Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director, Stanford d.school
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00:00 Good morning, I'm Claire Zillman, senior editor at Fortune.
00:04 Sarah Stein Greenberg is the executive director of the Stanford D School,
00:08 where she leads a community of designers, faculty, and
00:11 other innovative thinkers who help people unlock their creative abilities and
00:16 apply them to the world.
00:17 Sarah is also author of Creative Acts for Curious People, how to think, create, and
00:23 lead in unconventional ways, the anchor title in Stanford's design library.
00:28 By now, you likely will have noticed titles from the design library on display
00:32 around the room.
00:34 Please take them, take one, they are there for you.
00:37 Each year, nearly 1,000 D School students attend classes, workshops, and
00:42 programs to learn how the thinking and
00:44 skills behind design can enrich their own work and unleash their creative potential.
00:49 Please help me in welcoming Sarah Stein Greenberg.
00:52 [MUSIC]
01:02 >> Good morning, it is really a pleasure to be here with all of you.
01:15 I wanna start with a spark.
01:18 And this spark comes from the past, and it also comes from the future.
01:25 And to catalyze this spark, I need your help.
01:28 I need you to flex your imagination just a little bit.
01:31 So let me ask you to imagine that today is your very first day of college.
01:38 You walk into the classroom, you sit down at a table, and
01:43 the professor hands you a memo that he says was written by someone who
01:49 is currently 37 light years away on a very distant planet that is orbiting
01:54 the star Arcturus, which in real life is the fourth brightest star in Earth's night sky.
02:00 In the memo, you start to read about an alien species
02:08 that has a totally different set of needs and biology.
02:13 Breeds a different set of gases in their atmosphere,
02:17 has a different relationship with gravity.
02:19 The way it works on their planet is not the way it works on Earth.
02:22 Has their own culture, their own perspectives, their own society.
02:25 As you look more closely at this memo, you start to notice some other details.
02:33 You notice that the company that sent this memo to you
02:38 is the Massachusetts Intergalactic Traders, which is curious to you
02:42 because currently you are a student at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
02:46 You notice it's been sent from the office of the chief designer,
02:52 who is really interested in figuring out how do we stimulate intergalactic trade
02:57 with this alien species through the design of new products and
03:01 services that might appeal to them.
03:04 And then you notice a very critical detail,
03:08 which is that this memo is dated almost 1,000 years in the future.
03:11 Now, if you were actually a student at MIT in the early 1950s,
03:18 you might have had this actual experience.
03:21 You would have been able to see pages and pages, almost 150 pages,
03:27 of this case study that was created by a remarkable,
03:31 innovative educator named John Arnold.
03:34 John Arnold created what he called the Arcturus 4 case study as a way to
03:41 really radically experiment with something that he was finding challenging.
03:45 He had observed in his students,
03:47 his engineering students, a remarkable technical capacity.
03:52 But he also observed that they were missing something that he thought was
03:55 equally important in the design of new products and services.
03:59 And that was the ability to approach a problem in a creative way.
04:03 So he designed Arcturus to try to figure out how do we set those conditions for
04:08 creativity to emerge?
04:10 So for one example, he had the students design a timepiece,
04:14 some way of telling time, a watch or a clock or
04:17 something else, that would be of value to these aliens.
04:20 But the students realized in reading the case study,
04:23 they didn't know anything about the system of numbering or
04:26 the way that these aliens felt about time.
04:30 And so they had to make some educated guesses.
04:32 They had to make some creative leaps and actually use their imaginations.
04:36 Imagination was actually a requirement to be successful in this assignment.
04:41 And that's really how Arnold was trying to experiment with how to help his
04:45 students break out of a very binary, yes, no, kind of limited way of thinking.
04:53 Now people found out about this because it was very unusual.
04:57 And this idea of using science fiction as the backdrop to help students
05:02 flex their creative abilities and design new things really gained notice.
05:07 So these are some actual headlines from widely read publications in the US,
05:11 like Life Magazine and Popular Science.
05:15 The course where students lose earthly shackles and
05:19 scientific pedagogy unblock creativity.
05:22 And of course, my absolute favorite, Spacemen make college men think,
05:26 which gives you a little feel for who was in the classroom at MIT at that time and
05:30 also who was not in the classroom.
05:31 And this experiment really garnered an unusual degree of public interest for
05:39 something that was happening in a classroom.
05:40 So Arnold, a few years later, left MIT and he came to Stanford.
05:45 And by the early 1960s, these kinds of ideas and practices and
05:50 approaches, these early seeds became later on what we now know
05:55 as human centered design and design thinking.
05:58 In the early 60s, those were just beginning to take root.
06:00 And at Stanford, we look back on this history with particular interest
06:08 because it helps us understand a couple of big ideas.
06:11 So the first is Arnold's thinking about what design was most useful for.
06:17 So in a traditional analytical engineering education,
06:21 particularly at that time, students might be trying to figure out the answers
06:25 to relatively clear yes or no questions.
06:29 Like, will this bridge that we've designed hold the weight that is required to do so?
06:34 That might be a big challenge.
06:35 It might be complicated to figure that out and
06:37 require a lot of technical skill, but it is a yes, no answer.
06:41 Whereas design problems, he posited,
06:45 were really ones in which there could be many workable solutions.
06:50 And which was the best solution wasn't entirely obvious, right?
06:53 Design adds the most value where human behavior or human culture is important.
06:58 Or the conditions and the context are really emerging or
07:02 they're changing very rapidly,
07:03 which is very familiar in the world that we live in today.
07:06 And Arnold developed this very playful but
07:11 also very purposeful approach because of this important skill and
07:16 ability that he felt that his students were missing, this creative ability.
07:21 And that was reflected in the time that he was working.
07:26 And it makes us ask the question, what is it that our students are missing today?
07:32 What's important for them to understand how to do that we may not even yet
07:36 know how to teach as educators?
07:39 So now, Arnold's version of design feels very familiar to most of us in this room.
07:44 Right, it was characterized by the technical ability to make things real,
07:49 often in a variety of mediums, as well as that spark of imagination
07:55 that actually produces new ideas.
07:57 And as you heard just in that last conversation,
08:03 design is in a very important moment of evolution.
08:07 Once again, design is in an important moment of evolution.
08:12 And in this period,
08:16 we are really reimagining what our curriculum needs to look like to meet
08:20 the moment.
08:21 So we are imagining some additional pillars of design to add to these two.
08:25 The first is the reality that as new mediums have joined
08:33 the ones that would have been present in Arnold's day, so steel and wood and
08:36 lots of physical mediums, and has migrated to also include lots of digital
08:41 environments, service design, experience design, and of course,
08:45 new technologies like AI and even synthetic biology.
08:50 The standard of care that we have to have as designers has greatly increased.
08:55 We need to be training our students and
08:57 equipping them to take responsibility for the long term outcomes of their work.
09:01 To be thinking about the impact on the planet, all people, and
09:05 even the data that we produce.
09:06 And I would love to stand here and
09:09 tell you that I can predict exactly what our students will need in 10 or 20 or
09:13 30 years.
09:14 But given the rate of technological change, we can't predict that.
09:17 And so we have a very strong responsibility to actually equip them to
09:21 be what we call adaptive learners, right?
09:24 Actually able to learn in situ,
09:27 in on the job for the rest of their lives and their careers.
09:32 And for design to add lasting value to the multiple stakeholders
09:37 in the complex environments and challenges that we take on today,
09:41 we think all four of these pillars need to be present in design education.
09:45 Now, we don't know exactly what that needs to look like, but we have some ideas and
09:52 we're seeing some glimmers or even if you will, sparks.
09:55 So I wanna share one such spark, which is the work of two of our recent graduates,
10:02 Kelly Redmond and Gabriella Dweck.
10:04 And Kelly and Gabby met in the Design Masters program at Stanford.
10:09 And they really came together over a shared desire to have
10:13 significant impact in the world using design.
10:16 And this passion really led them to a deep investigation of the palm oil industry.
10:22 Now, many of you may know, palm oil production has a lot of,
10:25 particularly environmental as well as social costs.
10:28 It is leading to a tremendous amount of deforestation.
10:32 And has a lot of consequences on the climate because of that deforestation as
10:37 well, but simultaneously, there is enormous global demand for palm oil.
10:43 It is in soap, it is in toothpaste, it is in many kinds of food products.
10:47 It is really everywhere and that picture is not gonna change quickly.
10:51 So this is a classic design challenge, right?
10:53 You can imagine many workable solutions.
10:56 You could think maybe Kelly and Gabby are gonna design a campaign to help
11:01 discourage people from using products that have palm oil.
11:05 You could think maybe they will start a product design firm that specializes
11:09 in cosmetics that don't use palm oil.
11:12 But the more that they investigated this industry through a really systemic and
11:17 holistic lens, what they realized is that to have significant impact at scale,
11:22 they needed to go higher in the value chain.
11:24 So they realized that if produced differently,
11:29 if they actually change the way that palm oil is produced,
11:32 it could be the most environmentally friendly vegetable oil.
11:36 Because it actually has a very, very high yield per acre.
11:40 So together, they have co-founded a company called Oleo Sustainable Palm
11:47 Oil Solutions.
11:48 They are determined to make a climate impact.
11:53 They are determined to make an environmental justice impact.
11:56 And the way that they are approaching that is actually to create a process that
11:59 yields a synthetic alternative to palm oil that is far more sustainable
12:04 than the current version.
12:05 They have filed a provisional patent for the technology that they have designed,
12:11 which involves taking the massive amount of waste that is lying on the ground
12:17 as a result of the current palm oil production model.
12:20 Which also has a bad climate impact because as it decomposes,
12:23 it releases more carbon into the air.
12:26 They take that waste material, that byproduct that no one else is using, and
12:30 feed it into a digester that involves both microwave and fermentation technology.
12:36 And then they wind up with this much more sustainable palm oil substitute.
12:42 So they're piloting that in several areas right now.
12:45 And that's very exciting.
12:51 Equally important is that while they're designing that core technology,
12:55 they're also designing the economic model that would allow smallholders
13:00 to be stakeholders in this process.
13:03 To actually decentralize this means of production and to benefit economically.
13:08 And that is really critically important, they think,
13:10 to their differentiation strategy.
13:12 And to actually ensuring that people are gonna adopt this solution
13:16 versus other solutions that are also trying to work in this space.
13:19 And you can see Gabby and
13:22 Kelly's work across this very wide range of types of design, right?
13:29 As we've just heard, design has dramatically expanded its remit, right?
13:34 We work on services, we work on systems.
13:36 We even think about how do we design the implications,
13:39 the long term consequences of our work.
13:42 And given this expanded purview,
13:46 it makes those two additional pillars even more important, right?
13:49 How can you design in a system if you're not able to adapt quickly?
13:54 How can you think critically about the implications and
13:57 even mitigating the potential consequences of your work if that's necessary
14:01 without that higher standard of care baked into your design philosophy?
14:05 All four are really essential.
14:08 Now, we live in a time where change is so
14:12 rapid that we are all learning and adapting,
14:16 perhaps more quickly than we ever thought we could.
14:19 And what that means is that the things that we are teaching our students now and
14:24 equipping young people with,
14:25 it's actually not just the responsibility to figure that out of educators.
14:29 It's truly all of our responsibility.
14:32 We are in the midst of what the World Economic Forum has called a reskilling
14:37 emergency.
14:39 And one of the things that is quite interesting in the chart that you see
14:44 on this slide, which was produced by a team at Deloitte a few years ago,
14:48 is that they draw a very important distinction between technical skills,
14:53 which is that expertise that is context dependent,
14:57 that allows you to produce good work outcomes in that context,
15:01 versus enduring human capabilities, things like curiosity and
15:05 empathy that are not context specific and therefore will not become obsolete
15:10 as technology changes.
15:12 And what you'll notice on this chart is design is all over it, right?
15:16 These are the core capacities that we endeavor to nurture in all of our students.
15:21 And it also reminds us of John Arnold's work to try to create that
15:27 next type of education that was much more focused on that human capacity for
15:34 creativity, not just the technical skill to build things.
15:37 So we started with a spark, and
15:42 I wanna conclude by asking you for some help in crafting a vision.
15:48 So we do live in this amazing moment where things that once
15:54 you might have thought of as science fiction, maybe space travel,
15:58 maybe personalized medicine, maybe quantum computing, maybe sustainable palm oil.
16:03 Those might have been science fiction, but
16:05 it feels like they might be right around the corner right now.
16:07 And I want you to think about a young person who's in your life now,
16:14 and think about one of their descendants.
16:18 Maybe it's their child's child, or maybe it's your grandchild's grandchild.
16:24 And I want you to think about their first day of school, and
16:28 imagine they're walking into the classroom.
16:31 What are those capabilities that you think will be important for
16:35 them to have nurtured and have pulled out of them, and
16:39 to cultivate in those classrooms?
16:40 What are the challenges that you wanna make sure that they are equipped to face
16:45 in their time?
16:46 That is the collective project that I think we are all in together, and
16:53 I think design has a pretty important role to play in that.
16:56 Thank you.
16:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]