Summer Graduate Bootcamp - Stanford University



Proposal for Stanford Summer Graduate Workshop on Design Thinking

The Report of the Commission on Graduate Education proposed a number of innovative changes in graduate education at Stanford. One of these is the development of summer workshops that provide graduate students with interdisciplinary experiences that give them new exposure, understanding, and tools for leadership. The goals of this initiative are very closely aligned with what we have been developing in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (HPID) and we see a great opportunity to develop a pilot program this summer that can be a highly successful first example of what the initiative can achieve.

The HPID is a cross-disciplinary program centered around project-based learning. It is a place for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way. It is based on our experience that true innovation happens when strong multidisciplinary groups come together, build a collaborative culture, and explore the intersection of their different points of view.

We are in an iterative process of designing, teaching, and evaluating a series of courses, each of which brings together students and faculty from multiple disciplines to attack difficult problems. The courses have ranged in length from a 2-quarter sequence in ME and GSB, being taught this year , down to a 3-day design thinking workshop for students in the Bioenginering program. Topics have included FILL IN LIST HERE.

These courses build on a prominent and successful tradition of project-based learning and design thinking in the Design Division of ME. We have extended our ambitions by broadening the disciplinary scope and the range of problems and projects. The HPID is a place for project teams to tackle difficult, messy problems. The prototypes produced in the courses will include objects, software, experiences, performances, and organizations. They will be imperfect and ever-evolving solutions. In our experience, teams have greater impact when their ideas integrate human, business and technical factors. The HPID connects Stanford's activities in these fields and brings together diverse teams of experts who would otherwise never collaborate.

The diversity and breadth of the HPID community make it possible to establish bold new initiatives and projects that integrate a unique mix of disciplines. We foster a culture of collaboration that means we move quickly beyond obvious ideas. We help each other even if it's inconvenient. We ask for help when we are stuck. And, we defer judgment long enough to build on each other's ideas. We believe that having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.

Our hope is that the ideas and people emerging from the HPID will help set the standard for how teams innovate, how universities conduct interdisciplinary work, and how design is taught around the world.

Proposed workshop

We propose to develop a 2-week workshop experience for thirty graduate students from across the university. During these two weeks they will go through one or more iterations of the design process, from user observation and empathy to prototyping, evaluation, and implementation. They will work in teams of students whose differing areas of expertise each contribute to the solutions. They will learn as much from each other as they do from the official instructors. Our goal is to help them become people who can listen, ask good questions, help others succeed, develop empathy for people with different life experiences and opportunities, and have the skills, judgment, and courage to do things in new ways. We want them to become wiser, more complete human-beings and leaders in design thinking.

The detailed structure of the workshop will be developed during the first two months of the summer, based on our experience with current courses, especially the ME377 (Experiences in Design Thinking) course being taught this quarter. That course is structured around a series of hands-on immersive experiences focusing on: Teams - Radical collaboration; Discovery - Design process; Storytelling – Communication; Trailblazing – Entrepreneurship; and Delivery - How to plan and execute. It is similar in general structure to last summer’s short workshop, and in a more general way to the whole range of interdisciplinary design courses that preceded and foreshadowed the HPID. We have a great deal of experience with courses of this nature, and the main focus in the planning and development will be in mapping it to the specific duration and student population.

Faculty

A core team of Stanford faculty from Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Management Science and Engineering, and the Graduate School of Business already are working on HPID courses. This group is led by David Kelley, who has taught design at Stanford for over 25 years. We propose to have two faculty from different disciplines in charge of planning and managing the workshop, with others from the HPID faculty participating during the two weeks. The activity will be supported by the HPID fellows, who are.. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE THEM?

I’M WILLING TO BE ONE OF THE TWO PLANNERS IF SOMEONE FROM DESIGN IS INTERESTED IN BEING THE OTHER ONE. WHO?

SHOULD WE HAVE A PRELIMINARY LIST OF WHICH FACULTY WOULD BE AVAILABLE?

Budget (rough estimates at this point)

Subsistence:

the housing, feeding, and other living costs of bringing the students to campus for the workshop. CAN SOMEONE CHECK WITH THE CONFERENCE SERVICES TO GET A BALLPARK?

Preparation:

Faculty – two faculty each one month summer support with benefits $40,000

Fellow or Student Assistant – one for whole summer - $15,000

Teaching (in addition to the above):

Fellows/assistants - $10K

Faculty participation and outside speakers - $15K

Facilities:

The workshop would be held in our Birch Hall space, so there is no direct space cost.

Materials, event costs, etc. - $15K

Schedule

April–

Reflection/debrief on ME377, aimed at designing workshop,

Produce materials for student recruitment

May- Recruitment and selection of both students and faculty

June-July – Develop detailed course plan

August – Finalize logistics, prepare materials

September – Workshop from Sunday Sept. 10- Fri Sept. 22

Basis for innovation, Leadership

Multidisciplinary teaching team

Fellows

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