Clicks-n-Bricks: New Stanford d.school Class Sponsored by Wal-Mart

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.

Just 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. 

 

Comments

[Matteo Raggi]

Nice info! where I could find a list of clicks and bricks web sites?

[Lilly]

I knew I should have stuck around for another 5 years for my M.S.