I’ve
spent much of the summer working with a great team to design a new course
called Clicks-n-Bricks:
Creating Mass Market Experiences, the
lead-off in a series of project-based classes taught by Stanford’s Hasso Platner Institute
of Design (“The d.school”)this year. Building on what we learned from last
year’s class on Creating
Infectious Action, this fall class will focus on designing on-line and
off-line experiences for customers and employees, as students will work with
real executives, industry experts, and companies to find solutions to real
problems.
like the teams that we ask students to work in, our team is interdisciplinary too.
The core team is Michael
Dearing, Perry
Klebahn, Liz
Gerber, and me. All played key roles in Creating Infectious Action, with
Liz as a core member of the teaching team, and Michael and Perry serving as
coaches. Michael has a Harvard MBA and has had a varied and intriguing career in
industry, working at Disney and, most recently, about six years in a senior
marketing role at eBay. And one of the
coolest – and I bet hardest – things he did was serving as Director of Filene’s
Basement in downtown Boston
for three years. Perry, a member of the core team that runs the d.school and graduate
of the Stanford product design program, invented and spread the popularity of
the modern snowshoe. After he sold Atlas, his snowshoe company, he ran sales
and marketing at Patagonia for several years and now serves on their board. Liz Gerber is also a graduate of the Stanford
Product Design Program, and has held jobs including middle school teacher, toy
designer, and helped start a software firm during the dotcom boom. Liz is now working on her doctorate in
Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and has done extensive ethnographic
research on the design process, which she is studying and interpreting with
social psychological theory. Liz also
has a great deal of experience teaching product design classes and
improvisation.
In
addition to the core teaching team, we will pull in experts to help students at
key junctures in the class, including former senior HP executive and sustainability
expert Debra Dunn,
Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler
who – among other amazing things – co-leads the Spread Firefox project,
Julian Gorodsky, our “d.shrink” who will teach students group skills and
help them work through group dynamics issues, and my collaborator Diego
Rodriguez, who we hope to get involved in teaching and coaching students
about the design process.
As you can see, putting on one of these
d.school classes is a lot like putting on a high school musical, there are lot
of exits and entrances to manage.
The
class will focus on two major projects to get student
teams out into the real world to wrestle with real problems. The first project is on “improving the theme
park experience.” The teams will visit local theme parks, identify customer
experience problems, and brainstorm and then design solutions. The second
project, the capstone, will entail using the design process to work with
Wal-Mart on its sustainability initiative (see the cover story of Fortune this week) to spread knowledge,
network connections, and enthusiasm among Wal-Mart employees about this
initiative. Wal-Mart executives and managers will work with students to explain
the company’s commitment to sustainability, guide students efforts to engage
Wal-Mart employees more fully and effectively in this effort, and (along with
other experts), give feedback to students about their work.
I
will keep you posted about developments as the class unfolds. If you are a
Stanford Masters student (we love diversity, so the class is open to all
majors), please click on this
d.school page and use the link to get on the list for the application
process.
It
should be a fun and wild ride.
Leave a Reply