Innovators, not innovations

The d.school is a hub for innovators at Stanford. Students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, law, the humanities, sciences, and education find their way here to take on the world’s messy problems together. Human values are at the heart of our collaborative approach. We focus on creating spectacularly transformative learning experiences. Along the way, our students develop a process for producing creative solutions to even the most complex challenges they tackle. This is the core of what we do.

In a time when there is hunger for innovation everywhere, we think our primary responsibility is to help prepare a generation of students to rise with the challenges of our times. We define what it means to be a d.school student broadly, and we support “students” of design thinking who range from kindergarteners to senior executives. Our deliberate mash-up of industry, academia and the big world beyond campus is a key to our continuing evolution.

Our way of working

We welcome our students with a methodology for innovation that combines creative and analytical approaches, and requires collaboration across disciplines. This process—which has been called design thinking—draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world. Our students learn this process together, and then personalize it, internalize it, and apply it to their own challenges.

At the d.school, we learn by doing. We don’t just ask our students to solve a problem, we ask them to define what the problem is. Students start in the field, where they develop empathy for people they design for, uncovering real human needs they want to address. They then iterate to develop an unexpected range of possible solutions, and create rough prototypes to take back out into the field and test with real people. Our bias is toward action, followed by reflection on personal discoveries about process. Experience is measured by iteration: students run through as many cycles as they possibly can on any project. Each cycle brings stronger insights and more unexpected solutions.

Real-world projects

Students want to put their efforts into problems that matter. Real-world problems, constraints and commitments accelerate learning more than hypothetical classroom exercises.

At any one moment, there are hundreds of projects underway at the d.school involving partners, stakeholders, users, and experts. Some are quick introductions that last just an hour or two, others are 10-week class projects, and some span years as student teams stick with a project after their class is over.

We partner with corporate, non-profit and government-sector organizations to develop these projects. It’s a learning loop: our students get a better understanding of what it means to use design thinking outside the classroom, and our partners deepen their own innovation methodology.

A few of the organizations that have partnered with us include:

Visa
Teach For America
JetBlue
White Mountain Apache Tribe
Gates Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
PepsiCo
Palo Alto Medical Foundation
The Girl Scouts
Procter&Gamble
General Electric
NewSchools Venture Fund
The City of Mountain View and Palo Alto
Project[RED]
Electronic Arts
Stanford Trauma Center
Motorola
Google
WNYC public radio

Radical Collaboration

Students come to the d.school with an intense curiosity, a deep affinity for other people, and the desire to gain an understanding beyond their own experience. They come from every school on campus, and beyond. Instead of working on different pieces of the same project, they navigate each step in the innovation process together, leveraging their differences as a kind of creative engine. The design thinking process becomes a glue that holds teams together, allowing students to unleash intuitive leaps, lateral thinking, and new ways of looking at old problems.

Our teaching teams, too, combine contrasting view points and problem-solving approaches. All of our classes are team taught by a robust mix of faculty and industry leaders, combining disciplines like computer science with political science, and CEOs with elementary school policy-makers. We believe these dynamic and sometimes contrasting points of view encourage students to see the open-ended nature of innovation and to trust themselves to find their own way forward.

Everyone at the d.school loops through cycles of learning, teaching and doing. Our culture of collaboration means we move quickly beyond obvious ideas. We help each other even if it’s inconvenient. We ask for inspiration when stuck. We play. And we defer judgment long enough to build on each other’s ideas.