Name: Brainstorm Design 2023: Four Foundations For An Unknowable Future
Uploaded: 2023-12-06
Duration: 17 min 3 s
Description: Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director, Stanford d.school

Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director, Stanford d.school

Brainstorm Design 2023: Four Foundations For An Unknowable Future

Conferences

Good morning. I'm Claire Zollman, senior editor at Fortune Sarah Stein Greenberg is the executive director of the Stanford D School where she leads a community of designers, faculty and other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world. Sarah is also author of creative Acts for Curious People How to Think, create and lead in unconventional ways. The anchor title in Stanford Design Library by now, you likely will have noticed titles from the design library on display around the room. Please take them uh take one. They are there for you. Uh Each year, nearly 1000 D school students attend classes, workshops and programs to learn how the thinking and skills behind design can enrich their own work and unleash their creative potential. Please help me in welcoming Sarah Stein Greenberg. Good morning. It is really a pleasure to be here with all of you. I want to start with a spark and this spark comes from the past and it also comes from the future and to catalyze this spark. I need your help. I need you to flex your imagination just a little bit. So let me ask you to imagine that today is your very first day of college. You walk into the classroom, you sit down at a table and your professor hands you a memo that he says was written by someone who is currently 37 light years away on a very distant planet that is orbiting the star Arcturus, which in real life is the fourth brightest star in earth's night sky in the memo. You start to read about an alien species that has a totally different set of needs. And biology breathes a different set of gasses in their atmosphere, has a different relationship with gravity. The way it works on their planet is not the way it works on earth has their own culture, their own perspective, their own society. As you look more closely at this memo, you start to notice some other details. You notice that the company that sent this memo to you is the Massachusetts Intergalactic traders, which is curious to you because currently you are a student at MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts. You notice it's been sent from the office of the chief designer who is really interested in figuring out how do we stimulate intergalactic trade with this alien species through the design of new products and services that might appeal to them. And then you notice a very critical detail which is that this memo is dated almost 1000 years in the future. Now, if you were actually a student at MIT in the early 19 fifties, you might have had this actual experience, you would have been able to see pages and pages, almost 100 and 50 pages of this case study that was created by a remarkable innovative educator named John Arnold. John Arnold created what he called the Arcturus four case study as a way to really radically experiment with something that he was finding challenging. He had observed in his students, his engineering students, a remarkable technical capacity, but he also observed that they were missing something that he thought was equally important in the design of new products and services. And that was the ability to approach a problem in a creative way. So he designed arc tourists to try to figure out how do we set those conditions for creativity to emerge. So for one example, he had the students design a timepiece some way of telling time, a watch or a clock or something else that would be of value to these aliens. But the students realized in reading the case study, they didn't know anything about the system of numbering or the way that these aliens felt about time. And so they had to make some educated guesses, they had to make some creative leaps and actually use their imaginations. Imagination was actually a requirement to be successful in this assignment. And that's really how Arnold was trying to experiment with how to help his students break out of a very binary. Yes. No kind of limited way of thinking. Now people found out about this because it was very unusual and this idea of using science fiction as the backdrop to help students flex their creative abilities and design new things um really gained notice. So these are some actual headlines from widely read publications in the US like Life Magazine and Popular Science. Uh the course where students lose earthly shackles and scientific pedagogy, unblock creativity. And of course, my absolute favorite spacemen makes college men think, which gives you a little feel for who was in the classroom at MIT at that time and also who was not in the classroom. And this experiment really garnered an unusual degree of public interest uh for something that was happening in a classroom. So Arnold a few years later left MIT and he came to Stanford. And by the early 19 sixties, these kinds of ideas and practices and approaches these, these early seeds became later on what we now know as Human Center design and design thinking in the early sixties, those were just beginning to take root. And at Stanford, we look back on this history with particular interest because it helps us understand a couple of big ideas. So the first is Arnold's thinking about what design was most useful for. So, in a traditional analytical engineering education, particularly at that time, students might be trying to figure out the answers to relatively clear yes or no questions like will this bridge that we've designed hold the weight that it is required to do. So. That might be a big challenge. It might be complicated to figure that out and require a lot of technical skill, but it is a yes, no answer. Whereas design problems he posited were really ones in which there could be many workable solutions and which was the best solution wasn't entirely obvious. Right. Design adds the most value where human behavior or human culture is important or the conditions in the context are really emerging or they're changing very rapidly, which is very familiar in the world that we live in today. And Arnold developed this like very playful but also very purposeful approach because of this important skill and ability that he felt that his students were missing this creative ability and that was reflected in the time that he was working. And it makes us ask the question, what is it that our students are missing today? What's important for them to understand how to do that? We may not even yet know how to teach as educators. So now Arnold's version of design feels very familiar to most of us in this room, right? It was characterized by the technical ability to make things real often in a variety of mediums as well as that spark of imagination that actually produces new ideas. And as you heard, just in that last conversation, design is in a very important moment of evolution. Once again, design is in an important moment of evolution. And in this period, we are really reimagining what our curriculum needs to look like to meet the moment. So we are imagining some additional pillars of design to add to these two. The first is the reality that as new mediums have joined, the ones that would have been present in Arnold's Day. So steel and wood and lots of physical mediums and has migrated to also include lots of digital environments, service, design experience, design, and of course new technologies like A I and even synthetic biology, the standard of care that we have to have as designers has greatly increased. We need to be training our students and equipping them to take responsibility for the long term outcomes of their work to be thinking about the impact on the planet, all people and even the data that we produce. And I would love to stand here and tell you that I can predict exactly what our students will need in 10 or 20 or 30 years. But given the rate of technological change, we can't predict that. And so we have a very strong responsibility to actually equip them to be what we call adaptive learners, right? Actually able to learn in situ in on the job for the rest of their lives and their careers and for design to add lasting value to the multiple stakeholders in the complex environments and challenges that we take on today, we think all four of these pillars need to be present in design education. Now, we don't know exactly what that needs to look like, but we have some ideas and we're seeing some glimmers or even if you will sparks. So I want to share one such spark, which is um the work of two of our recent graduates, Kelly Redman and Gabriella Dweck and Kelly and Gabby met in the Design masters program at Stanford. And they really came together over a shared desire to have significant impact in the world using design. And this passion really led them to a deep investigation of the palm oil industry. Now, many of you may know palm oil production has a lot of particularly environmental as well as social costs. It is leading to a tremendous amount of deforestation and has a lot of consequences on the climate because of that deforestation as well. But simultaneously, there is enormous global demand for palm oil. It is in soap, it is in toothpaste, it is in many kinds of food products. It is really everywhere and that picture is not going to change quickly. So this is a classic design challenge, right? You can imagine many workable solutions. You could think maybe Kelly and Gabby are gonna design a campaign to help discourage people from using products that have palm oil. You could think maybe they will start a product design firm that specializes in cosmetics that don't use palm oil. But the more that they investigated this industry through a really systemic and holistic lens, what they realized is that to have significant impact at scale, they needed to go higher in the value chain. So they realize that if produced differently, if they actually change the way that palm oil is produced, it could be the most environmentally friendly vegetable oil because it actually has a very, very high yield per acre. So together, they have co-founded a company called Olio Sustainable Palm Oil Solutions. They are determined to make a climate impact. They are determined to make an environmental justice impact and the way that they are approaching, that is actually to create a process that yields a synthetic alternative to palm oil that is far more sustainable than the current version. They have filed a provisional patent for the technology that they have designed, which involves taking the massive amount of waste that is lying on the ground as a result of the current palm oil production model, which also has a bad climate impact because as it decomposes it, it releases more carbon into the air. They take that waste material that by-product that no one else is using and feed it into a digester that involves both microwave and fermentation technology. And then they wind up with this much more sustainable palm oil substitute. So they're piloting that in several areas right now and very exciting. Equally important is that while they're designing that core technology, they're also designing the economic model that would allow small holders to be stakeholders in this process, to actually decentralize this means of production and to benefit economically. And that is really critically important they think to their differentiation strategy and to actually ensuring that people are going to adopt this solution versus other solutions that are also trying to work in this space. And you can see Gabby and Kelly's work across this very wide range of types of design, right? As we've just heard, design has dramatically expanded its remit, right? We work on services, we work on systems. We even think about how do we design the implications, the long term consequences of our work. And given this expanded purview, it makes those two additional pillars even more important, right? How can you design in a system if you're not able to adapt quickly, how can you think critically about the implications and even mitigating the potential consequences of your work if that's necessary without that higher standard of care baked into your design philosophy, all four are really essential now we live in a time where change is so rapid that we are all learning and adapting perhaps more quickly than we ever thought we could. And what that means is that the things that we are teaching our students now and equipping young people with, it's actually not just the responsibility to figure that out of educators, it's truly all of our responsibility. We are in the midst of what the World Economic Forum has called a reskilling emergency. And one of the things that is quite interesting in the chart um that you see on the slide, which was produced by a team at Deloitte um a few years ago is that they draw a very important distinction between technical skills, which is that expertise, that is context dependent, that allows you to produce good work outcomes in that context versus enduring human capabilities. Things like curiosity and empathy that are not context specific and therefore will not become obsolete as technology changes. And what you'll notice on this chart is design is all over it, right? These are the core capacities that we endeavor to nurture in all of our students. And it also reminds us of John Arnold's work to try to create that next type of education that was much more focused on that human capacity for creativity, not just the technical skill to build things. So we started with a spark and I want to conclude by asking you for some help in crafting a vision. So we do live in this amazing moment where things that once you might have thought of as science fiction, maybe space travel, maybe personalized medicine, maybe quantum computing, maybe sustainable palm oil, those might have been science fiction, but it feels like they might be right around the corner right now. And I want you to think about a young person who's in your life now and think about one of their descendants, maybe it's their, their child's child, or maybe it's your grandchild's grandchild. And I want you to think about their first day of school and imagine their walking into the classroom. What are those capabilities that you think will be important for them to have nurtured and have pulled out of them and to cultivate in those classrooms? What are the challenges that you want to make sure that they are equipped to face in their time? That is a collective project that I think we are all in together and I think design has a pretty important role to play in that. Thank you.