shuqiao song
carloline’s tour of d.school
[atrium]
welcome to the hasso plattner institute of design. informally known as d.school which is a bit of a
misnomer, d.school doesn’t actually give students degrees. what we are is a place where
students from all over campus can get together, take classes, work on projects and it’s really
about giving students a process that they can use to innovate. but also to work together.
this is a new buildling, d.school has only been here since last spring. d.school started in a trailer
on the edge of campus five years ago. literally a trailer. moved four times between then and here.
and this is kind of what the university is considering their permanent home but they’re always
growing so they’ll see how that goes.
d.school mostly on this side of the building. and on the other side is a closely related thing which
is an department that does grant degrees in design and that’s the Product Design program in the
Mechanical Engineering department.
have around 1000 students, primariiy grad students, but some undergraduates too. they are
increasingly serving more undergrads. hope to do so more in the future. they also run executive
education programs, executives come in from proctor and gamble, and GE, and smaller
companies, and startups, .
k12 education lab. hundreds of teachers of principals and administrators and school children.
there’s a charter school in east palo alto that has been transformed by design thinking.
east palo alto phoenix academy. there’s a teacher there who did a weekend workshop here.
literally used design thinking to redesign how she was teaching a remedial reading class (a class
for students who are not so good at reading and are perhaps not at the skill level they should be).
like kids who were at the 7th grade who were reading at a kindergarten level. introduced design
thinking and the empathy piece was their reading, but then she let them jump off into designing.
totally non traditional way to teach remedial reading. but they became so engaged in the text and
really amazing.
atrium open to our students at the d.school 24/7. we actually do use it 24/7.in the back is the area
called the grove, has shared screens and everybody can plug into. hasn’t specified use, but
watlk in a lot of people using it.
d.school intentionally has this rough “it’s your canvas” kind of feel. things like raw concrete floor.
garage door that we can open.
meant to be owned by anybody who comes in. within certain limits.
no staff to help reset the space, everybody including david Kelley. everyone is responsible for the
community.
one of the things that happened when they were moving around and designing their temporary
spaces is that they realized that prototyping as part of our design process how we teach, us as a
community, and to our space, keep it changing, respond to what people need from it.
concept car, experimental space. come back in and you’ll see a very different space.
learned a lot and implemented in other places. and putting resources in to constantly change.
full time work area, folks that run d.school
spaces open nothing designated. work anywhere that you need to kind of place and have break
out rooms whe you need to have meetings or when you need to have calls.
recently celebrated Chinese new year in the room at the back. and lanterns were so nice that
they left the up.
white room
we’re obsessed with white boards. we love them because it helps get the ideas that are in your
brain out there and you can think big.
room that we experimented with the idea of in the last building and their idea is white boards are
really integral to what we do here. this idea of wouldn’t it be cool If we just had a room of all white
boards everywhere. whiteboard paint from floor to ceiling and the idea was “oh this is really
austere” no one is going to use it, so cold and uninviting but it was one of the most requested and
most popular rooms! so this is the implementation of that idea in the new building. so hungry for
the white room.
this is the booth noir.
close knit teams. teams that are really interdisciplinary. totally different fields, totally different
problem solving approaches and they are asked to really step through and work here and really
together . cool little space where if you are meeting with folks in here, you change your posture,
cross legged, and relaxing space a nice space to get cozy with your team.
circle thingies. pure fun. also nice way to lightly divide the space.
this room is the prototyping room. mini PRL. hardcore machine shop. lathe…
this is where students really roughtly lightly prototype physical things.
digital prototyping room. emphasis was definitely on physical prototypes, but more and more
students tend to gravitate towards digital prototyping.
and also more of experience prototyping. what they are come up with for an innovation is a
physical object ….
a kskit,
soul of d.school anybody can walk over and make whatever they want to make whatever they
need to to express their idea to their team and others
pretty fundamental to design thinkers,who they are and their process.
mobile prototyping supplies. go all over the place especially when folks are getting introduced to
the process. something magic about these items, but it’s just the freedom.
studio 1
one of two main teaching spaces. teaching spaces are made to be utterly reconfirgurable. has
some T shaped white boards. something they discovered teams that had a space in the corner,
loved it. teams that had a flat space on the wall, they left and
t walls create these little nooks for teams.
bay studiocan work on whatever they need to be working on. open space for them. some clases
will spill out into here.
environments collaborative
they designed the buidlling. putting out materials about underlying design and space for them to
work.
guru room.
george, sarah, etc khang out here
k12 lab
social e lab
led by erik teams that continue of out of extreme affordability. liberation technologies.
continue work.
continue to be supporting ive thir diesgn thinking working.
media and publications initiatives.
short format prorams.
they run exec ed programs. zillions of requests like I want to start a d.school. I want to use design
thinking to transform my company.
and these guys work on that.
business and design initiative (new emergent initiative)
hunger for work at the intersection of business and design. a lot of students and faculty that are
interested in that. a lot of business school students come and take classes here.
this list is from launchpad which is a 10 week class where teams take one of their ideas and work
on it with help from a teaching team and then at the end of the ten weeks they launch their project
in ther eal world. this was a ridiculous success. I don’t know if any of the names are familiar with
you.
but pulse story.
10 weeks in steve jobs was talking about pulse.
teaching team suite, place for teams and not people who are full time in the building and coming
in from different departments. prep or debrief for classes.
d.next. what is the future of the d. school look like.
looking at the website, big picture section. accomplished everything in this our goals section, what
do we do next??? over 5 years grown over everynoe’s wildest expectsations
using design thinking process on themselves.
studio 2
track system idea that you want to feel like they can own the space to what they need. but don’t
want them to feel like its’puzzling ly open ended or when constantly totally turne the space, and
frustrating felt like they didn’t belong to the community, think hard to hlet people own the space
and have some constancy.
can and do divide up this room. don’t move beyond that.
z racks. original ones fwere made by themselves out of showerboard and coat racks.
students desperately hungry for whiteboard space.
be visuals. share your ideas with each other. get thigns out onto the board out of your head. so
difficult to get feedback and interaction with something that’s in your head. you have to get it out.
that’s why we’re so desperate for white board space because we need to get all the infinite
amounts of stuff in here out here. and once it’s there other peple can iterate aon it.
and then build it into something real. feel is pretty magic to students who come here.
I can literally only draw a stick figure.
had to come up with solution; how do you allow teams to have ongoing work and maybe feel like
they have some space here. and that it’s persistent nad it’s dedicated to them. so these are kind
of one solution to that problem. these are whiteboards teams are assigned to and can take it over
to space and then can store it over time. and thes towers are meant to be towers for student work.
everything is a charming mess. and it’s just work and it can be inspiring to other people.
usually wrap up a tour. and let them feel like they do some activity so they don’t just feel like they
just saw it.