Erik Olesund
Teaching Fellow 2014-2015
Erik is too loud, talks too much, and is too funny. And at the d.school, we wouldn’t want him any other way.
In primary school in Sweden, Erik’s teachers described him by those three characteristics and requested that he repress his personality for the sake of the learning process. Fifteen years later, Erik arrived at Stanford for his Master’s degree in Management Science & Engineering, but spent most of his time magnetically drawn to the d.school – a place that allowed him to freely be himself. At Stanford, Erik also discovered the theatrical art of improv and joined the campus improv troupe, the SImps, which is now his favorite way to decompress.
Erik was a designer early on. He grew up in Jönköping, Sweden and when he was 16 he taught himself graphic and website design and started a web design firm with his best friend. The firm lived on over Erik’s two gap years after high school and through his three years of college at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, where he studied Industrial Engineering and Management. Regardless, Erik steered away from studying design and tapered his web design work because he didn’t feel that design was meaningful enough for what he wanted to do in life.
What Erik didn’t realize was that the way he was doing design was not creating the meaning he craved. Arriving at the d.school he finally understood that everything around him — products, services, organizations, systems — was designed. Or if it wasn’t, then it should be! He came to realize that any design challenge rooted in real human needs is meaningful and worthy to pursue.
In the two years of Erik’s MS&E program at Stanford he managed to take six d.school classes and was later on a teaching assistant for five of them. On top of that he helped teach the beginners class in improvisation in the Theatre Department. This year as a Teaching Fellow, Erik is looking forward to activating the creative potential in each of his students, as well as tinkering with what, how, and why we teach what we teach. In future years, he hopes to return to Sweden to change its schools for the better and run a socially-minded design consultancy. If that doesn’t work out, he will just start a combined bakery and hostel with his mom and dad.
Erik loves people (he once lived in a dorm where he shared a kitchen with 18 people), radio (his dream job is being Ira Glass on “This American Life”), and his two younger brothers (who he describes as progressively more intelligent, athletic and attractive versions of himself). Come meet him at the d.school to talk about ecological economics or why you should be paying more for your coffee. Better, yet, cheer him on at a SImps show. Remember – the louder, chattier, funnier – the better.
