Interconnections in Design  Activity: The Layers of Design Learning Goal: To help learners of any age see the web of connections embedded in our lives. Everything is designed, from the chair you’re sitting on to the app you use for exercise class to the policy for taking time off from your workplace. Not everything was designed well or even intentionally, but somewhere, someone(s) made a decision about everything people have put into the world. Their reasons for doing so—the gaps they aimed to fill—varied, but each item ends up as part of an interconnected system.  We’re now in an er ..read more

Interconnections in Design  Activity: The Layers of Design Learning Goal: To help learners of any age see the web of connections embedded in our lives. Everything is designed, from the chair you’re sitting on to the app you use for exercise class to the policy for taking time off from your workplace. Not everything was designed well or even intentionally, but somewhere, someone(s) made a decision about everything people have put into the world. Their reasons for doing so—the gaps they aimed to fill—varied, but each item ends up as part of an interconnected system.  We’re now in an er ..read more

This year brought a new level of electrifying charge at the d.school. I almost mean that literally – walking through our building you can feel a tangible, creative humming like there might be a live wire close by. Our new degree programs continued to take shape, and students really took notice. We built new tools for learning, and built out ideas that have been steadily simmering and are now ready to publish. We created space for imagination, and spaces for connection. The vitality of the place and the people who make it real every day is practically sparking off these pages! I hope exploring ..read more

Knowing Your Values Activity: Your Love Is Like a Red Red Rose Learning Goal: To help learners uncover their values. To help them develop self-awareness and independent thinking, build creative confidence, enhance motivation, and strengthen their moral compass. Values are simply what you value in your life. They help you determine what is important to you in both the long term and the short. These underlying beliefs influence your behavior and motivate your actions—the ones you take and the ones you don’t take. Values motivate you. They push you. Let them. Get good at letting them push you. Va ..read more

Creating Experience Prototypes Activity: The No-Build Hack Learning Goals: To help learners use improvisation to help them understand an idea, concept, or motivation. To help them deepen curiosity, let go of perfection, and explore for the sake of learning. How do you close the gap between I wonder and I know? You make a prototype. A prototype is a tool that gives you a chance to investigate your ideas and explore what could, should, or would come next, whether you are designing a new product, working out a new routine, or rearranging your furniture. Experience prototypes are just one of a who ..read more

Desktop Data! Experience the power of maps using items from your backpack. Activity: Desktop Data Shuffle Learning Goal: To help learners understand how to organize information and look at data through multiple lenses. To help them develop critical thinking, observation, sensemaking, and creative problem-solving skills. Data surrounds us, and building basic data visualization skills is a critical competency for every student. By mapping data with a range of frameworks, we can discover hidden relationships, articulate ideas, and spot patterns and opportunities. Maps are important tools for tell ..read more

Understanding Your Attitude toward Ambiguity Activity: What Are Your Attitudes toward Ambiguity? Learning Goal: To help learners understand their personal reaction when faced with ambiguous challenges. To help them develop self-awareness, creative confidence, and problem-solving skills. Some things about our future are uncertain (Will the tornado season be bad?), and many more things are unknown (How will humans respond to the climate crisis?). Then there are ambiguous things. These are things that are unformed and emergent—they could be created or interpreted in any number of ways. While ambi ..read more

How To Redirect Your Thoughts to Reveal New Possibilities Activity: Do a Duchamp Learning Goal: To help learners develop creative thinking skills. To help them develop divergent thinking, confidence in their creative abilities, a bias to action, and brainstorming skills. Possibility is about the ability to see something in your imagination or in your heart and materialize it in real life. Unbeknownst to us, our imagination is limited by what we already know. Your brain is a repository of all your prior experience — it’s mapped with all your cumulative emotional, cognitive, and motor experience ..read more

Climb the Ladder of Meaning Activity: The Ladder of Meaning Learning Goal: To help learners develop their ability to move from concrete to abstract. When you get stuck trying to solve a problem, you are most likely trying to solve the wrong problem. By moving between the concrete and the abstract, you can discover which problems are a better fit for where you are and what you want to achieve–otherwise you may discover you were moving down a narrow path that wouldn’t take you where you want to go. This activity is an invitation to test the hypothesis that exploring multiple levels of abstractio ..read more

Know Your Values Activity: Write an Internal Op-Ed Learning Goal: To help learners understand their values so they can stand up for what they believe in. To help them develop self-awareness, courage in the face of fear or uncertainty, and the agency to spark change. Fear is the force that deters acts of courage. Yet, there is an opposing force that keeps pushing you forward: Your values. What matters to you might be external—like a vision that inspires you or a cause that is meaningful to you, aka your purpose. Or it might be internal—a desire to stay true to your convictions, or simply do the ..read more