Last year, Diego Rodriguez and I led a new Stanford d.school class called Creating Infectious Action. We recruited 26 master’s students from around Stanford — mostly engineers, product designers, and MBA’s, but doctoral student in philosophy too — and worked with companies and industry experts to spread Firefox. promote hip-hop performers, and too spread financially prudent behavior among young adults. This year, I am playing a much smaller role, and Diego and two of our team coaches from last (who are both now Associate Consulting Professors), Debra Dunn and Michael Dearing have taken charge of a descendant of this class called Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB). They have also recruited Kris Woyzbun (a product design student and veteran of at least 4 design school classes) to be the course assistant and Perry Klebahn (now CEO of Timbuk2, and a master product designer and team leader) to be a team coach.
If you are are a Stanford master’s student in any field, I encourage you to sign-up for this class, it is a lot of work, but you will learn a huge amount, and the teaching team has diverse skills and deep experience, and are great people. If you want to read a great testimonial, see Min Liu’s post on why the d.school works. You can also see video from Alwayson where Diego and I talk about last year’s CIA class.
Here is the description for this year’s class:
Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB): application due March 9
This small and intense project-based class is built around two team
efforts to “spread” positive behavior, which will be bolstered by
exposure to, and coaching from, industry experts and academics. The
first project will be an initiative done with Mozilla, the second a
project focused on building the user base of a social venture called
Global Giving that runs an
online marketplace connecting donors with
social entrepreneurs globally. A limited number of summer internships
with Global Giving will be available to CIA-KGB students who wish to
continue creating infectious action in that domain.The teaching team behind CIA-KGB brings a wealth of academic and
real-world experience to the course. The instructors are Michael
Dearing, Debra Dunn, Diego Rodriguez, and Bob Sutton (who will be a
guest instructor). The course assistant is Kris Woyzbun, who was part
of the inaugural version of CIA last year. Project teams will also
benefit from the coaching of Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn.Learning how to become a better design thinker will be a major focus
of this course. Students will apply the “build to think” philosophy of
the d.school and create prototypes of everything from viral marketing
campaigns to entire businesses. While there will substantial helpings
of theory delivered throughout the quarter, this is a course for people
who want to get their hands dirty, to get out in the world and do
things.
P.S. See Diego’s post on the CIA-KGB class for more information and context — and to catch his excitement about the class.
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