Chris Flink
Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school
Chris is one of the d.school’s founding faculty members, an active part of our teaching team, and an enthusiastic contributor to our cultural and strategic leadership.
Because his parents ran a small graphic design and branding firm in New York City, Chris grew up amidst foam boards, Exacto knives, obsessive typography, and traditional design disciplines. However, his various experiences at Stanford have nurtured an ever-expanding view of what it can mean to be a designer. Degrees from Stanford’s Engineering/Product Design program and from its Graduate School of Business, as well as years of collaborative teaching, have helped him develop a broad, integrative approach to creative opportunities that blends design, engineering and business perspectives.
He has taught courses such as “Advanced Product Design” and “Human Values in Design” since 1999. In 2011, he co-taught the popular “Brands, Experience, & Social Technology” (BEST) course, followed by “Social Brands” in 2012 — both in collaboration with Professor Jennifer Aaker. He’s actively involved with Executive Education programs such as “Customer Focused Innovation” (CFI) and “Bootcamp”, and has also guest lectured on the strategic application of design thinking at Wharton and Columbia Business Schools.
Chris is a partner at IDEO where, over more than 15 inspired years, he has played a variety of roles, from heading the firm’s Consumer Experience Design practice to co-founding its New York office. His teaching leverages nearly twenty years of experience helping companies of all kinds innovate and grow.
Prior to IDEO, Chris designed and patented products as an independent inventor and sought activities for which excessive creativity or physical height offered some kind of notable advantage. A proud father, Chris devotes most of his free time to conspiring with his daughters. Their latest scheme aims to distribute their art via a national network of repurposed cigarette vending machines.
