PALO ALTO, Calif. – Akshay Kothari’s first assignment at the D.school – formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University – was to rethink how people eat ramen noodles. His last D.school assignment led to a news-reading app that was bought by LinkedIn for $90 million.
While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.
At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.
So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and startups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.
The school has become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available.
Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students – many of them analytically minded – the tools to change lives.
One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.
That is how Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.
The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users – and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes – until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.
An important element of the school, Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.
