourselves about who we are and who we want to be, I think that we decrease our ability to have joy.”

During the class, students blended personal explorations of joy with communal perspectives and they were exposed to a range of design resources and theories to support their individual journey towards being joy designers.

They worked to understand themselves and part of that assessment involved allowing serendipity, as De explains: “in seeing and witnessing or learning vicariously or directly the practices of joy that may not necessarily be immediate.” By looking inward, outward, and around, students were able to unearth, understand, and explore how joy integrates with their own unique identities in order to come to design from a place of authenticity.

Most importantly, students showed up to design with dedication and energy.

De notes, “They brought so much wisdom and insight and experience to this space.”

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Pushing Inter– Disciplinarity About: When disciplines collide, there is an opportunity for surprising, boundarypushing ideas to emerge. From space to emerging technologies to healthcare, our students, staff, and community partners explored the magic of interesting intersections.

Read on to learn about how we collaborated to learn from and with each other at unexpected nexuses.

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ana Slug ams

Adrienne Baer in conversation with Drew Endy and Michaela Gordon

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H

ave you ever wondered what a banana slug dreams about the future?

Drew Endy has.

Drew is a “homosapien on Earth” who is professionally interested in “flourishing,” which refers to the approximated “10 billion people on this planet, getting along totally fine in partnership with the rest of life on earth,” as he described. He is also a co-teacher of Inventing the Future, alongside Lisa Kay Solomon and Tina Seeling, with each team member bringing their unique orientations and approaches to designing the future.

At first glance, I thought an interesting intersection to explore here was the crossing of Drew’s illustrious career in biotechnology with his role as a design educator. However, I walked away from our conversation with a more fundamental idea. Intersections are not necessarily just about the linking of seemingly discordant disciplines, but rather about assuming agency to collaboratively chart a path to the future. A future where we form stronger, imaginative coalitions with each other... and with dreaming banana slugs.

We Happen to the Future Inventing the Future begins with a fundamental shift in agency. Michaela Gordon, a student in the class, described being empowered by this shift, “The future isn’t something that happens to us, but we happen to it.” She added that students “come away from the class, knowing that their own actions will contribute to the way the future is shaped.” Drew points to his own ability as a teaching team member to boost the confidence of students, just by being “existence proof” that “tomorrow will appear and what you do between now and then will shape what happens tomorrow.” Further, he highlights that the class gives students tools to articulate the future they want: constructing positive dreams, instead of only focusing on negative projections, and then putting those dreams into action.

Along with students feeling increasingly empowered, Michaela shared that they walked away with a sense of responsibility to understand their own personal impacts on the future as well as the tools to learn from and with others.

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Collaboration at Intersections For Drew, the future looks positive. “For the first time in human civilization…[we have] the capacity to provision enough joules, bits, and atoms for 10 billion people...the napkin math looks really good,” he explained. However, he thinks right now we lack the human systems, institutions, practices, and cultures to bring flourishing to fruition, noting “yeah, I need better biotechnology and better tools and better science and better math, better computers. But what I really need is better human constructs, better human coalitions, better non-human coalitions.” How can we collaborate better with each other and with banana slugs?

Collaboration can lead to interesting, productive intersections when humans, each with their own perspectives and experiences, find a spark of connection that allows them to explore and revel in each others’ distinctness. This type of magic occurs throughout the Inventing the Future community.

“What emerges for me as a teaching team collectively,” Drew described working with his incredible colleagues, “is this recombination of energy and

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enthusiasm and caring and responsibility and ambition and thoughtfulness and that's a really hard thing for one person to bring into a class.” Michaela similarly valued the variety of backgrounds and experience that Drew, Tina, and Lisa brought to the class, describing the teaching team as “amazing.”

Of course, collaboration is not limited to the teaching team, but truly buoyed by the student community. Drew noted that students, “come into this and then there’s this resonance and amplification” that creates a positive experience for all. “One of the best things you can do in teaching... is to play and create and test that hypothesis...do we have something worth teaching? And the students right, of course, are amazing in helping, and essential, in testing that hypothesis.”

The teaching team created opportunities for students to learn from one another and to challenge assumptions through collaboration. Michaela explained that challenging assumptions is “more about the different perspectives and backgrounds we all have, then maybe one singular field of expertise that we're coming from. A lot of it is...our own personal experiences as well, which can include, like, the cultures we come from, our backgrounds, our families, our interests... so I think that the perspectives that students, and the teaching team as well, take to the class is one of the most valuable things for sure.”

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Inventing the Future inspires students to see themselves as authors of a bright future, bringing interesting intersections to life through collaboration.

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LOOK– ING OUT TO LOOK IN

By Lisa Kay Solomon

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A

s the world locked its doors in 2020, the d.school looked outward to build a global community through conversations with futures scholars, practitioners, artists, activists and pioneers to explore, expand, and extend how we see and shape a more positive, inclusive, just future.

We wondered: What are the practices we could all learn to approach the future with a sense of personal and collective agency, steeped in possibility and imaginative hope?

These questions framed the foundation for our inaugural d.school Futures Series, a monthly public collaborative learning session where we invite future focused thinkers, scholars, artists, community connectors and amplifiers to share ideas, practices, experiences, mindsets and possibilities with us.

Our series kicked off in February with an exploration and imaginative game play with Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks and Ahmed Best: futurists, writers, scholars, researchers, performers, producers, game

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designers, curators,and co-creators of the Afrofutures podcast. They were joined by their collaborators, The Famothers, and the co-creator of their Afro-Rithms From the Future game, Eli Kosminski of the Equitable Games Group.

Afro-Rithms from the Futures is an interactive story-telling game inspired

by Afrofutures, an expansive worldview that combines Black cultural, spiritual, and historic traditions with science fiction, fantasy, and technological utopia.

Using structured and collaborative imagination, the game ignites new conversations, new dreams, new artifacts, and communal visions of the future. For example, in our short time together, we co-created an Ancestral Murmuration Mothership Library— a magical library that becomes the educational place that you need at that moment and helps you remember your history in order to imagine and prepare for a better future. We also conjured up the Ancestral Empathy Express— a bus or a train that connects you, as you ride,to the ancestral people who walked those spaces before you, finding strength from their world experience to fuel the urgency of future changes.

Each of us individually can shape, not only our personal future but the future that we all live in. —Ahmed Best, cocreator Afro-Rithms from the Future

Award-winning futurist Leah Zaidi joined our second d.school futures series for an imaginative conversation about designing for the multiverse, a multiplicity of potential futures.

As an Associate Editor of the World Futures Review and the founder of Multiverse Design, Leah’s work blends strategic foresight, systems thinking, and storytelling to design for complex problems.

Together we used techniques of Worldbuilding and science fiction to crowdsource a new SolarPunk Future and explored how new images of the future could help us accelerate that future becoming a reality. Worldbuilding blends practices of science fiction and narrative construction to create imaginary worlds that illicit a more holistic understanding of environmental, political, artistic, and technological aspects of new possible worlds.

During our third session, justice pioneers Aisha Bain and Meredith Hutchison, cofounders of Resistance Communications, helped us explore how creativity, art, and story move us expansively across generations of past and future.

Aisha and Meredith are artists, activists, visual facilitators, and pioneers for justice, using their interdisciplinary craft to weave cultural narratives of equity and justice. They led us through our own

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metamorphosis, journeys from our past to our futures.

We explored what it means to ground our work in the intergenerational transmissions of the past to create expansive visions of the future.

By expanding and enriching our understanding of our ancestors’ experience and context we expand our understanding of ourselves and the world. Who came before us? Whose histories have been erased? How might we reclaim their stories to enlighten new pathways forward?

Award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and novelist Minister Faust shared the power of combining science fiction and pro-social competitions to shape more inclusive, equitable futures in our 4th series.

Pro-social competition starts with design-driven questions and could initiate a mass activation of innovators and co-creators. Instead of a zero sum model, pro-social competitions are designed to spark innovation, invention and the advancement of new ideas while also building community and capacity. Together we explored: What problems do you want to solve? Whose?

Where? Why? How can you design more equitable and just results? What opportunities do you want to create?

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For whom? Where? Why? What are your clear criteria that serve people in abundant and additive ways?

We rounded out our inaugural series with a conversation with UNESCO’s Future Literacy lead Dr. Riel Miller and anticipation specialist and Africa

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literacy as a critical skill set and required coordinator Kwamou Eva Feukeu. As integrative discipline for the 21st century. part of thea small team that runs Future Literacy Labs across the world and host “Futures Literacy is a capability. It is the skill of the Futures Literacy Summit, the that allows people to better understand largest online community gathering of over 8000 practitioners, leaders, innovators the role of the future in what they see and do. Being futures literate empowers and educators from around the world, the imagination, enhances our ability to their work focuses on articulating futures

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BO OK : TH E ALCHEMISTS OF KU SH

BY MINISTER FAU ST

prepare, recover and invent as changes occur.”

—UNESCO We’re grateful for the nearly 1500 participants that signed up for at least one futures conversation in our series, but with the world continuing to tee up novel and unexpected surprises, our futures explorations feel more urgent than ever.

Stay tuned for more futures in the future!

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REP MAGA– ZINE

By Ariam Mogos

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2021 was a transformative year for REP magazine, the d.school’s flagship initiative to support young people and educators exploring emerging technologies.

Radical access to concepts, materials, and personal agency has always been at the heart of the d.school’s emerging technology portfolio, and REP magazine accomplishes this through self-facilitated and play-based experiences. Through REP, educators and students can make meaning of how they might design with emerging technologies to repair, repurpose, change their reputation, or any other way they want to riff on the title.

REP started as a series of public workshops at the d.school in 2018, and over the last few years, it has evolved into an accessible and responsive medium to meet the needs of K12 communities during the global covid-19 crisis. One of the most accessible formats for young people and educators who don’t have connectivity or access to technology is print.

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The first three issues of the magazine focus on voicebots, synthetic biology and blockchain, and the remaining issues touch on machine learning, brain computer interface technologies, and the internet of things. The common thread across the issues is a learning arc which guides young people to ask better questions about how these technologies work, and how they can become equitable designers of these technologies. For example, REP challenges us all to consider the implications of what we create on society and nature before we put it into the world. Throughout 2020–2021, REP has gone through many iterations and testing sessions with education communities like ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), Deeper Learning and Adobe to form this learning arc.

In 2022, REP will continue to grow through collaborations with communities interested in bringing diving into REP and creating their own REP learning experiences.

REP has been recognized by Fast Company as a World Changing idea.

It was a finalist for the Education category and received honorable mention for both General Excellence and Social Justice.

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Collaging the Art Remix activity in REP Magazine.

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THE SPACE BE– TWEEN US

Ripples to the Future: An experimental course partnership with NASA and the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory that began in January 2020 sent student experiments to outer space in February 2021.

By Miki Sode and Adrienne Baer

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Stop 1: Destination Station Event On February 28, 2020, the d.school hosted an event in collaboration with NASA and the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory to brainstorm ways to leverage the ISS to conduct innovative research. The ideation event, led by Seamus Yu Harte, asked the general question: What can we learn in space that could have an impact here on Earth?

The event bridged an undercharted path between scientific experiments in space (which are literally out of this world) to our everyday life.

Stop 2: A Glance at the New York Times in 2025

the ISS might impact humans living on Earth: What if a sneaker insole was revolutionized through an experiment on the ISS that couldn’t have been done here on Earth? Maybe shoes with such insoles would be banned from the Olympics for being too powerful?!

Stop 3: Stanford Student Projects to the International Space Station One year later, in February of 2021, a team of Stanford students co-led by Destination Station workshop participant Phoebe Wall was selected to send their research experiment to the ISS! As one of only five collegiate teams chosen, the Mars BRIC team (a subteam of the Stanford Student Space Initiative) is exploring technologies to create bricks on Mars using natural materials that are already there.

At the event, participants created fictional New York Times headlines imagining how an experiment onboard

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Stop 4: What’s Next?

The event and its subsequent ripples have exposed an interesting and promising intersection where design meets rigorous science and outer space.

Expanding on this intersection could include new activities or even new classes. The initial explorations have already unearthed some intriguing reflections about creating at the out-ofthis-world nexus of design and space.

Reflecting on the Nexus Dr. Sode reflected on the event, “I witnessed the power and ingenuity of a well-designed workshop. Seamus was able to get the gears in participants' heads to start turning, leading them from why to how to what is the value of conducting experiments in space—all while having fun! I’ve been struggling to do that as a part of my job for three years, and Seamus did it in one afternoon.”

Three thematic learnings emerged from creating at the intersection of design, space, and science.

Acknowledging what we take for granted “Gravity is something that we take for granted and never doubt,” Dr. Sode acknowledged. When we think outside of gravity and question an assumption we don’t usually question, we open ourselves up to new possibilities and a deeper understanding of the world we live in. In general, designing at an intersection allows us to expand our frames of reference and context, pushing us to make unexpected connections.

Finding commonalities The way in which we are taught about science, space, design, or any topic, might lead to preconceived notions about those topics. On the surface, we might see art and science as opposites, but they actually share important commonalities. At their core, art, science, and design can all be characterized by cycles of hypothesizing and experimenting to test those hypotheses. Yet, we all use different languages. Perhaps, the key to navigating intriguing intersections is communication: when can we be speaking the same language?

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Navigating ambiguity at intersections can be scary, but the ripples go a long way.

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Unique intersections create exciting opportunities to explore because they encourage unusual thinking and inventive applications.

Of course, this requires deep dives into ambiguous spaces—and making connections in uncharted places is tricky work! But navigating the puzzle and fully investigating the opportunity might have the power to produce big, unexpected, and fascinating results.

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thcare nue & Social Justice Street

By Adrienne Baer

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I

magine an intersection of two streets - the corner of healthcare avenue and social justice Street.

What would you see?

For Jules Sherman and Dr. Lee Sanders, cofacilitators of Designing Healthcare For Social Justice: Telehealth Design and Access, the first thing they notice in the intersection is the historical society, documenting the painful history of racism in our country and the enduring struggle for equality in healthcare, often led by female activists. Public health officials are milling around, representing a growing awareness of public health and the social factors, like race, age, and socioeconomic status, that influence who lives, who dies, and who thrives.

There are frontline workers, witnessing the personal pain behind big picture disparities, and patients who are either receiving appropriate care, or not, depending on their physical environment, social context, or individual behavior.

Our abstract intersection has varying amounts of greenspace and trees, scattered food deserts, and the built environment - all of which impact health, and all of which can be both intentionally and unintentionally constructed. There are engaged communities, bright art, and voices of youth.

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Naturally, they also see “activistdesigners” who disrupt the fixed mindsets that often hinder creative problem solving in healthcare spaces.

In the Fall of 2020, the class focused on telehealth. Their human-centered exploration into accessing remote care revealed multilayered facets of healthcare, like how a lack of decent wifi, health and tech literacy, or a safe space to talk to a provider could prevent someone from getting care.

The teaching team of Designing Healthcare for Social Justice strives to equip the next generation of social impact designers to tackle these problems, launching students from their class with these key takeaways:

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Designing Healthcare for Social Justice: Telehealth Design & Access

1. Research & Discovery Phase

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Empowering Co-Creation

Getting Activated

Students develop empathy for the population they are learning about through comprehensive literature review and interviews with patients, clinicians, and experts in the field.

Establishing mutually respectful relationships is key for developing meaningful need statements and co-creating useful solutions.

Students are empowered to see themselves as interdisciplinary change agents through design. Whether they are pre-med, computer science, or anthropology students, the overarching goal is to teach how design thinking methods can be applied to any field in order to solve complex problems.

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2. Problem Definition, Prototyping & Testing

3. Reflection & Story

Building Context

Relying on Teamwork

Students practice seeing challenge areas from multiple perspectives by learning about the motivations and incentives of all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem.

Students understand how to engage with each other by working in teams of 2 or 3. Groups approach intimidating problems through using tools to synthesize their research, prototype and test solution ideas with their users and embrace that they each bring a unique personal lens to the problems space.

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One student shared: “As I look back on my persona- the frustrated and helpless teacher now to me is the deeply passionate teacher brimming with love. The frustrated parent is now to me one that carries enormous burdens in their child, but who [carries] them with grace, dignity, and inspiration. And the patient, as always, is the biggest source of inspiration there will ever be. I’m thankful for how you were so passionate and encouraging regarding the design process and helping those in need. I think that the fact that I was able to present last Friday and receive so much positive feedback is a testament to your care and dedication.”

In Designing Healthcare for Social Justice, the students are seen as future leaders - in business, engineering, healthcare, and more - and they’ll take the lessons with them to not only design more empathetic, humane, elegant, healthcare solutions, but to change the culture of healthcare along the way.

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ond m grid the

By David Janka

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Confronting Crisis

contamination and performing relevant physical exam tasks.

We were all impacted by a global pandemic, wrestling with ambiguity about how our future would be changed because of COVID. As the quarter began, we discovered a timely application of VR: a recently developed infection prevention training module for healthcare workers. The creators joined us in class and gave us access to their not-yet-public program through “sideloading” on our headsets. We each experienced the training, practicing the process of appropriately donning and doffing PPE, understanding surface

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We often challenged students to design VR experiences that could be useful in our COVID world, such as creating an experience to prepare a person for drivethru testing or designing a virtual escape for a patient isolated in a hospital. One student extended the pandemic lens into their final project, designing a COVID vaccine training scenario for nurses.

Rather than learning in spite of pandemic stressors, we leveraged the moment in a productive way, channeling anxiety and helplessness into immersive experiences and design outputs. As we look toward future iterations of the class, we are asking: How can we continue to have flexibility in

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responding to evolving current events?

What are other ways that learning experiences can help our students process and respond to a time of crisis?

How else is VR uniquely positioned to adapt to disruptions and constraints?

The “Classroom” Experience Even before the pandemic, we were excited to see how VR could be a new element of teaching and learning at the d.school. Needing to teach virtually then provided a rich opportunity to explore novel ways of connecting and interacting with our students. We

were able to go beyond the 2-D, flat interactions of Zoom and “meet” in virtual spaces. In one program, we convened in a VR classroom, each of us with a photo of ourselves layered on the face of our virtual embodiment. We did simple things: conversed through our headsets, gave each other high fives that produced a satisfying sound, drew images on virtual Post-its and moved them around. We placed assets from class throughout the virtual room, including Zoom screen captures from memorable moments, PDFs of content, and images of key design frameworks. Being able to see each other and move around in three dimensions, we felt “together” as a class for the first time.

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In another session, we were joined by an emergency medicine physician who created a VR simulation to teach first responder skills. Groups of students took turns entering the simulation and tending to trauma as the doctor ran scenarios and gave feedback. As instructors we watched our students in virtual space over Zoom while observing the behind-the-scenes control panel that manipulated the experience. This was a first look at designing for the interplay between virtual environments and live interaction, and highlighted the potential for distributed learning experiences that engage students in new ways beyond the Zoom grid.

Looking toward a future where virtual learning is an option rather than a requirement, we are curious to explore new opportunities for hybrid learning that mixes in-person, video and VR environments. What else can we do with immersive VR experiences, whether synchronous or asynchronous? How can we redefine the community aspect of a d.school class with these new options?

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The Role of Identity Our efforts to design with diversity, equity and inclusion as a core value have made the concept of identity a more explicit component of teaching design and developing designers. The role of identity in design manifests intensely with VR because identity can be created and experienced in newly immersive ways. VR spaces allow users to take on various identities, sometimes versions or pieces of their actual selves, other times by assuming totally synthetic identities or embodying aspects of another real person’s identity. When you have a VR profile as part of a platform, you choose aspects of your identity by constructing an avatar. This can be an opportunity to represent your identities or try on new elements. Avatars can be more realistic, like having a real headshot “skinned” onto the face of your VR embodiment, or more fantastical by taking the form of an animal or a fictitious creature.

In addition to deciding how they want to be represented in VR as students, as designers they had to consider how identity showed up in experiences they created. In “Driving While Black,” students experienced an immersion into the history of restricted travel in the US and the impact on the Black community. Part of that experience involved witnessing a conversation in a safe community space, with a level of intimacy and access afforded by a virtual embodiment that is part of the community. New opportunities arise with the ability to adjust, create or “borrow” an identity. One student’s final project focused on how borrowed embodiments may be an effective element of a VR therapy experience for trans people managing eating disorders, with people “donating” their body for others to use in VR. We were particularly excited by the possibilities here and wondered how empathizing and understanding the experiences of others can be taken to a higher level with identity as an explicit design element.

We must consider the new sensitivities and considerations that are important when a designer has the ability to play with identity as part of creation.

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he bers

Student & Instructor Data

By Milan Drake and Megan Stariha

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he COVID-19 health crisis and pandemic shifted how we taught, where we taught, and how many classes we taught in 2020-2021. Our entire program, along with the vast majority of Stanford, was 100% virtual.

In 2020–2021 we offered: 34 for-credit offerings over autumn, winter, and spring quarters.

We did not offer pop-outs and workshops. The pop-out format is place-centric and not conducive to a remote academic year.

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D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

Number of Classes Our 34 for-credit offerings were a mix of familiar and novel and we focused on design output and student engagement.

In the autumn quarter of 2020, we offered 18 courses, all remote–the most in d.school history for one quarter.

Number of Students Overall student enrollment decreased as students adjusted to new academic priorities, changes to core classes, and completely online learning in general. In spite of the continuing pandemic and virtual learning, students sought to dive into their design work and problem solving with us.

Unique Students in For–Credit Classes: 3% Fellowship 9% Doctoral 47% Masters

36% Undergraduate 6% Non–Student

Diversity in Degree The graduate to undergraduate ratio decreased from last year, likely because we did not offer pop-out classes for the 2020 - 2021 academic year. The rise in undergraduate enrollment continued on an upward trend with 7.9% more students

enrolled compared to the 2019 - 2020 academic year. We continue to explore and expand the inclusion of fellows, postdocs, and co-terms to add to the voices and perspectives within our community.

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Diversity in Discipline

n Ed uc ati o

36% % 35

n ie Sc

ce

B

GS

Eng i

nee

s

11% GSB

d.school Students Stanford Students

232

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

ring

Engineering 36%

9%

E 16%

2%

7% L

3% Edu ca tio n

ine dic ci

e M

4% EarthSci

arthS

%

ine dic Me

H& S

aw

2

% 14

s& itie an Hum 26%

The d.school serves the graduate student population across the seven schools, and historically has certain schools overrepresented, compared to the general graduate population, and other schools underrepresented. This year, we have 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 a higher percentage of students from Earth and Science (7%), Education (10%), and Business (30%).

Engineering enrollment remained proportional at around 30%.

Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students

The 2020-2021 academic year Undergraduate representation continues its upwards trend: compared to the previous year we saw a 5% increase in the percentage of undergraduates Other ID relative to the all d.school d.school students. Students continued 51% 3% Instructors to experiment with taking more than one course as well: 17% of students took two or more classes, while around 9% of students All Stanford 30.5% Faculty took three or more classes.

1% EarthSci

Male

19%

2% EarthSci

Un

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69.5% cl

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38

34 & S% Hu cie man nce iti es s

30%

Hu m an itie s&

declared 53% Un

%

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27

Female g rin

46%

En gi ne

% 27

49%

56%

67%

When asked, one student remarked, “Honestly, and truly, this is the best learning experience I have ever had at Stanford. d.school 4% Students Pandemic or not. The instructors tried really hard to make it a personal experience and learning experience. They never gaveAll Stanford us 51% ‘busy work’ – everything Undergrads had a purpose and was exciting to engage with my peers.”

All Stanford Grad Students

44%

Percent of our students that took: 1 d.school class this year

Took 2 classes

Took 3 or more

9%

17%

74%

1 d.school class this year

Taught 2

86%

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9%

3 or more

6%

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By Gender Male

Female

Instructors

46%

3% Instructors

69.5%

All Stanford Faculty

30.5%

d.school

67%

49%

4% Students

All Stanford Undergrads

51%

56%

All Stanford Grad Students

44%

We continue to operate counter to the narrative of design as a male-dominated and traditionally 1space d.school class this year serve more female identifying students than male. This is 74%

234

d.school

51%

30% Students

Other ID

also reflected in our d.school instructor population. Each year we generally have over 50% of our teaching members Took 2 team classes Took 3 or more identify as female.

9% 17%

1 d.school class this year

Taught 2

86%

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

9%

3 or more

6%

Male

Female

Other ID

Amongst Instructors 46%

d.school

51%

3% Instructors

69.5%

69% returning All Stanford Faculty instructors

30.5%

Our instructor community increased in the 20202021 academic year. In the fall of 2020 we had 52 instructors across 18 courses. Throughout 30% the entire academic year, we had 80 instructors join and contribute to 49% our teaching community.

Across all three quarters, 31% of instructors were new to the d.school.

56%

31% new to teaching at the d.scho

69% returning instructors d.school

67%

4% Students

31% new to teaching at the d.school All Stanford Undergrads

51%

21%

Industry + Community

21%

44% 44% Academia

Industry + Community

1 d.school class this year

Academia

All Stanford Grad Students

44%

36%

Design 36% Design

Took 2 classes

Took 3 or more

9%

17%

74%

Percent of our instructors that taught: 1 d.school class this year

Taught 2

9%

86%

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3 or more

6%

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d.school Instructors

Racial Diversity The diversity of our teaching teams spoke directly to our effort to act on our commitment toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Instructors brought their experiences and ability to teach through the lenses of industry (21%), academia (44%), and design (36%).

The experiences that each instructor brought to their teaching teams directly tied into our goal of meeting words with actions in order to establish a sense of belonging for the students we serve and advance design conversations within classrooms.

Stanford Faculty

2% 15% 18%

20%

Asian or Asian American American Indian or Alaska Native Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander Hispanic or Latina

5%

67%

White (non–Hispanic)

56%

3% 1%

236

<1% 4%

Black or African American

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

1%

Multiracial

7%

Declined to State/ Other

d.school Students Grad + Undergrad For–Credit Classes

Stanford Students Grad + Undergrad

5%

4%

25%

25%

Black or African American

Asian

International or Nonresident

26%

26%

<1%

<1% <1%

8%

8%

30%

30%

6% <1%

6% 1%

American Indian or Alaska Native Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander Hispanic or Latino

White

In years past, Stanford has used different demographic IDs than the d.school. The University is using its first iteration of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access in a Learning Environment (IDEAL). The IDEAL dashboard which was launched in 2019.

The student, faculty, and staff dashboards were released in February 2021.

IDEAL represents an effort to share the composition of the Stanford community in much greater detail.

The d.school data hopes to mirror more closely the IDEAL data in quarters to come.

Two or More Unknown

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D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

Conclusion The year was filled with both pandemic anxiety and amazing adaptation by our teaching community and participating students. The pandemic was, and is, an undeniable force of concern and caution. However, that concern and caution did not pause our student’s desire to learn, our instructor’s desire to teach, or our community’s desire to be together–even if remotely.

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W

Autumn 2020– 2021 Classes

240

Design Thinking Studio: Designing With Radical Agency Design for Health: Navigating Frontiers in Virtual Reality Forget All the Jargon, Let's Innovate!

Transformative Design Needfinding in the Wild Designing With/By/For Joy Reimagining Campus Life for Today’s World Design Decoded: Human Interaction in a Digital vs. Analog World Designing Futures of Work Designing for Equitable Futures Designing Healthcare for Social Justice Conversations in the Wild Designing the Taboo Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact Designing Edu Ecosystems: Designing (ourselves) for Racial Equity Art as Activism Designing Black & Brown Spaces Design for More: Scaling Impact within Education

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

WS Winter

Spring

d.leadership Design for Extreme Affordability Designing Machine Learning: A multidisciplinary approach The Designer in Society Inventing the Future

Design for Extreme Affordability Launchpad The Designer in Society Design for Belonging: Autism Care Talk to Me! Redesigning Finance Reimagining Campus Life: Study Abroad Designing for Communal Safety Design for Healthy Behaviors Designing Fat Liberation Innovations in Inclusive Design Design for Edu Ecosystems: Playlist Pedagogy

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2020–2021 Instructors Hanan Ahmed Benjamin Alpers Michael Barry Dennis Boyle Jess Brown Bruce Cahan Mark Caine Emily Callaghan Michelle Carney Maureen Carroll Leticia Britos Cavagnaro Susie Chang Gloria Chua Marc Chun Stuart Coulson Richard Cox Braden Nancy Cuan Megan D’Alessio Logan Deans Drew Endy Glenn Fajardo Humera Fasihuddin Tessa Forshaw Omri Gal Nariman Gathers Jennifer Goldstein Ann Grimes

242

Grace Hawthorne David Janka Perry Klebahn Marlo Kohn Michelle Jia Kal Joffres Hannah Jones Marvell Lahens Becky Lai Mariana Lin Ise Lyfe Laura McBain Brandon Middleton Yusuke Miyashita Louie Montoya Mary Kate Morley Ryan Mallory Nezam De Nichols Lesley-Ann Noel Kursat Ozenc Pablo Paredes Frederik Pferdt Ryan Phillips Coleman Powell Ariel Raz Allan Reiss Sergio Rosas

D.S CHO OL YEAR BO O K 2020— 2021

Bernie Roth Chris Rudd Nethra Samarawickrema Lee Sanders Tina Seelig Londa Schiebinger Kathryn Segovia Sam Seidel Eric Shed Jules Sherman Dara Silverstein Meenu Singh Andrea Small Lisa Kay Solomon Sarah Stein Greenberg Shria Tomlinson Holly Truitt Nell Turner Jeremy Utley Emilie Wagner Adrian Octavius Walker Jacob Ward Angelica Willis Susie Wise Manasa Yeturu Seamus Yu Harte Yuri Zaitsev

Teaching + Learning 2020– 2021

Carissa Carter Academic Director

Megan Stariha Program Manager

Seamus Yu Harte Elective Program Lead

Ariam Mogos Emerging Tech and Education Lead

Renee Chao Degree Program Manager Milan Drake Community Lead Manasa Yeturu Academic Programs Special Projects Designer

Kelly Schmutte Academic Programs Project Manager Adrienne Baer Executive Editor for the Yearbook

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HI

W

LA