David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

Full text

88 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
David Kelley (figure 1) is founder of the Stanford
d.school—the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at
Stanford University. He is also founder and chairman
of IDEO, the renowned global design company. In this
conversation with Maria Camacho, Kelley discusses
design and design thinking as he and his colleagues
put them into practice at Stanford d.school and at
IDEO.
David Kelley (DK): The word design has always been
a funny word. Fashion designers say they design, and
people who design airplanes say they design, but they
are quite dierent people. One is really analytical and
one is much more artistic. It depends on who you
think came up with the term “design thinking”… it
doesn’t matter to me.
In our minds, it’s a method for how to come up
with ideas. These are not just ideas, but breakthrough
ideas that are new to the world, especially with re-
spect to complex projects, complex problems. That’s
when you really need multidisciplinary teams … and
you really need to build prototypes and try them out
with users (see figure 2).
For us at the d.school, we think of ourselves as
“ground zero” for design thinking. We started using
the term in our world because our students were
saying, “I’m not an expert in anything…” In this
group, there were students who were experts in me-
chanical engineering, and others expert in computer
science, and they were saying to me that they have
trouble in the job market, trouble talking to their
friends, because they are not experts at anything. I
said, “Yes, you are expert at design methodology, at
how you routinely come up with ideas.” I said that
for many years … and then one year I started saying
Maria Camacho, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
In Conversation
David Kelley: From Design to Design
Thinking at Stanford and IDEO
Copyright © 2016, Tongji University and Tongji University Press.
Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the
CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2016.01.009
Figure 1 David Kelley. Photo courtesy of IDEO.

89
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO
randomly, “No, you’re experts at a way of thinking,
you’re experts at design thinking.” I said “a way of
thinking,” and then they changed to say “design
thinking” and that caught on for some reason.
All those years I said “You’re experts at design
methodology,” nobody paid attention. They didn’t
take it as a new idea or a novel idea. They didn’t be-
lieve it. For some reason, the words “design thinking”
resonated with them.
Maria Camacho (MC): Why do you think that the
term “design methodology” didn’t resonate?
DK: It sounded too much like other things. There’s
scientific methodology … the word methodology has
many other contexts. And the term design thinking,
with the word “thinking,” was just novel enough
to attract attention. To put the words “design” and
“thinking” together made both ideas new.
Then it took o. Tim Brown wrote his book
Change By Design 1 after that, so now we have a period
in which we are getting to the same point where we
are with design. Everyone means something slightly
dierent by the term. I guess this is OK. It doesn’t
bother me, but I hear people using design thinking to
mean something quite dierent from what I mean.
There are many words in the English language that
people use, and they all mean something dierent by
the same words.
So your focus 2 on integrating the dierent
models of design thinking, I don’t know about inte-
grating them, but I like your notion of trying to syn-
thesize the terms to the point that we know … we can
say what we’re talking about, right?
Larry Leifer talks about comprehensive design.
For instance, take the d.school. The d.school is in the
same building as 310 3 …. I actually took ME310 in the
late 70s, and it is an important class. However, today
design thinking is referred to in 310 dierently than
at the d.school. Both are true, but come at design
from dierent perspectives—310 is made up of engi-
neers, and the d.school draws from every discipline
at Stanford. Therefore, it makes sense that a dierent
approach is called for.
There’s design thinking in Hasso Plattner Insti-
tute in Potsdam, and it’s quite dierent as well. I read
about design thinking everywhere, in dierent pub-
lications. I’m proud of the fact that the President of
Stanford University talks about design thinking with
other educators and leaders.
If you are on Mars and you are looking down at
the Earth, everybody who’s using the term design
thinking looks the same. They all look like people
Figure 2 An IDEO team observing a blind user testing a prototype.
Photo courtesy of IDEO.

90 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
who are trying to come up with ideas.
So I don’t know whether it matters or not. There
are people who consider themselves designers in the
classical sense and don’t refer to design thinking.
Design has an inherently individual bias, it’s like an
individual sport; design thinking is definitely a team
sport.
MC: Then you think designers have something to
learn from design thinking?
DK: You are talking to a funny person. This is my
religion, so I think everybody has something to learn
from design thinking; but I just see it as one tool on
your tool belt. I don’t think it serves everything. You
already have a hammer on your belt. I’m giving you a
screwdriver. I think that a screwdriver is sometimes
useful in addition to the hammer. I think everyone
can use an extra tool, but I don’t think it’s the only
thing that’s important. I certainly appreciate archi-
tects and designers who work on their own, but they
have a dierent point of view about their work and
how it relates to design. They are expressing what
they think.
MC: So is design thinking definitely a team thing for
you?
DK: 100 percent.
MC: And multidisciplinary?
DK: 100 percent (figure 3).
MC: One group that is apparently confused about the
term involves those who began to research design
cognition in the 80s or 90s, like Nigel Cross and Klaus
Krippendorf or others.… They use the term design
thinking to talk about design cognition, and they
published it in that context.
DK: … oh yes, long time ago.
MC: So there is a lot of conversation in discussion
groups about the confusion surrounding what people
are talking about when they talk about design
thinking…. When you studied here at Stanford, I
know that some people were an important influence
on you, people like Bob McKim. McKim was working
on the psychological side of designing.
DK: He’s my mentor; he’s exactly like us. He was
an industrial designer from Pratt and an engineer
from Stanford, and everything that he said became
the foundation for what we’ve said. In my world, he
was the one who came up with … I don’t know if
he came up with the term, but he was the one who
Figure 3 A multidisciplinary duo works together to build an early stage
prototype. Photo courtesy of IDEO.

91
championed “needfinding,” the idea that design
thinking is human-centered, not technological or
business-centered. That was Bob McKim, absolutely
(see figure 4). So yes, people like that—psychological
people—who are really important, so people like
Albert Bandura, and Bandura’s self-ecacy, are very
much related … so is Carol Dweck. We totally reso-
nate with these people, with the growth mindset and
self-ecacy.
MC: One of the conclusions I’m coming to is that
those who think that design thinking involves re-
search on the cognitive side of design, and those who
think that design thinking is a method as you do, are
referring to similar things, at least in the origins….
There is a connection…
DK: Yes, there is a connection. There are many lines—
many kinds of families, of people talking about this.
Stanford’s comes from a guy named John Arnold…
MC: And he hired Bob McKim, right?
DK: Right. And then there’s me. In some ways, John
Arnold is my academic grandfather, and his work
is about creativity plus design, and McKim is about
needfinding plus design … Did you read his book
Experiences in Visual Thinking?
4
MC: Yeah I’ve read it.
DK: He was working on his second book when he
retired, and I was helping him. His second book was
called Needfinding.
MC: What happened?
DK: He had a dicult time championing his ideas
within the context of a university, and decided to
leave and become a sculptor.
MC: So the book didn’t see the light?
DK: There is a draft of it somewhere, and I haven’t
been able to find it.
MC: I think it was bold of John Arnold to hire Bob
McKim. Bob was an industrial designer…
DK: He had two degrees, not simultaneous, but they
were both bachelor’s degrees—one in industrial
design from Pratt Institute in New York, and the other
in engineering here at Stanford.
MC: But when Arnold hired McKim, he was hiring an
industrial designer for an engineering faculty, right?
DK: The big break was here: Arnold was at MIT, and
he was all about creativity. Everything Arnold did
at MIT—he was a psychologist—was about dierent
worlds. The way he made students think dierently
about how to design things was to assume that they
were in a dierent world. He would say, “You are in
this world and it’s underwater, and now design some-
thing that enables you to plant seeds underwater.” You
had to come out of yourself and out of your habits, be-
cause you had to design for a world that there was no
way to experience yourself. That was his way of doing
what we do now—which is to get rid of your habits,
and look with new eyes, with a child’s mind.
The big break in this line came from hiring
Arnold despite how dierent he was from existing
faculty. He was very famous. Life magazine did a big
story on him because of his weird teaching practices
and approach with students. He was also an MIT pro-
fessor. Somehow, he decided that he wanted to move
to the west coast, to Stanford. The university got the
benefit of hiring this creative professor and they en-
joyed recruiting him away from MIT.
So he got here. Then Arnold hired Bob McKim as
a lecturer—not as a professor—and then Bob started
teaching 101, 5 and then Arnold died very young in
Europe, which left McKim here. McKim had a design
practice on the side—just like me with IDEO. Bob was
an independent guy, but decided to join Stanford full
time when he wrote a book and received tenure. So in
1973, Experiences in Visual Thinking was published.
McKim didn’t have a PhD, but he got tenure at
Figure 4 The evolution of design thinking at Stanford. Image © 2016 by
Maria Camacho.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

92 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
Stanford. The same thing happened with me. I was
hired as a lecturer, and then moved to tenure without
finishing my PhD. Prior to that, it was an anomaly
to find guys with tenure in a top research university
without a PhD. 6 You can’t find that, try to find that
somewhere, it’s almost impossible. That anomaly
allowed us to do the d.school, allowed us to have the
Product Design Program, all that.
MC: So Bob set up the product design program, right?
The thinking around it?
DK: I think so—you could ask Bernie Roth or
someone who was there. Larry Leifer probably knows.
But I give John Arnold credit in my mind for starting
the design program at Stanford, the whole thing.
MC: So the first influence would be creativity?
DK: Yes. And I have the discussion of creativity some-
where in his things.
MC: And then, human-centered design came with Bob
McKim?
DK: Yes.
MC: And now you are also looking into complex prob-
lems, right?
DK: These guys, all this time, all the way down to me,
it’s been called “product design,” and so they were
really…. McKim in particular was really thinking
about products. He’s very entrepreneurial, and the
thing he loved the most was when one of his students
came up with a product, and went out into the world,
becoming successful and getting the product sold.
That was his total goal.
MC: He was influenced by his education at Pratt, I
guess.
DK: Yes. And his own life here was also important.
He became quite wealthy by being a consultant to
two medical companies—Oxford Labs and Chemetrics
Corporation. He designed their products, the indus-
trial design. They were Silicon Valley start-ups. They
became very successful, and he had ownership in
them. So he was very much a product designer.
MC: But after them, let’s say it became a dierent era
… you’ve transcended product design?
DK: We think we’ve moved from design to design
thinking. Well, let’s say we moved from product
design at Stanford to design thinking at Stanford (see
figure 4). Forget the rest of the world. I mean, that’s
complicated—understanding how much influence we
Figure 5 A team prototyping a service at IDEO Chicago. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.

93
have in this world on product design. And there are
really many changes, to a team sport from an indi-
vidual sport. McKim was all individual.
MC: When did the team thing come in?
DK: The team thing came in when we started the
d.school (figure 5). Here’s how it happened: I became
restless teaching here. I have a lot of friends around
the university, and I thought it would be more fun to
teach with my friends around the university rather
than staying home to teach the same thing all the
time. So I taught with an art professor, I taught with a
computer science professor, with a business professor,
and I noticed that the students were really excited.
When I taught with the computer science pro-
fessor, he would bring his students to the class, be-
cause they had to follow him. They were his students,
right? There were three, four or five students that
would take anything the professor taught. That was
Terry Winograd. I had a bunch of students who would
follow me anywhere. And then you had a bunch of
students that just liked the sound of the course.
The first course had three projects. One of them
was to design a video game, and there were just
people who wanted to do that. In teaching those
classes, we saw how excited the students became
doing the multidisciplinary thing, and how they
liked having the other students. This was something
new, compared to the normal fare of students only
working with the same kind of students, all me-
chanical engineering students or all product design
students. That’s how the idea for the d.school came
about…. I saw how powerful it was to have multiple
professors and students from dierent departments.
So I started proposing to the university that we do
that. It took many, many years (figure 6).
MC: And I guess your inspiration must’ve also come
from IDEO, because in real life you were already
working in multidisciplinary teams.
DK: Yeah, sure. I only knew IDEO. Basically, in some
ways, I always thought that what would make me a
better teacher was that I knew exactly what was going
on at the cutting edge of the profession. And IDEO is
the way it is because I started IDEO right out of Stan-
ford, the day I graduated. The only thing I knew was
Stanford, so I made IDEO in the image of Bob McKim
and John Arnold and Stanford. That was the only
thing I knew. And it played very well because of its
uniqueness.
One thing that’s interesting is the fact that this
is unique. At that time there was not one of these at
Berkeley, or any other universities. There’s none of
this because of the tenure problem, the PhD problem.
In the commercial world, when IDEO went out and
started selling this, it sounded unique to clients be-
cause nobody else was saying that, because there
wasn’t any other program like this.
MC: Where would you put the industrial design pro-
grams that were going on in education in the same
years?
DK: Well they were uni-disciplinary—they were all
in art schools, Stanford was not … This program has
always been in the engineering school. It had a joint
relationship with the art department, but the center
has always been in the engineering school, so it’s
more about cleverness. Bob McKim was about clever-
ness. Aesthetics entered in the cleverness, but it was
just one aspect of cleverness.
MC: In the meantime, do you think most design
schools were centered on aesthetics?
DK: For sure. There’s no question that they would
say that. And then—if you look—there’s a continuum
today from design schools that are moving toward
this design thinking, and those that have stayed
focused on aesthetics, but they are all in aesthetics
first.
MC: You mentioned how you made the connection
between Stanford and IDEO. Do you think IDEO has
benefited from the research that Stanford has done,
and vice versa?
DK: The university moves at a very slow pace com-
pared to industry. IDEO has about 700 people and so
there is lots of learning there. The big dierence is
that money is changing hands, so IDEO has to contin-
uously come up with new ways of doing things, new
ways of presenting, new ways of prototyping … in
Figure 6 David Kelley and other professors present the d.school to
potential students. Copyright © 2015 Maria Camacho.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

94 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
order to have the client pay you and be happy
(figure 7).
If the projects that come out at Stanford don’t
turn out to be world changing, there’s no conse-
quence. All we’re trying to do is teach the students
to master the process. They’re not being paid for
working. So the fact that IDEO is in the industry
makes a dierence…. It’s just a bigger forcing func-
tion to make it excellent.
So I’ve always thought that the quid-pro-quo was
that, is that … there’re maybe ten or twelve people
at IDEO who teach classes here, maybe more. At one
time, there were eighteen. There’re all these people
at the d.school and in product design, there are even
some in mechanical engineering, but the transfer of
that immediately new knowledge, that recent knowl-
edge comes from IDEO to Stanford.
What goes back? Well, the very first thing is the
whole company wouldn’t exist without the Stanford
philosophy. The value system for IDEO came from
Stanford. It had its foundation in the way that Bob
McKim and John Arnold thought. So in some ways,
especially in the early days, the company was in com-
plete debt to Stanford.
Now, having said that, since founding the
d.school, there’s a whole bunch of things in the d.
school where the d.school is learning new things and
the way that things are done gets transferred to IDEO
as well. In my opinion, you can just see that the im-
perative for advancing the state of knowledge at IDEO
is much greater than at Stanford. Stanford’s goal is
teaching the methodology to students, getting them
to master design thinking. That’s my goal. I want
them to be masters of design thinking.
MC: Do you have some process in place at IDEO to
evolve the knowledge that you are creating there?
DK: We have tons of things in place for that. All the
sharing that happens—we have IDEO U now (figure 8),
we’re actually doing classes—but the cultural sharing
at IDEO is pretty amazing. There is this thing called
“IDEO Stories” where people tell the stories of what
they’ve learned. There’s “Monday Morning Meetings”
(figure 9). Today we had one, and people stood up
and talked about the projects they’re working on,
and what they’ve learned, and they shared…. There’s
a thing called “IDEO Wow” which comes out every
month, and it talks about the projects and each of the
things around the world.
One of the things that helps with that is we have
to win the work. We have to write a proposal that
explains how powerful design thinking is, and how it
will help your company, so somebody has to get really
good at doing that. That’s more centered in IDEO.
The people writing the proposals talk to each
other. If you learn some new thing about how this
part of design thinking resonates with corporations,
then every proposal that goes out after that has that
in it. And then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—once I
write a proposal to a company that says we’re going
to do this, we do it (figure 10).
MC: Could you say that you don’t do scientific
research at IDEO, but you do some kind of prac-
tice-based research?
DK: Every project has some kind of practice-based
research. We don’t do what is conventionally referred
to as scientific research that I can think of. We have
people with PhDs that know how to do it, but most of
our research is all in the trying to … We talk to eight
people, not to 100,000. We don’t send out surveys
or whatever. Our research is design research in that
self-reported kind of inquiry—“What do you think of
this?”
MC: What do you think of the research that the
Figure 7 David Kelley and team meeting with clients. Photo courtesy
of IDEO.
Figure 8 (Above) IDEO U, IDEO’s online learning platform. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.

95
Figure 10 An IDEO team facilitates a brainstorm session with
clients. Photo courtesy of IDEO.
Figure 9 The Monday Morning Meeting at IDEO is unique to each
of the locations. Some do breakfast, others host a happy hour. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

96 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
Center for Design Research does here at Stanford?
DK: I don’t work closely with them. I really like a lot
of people there, and they seem to be doing very inter-
esting things. Recently I’ve hired two new faculty into
product design, and they both have PhDs. They are
both doing research, and I expect their research to be
very compatible with our point of view. One is Erin
McDonald. She came from the University of Michigan.
The other is Sean Follmer, who came from MIT.
They are young faculty. The university came to
me and said, “You’re getting old here. Hire some new
people.” So in this track, the next person in line had
to have a PhD … and so that’s Erin and Sean.
MC: So you have creativity as an umbrella. In your
latest book you talk about how creativity is at the
center of what you do.
DK: Yes. It goes this way—design thinking is the
methodology that we teach, that’s the secret sauce,
that’s the thing that is surprisingly eective when we
want to come up with ideas, and we built everything
on that. The result of that is if you take students,
or companies, or anybody, and you get them to use
design thinking as a tool, my belief is that builds their
creative confidence (figure 11).
Before you had design thinking and somebody
gave you a big problem, a very dicult problem,
you’d say, “I have no idea how I’m going to do that,
I’m going to have to hope that I have a big idea.”
I remember those days. You’d say, “I’m smart,
I hope I have a big idea.” You’d think of it as a per-
sonal goal. Once you have design thinking in your
life, you get to the point when somebody gives you a
big problem, you have creative confidence. You say,
“I’ve solved dicult problems before. I know how to
do this. I’ll put a team together. I’ll build prototypes.
I’ll understand the users to get the ideas for what is
really meaningful to the people that I’m designing
for. I’ll bet you that I’d come up with something, with
intention, something that’s successful.” That’s confi-
dence (figure 12).
The way we get people from the notion of design
thinking to creative confidence we call “Guided Mas-
tery.” Guided Mastery is a series of successes at this.
That’s why we have all these projects (figure 13). My
product design students take eight classes, and each
class has three projects…. They’ll have twenty proj-
ects where they’ve experienced this before they grad-
uate from school.
MC: So the business of solving a complex problem,
understanding the problem and redefining it, that
part of design thinking, where do you put it in the
formula? Is it also part of the umbrella?
DK: No, that’s in the specifics of the methodology.
You just said something really important…. I am in
my 40th year at Stanford. One of the things that I
have studied all these years is the design methods
of dierent people. If I were to synthesize all the
methods of all the dierent people I met prior to our
design thinking point of view, it was something like
this:
I took 310, this is what 310 would’ve looked like
in 1976—you’re given a problem; you analyze it, break
it down into its parts, you do some iteration, and then
you synthesize a new possible solution given what
you learned by taking it apart and studying the parts.
You put the parts back together in a new way. Then,
depending on how much time you have, you start
again.
Now you have a new prototype or whatever, a
new view…. And then, when you’re done, you imple-
ment. Usually time runs out, it’s not that you’ve ac-
tually had a satisfying conclusion. That’s the normal
process. The main thing is that the problem is there,
at the beginning of the process.
Figure 12 A user tests a prototype developed by IDEO. Photo courtesy
of IDEO.
Figure 11 David Kelley speaking to employees at IDEO. Photo courtesy
of IDEO.

97
Where we are now, the thing about design
thinking that is really powerful, is that we put the
definition of the problem in the middle of the loop.
This allows you to change what you are working on.
We call this “the reframe,” and it turns out to be the
place where we usually come up with the big idea.
We’re given the kind of area called “how might we”—
how might we solve this problem, how might we
improve this area of life.
As you go through the process, you see some-
thing new through reframing. You realize that right
next to the original thing you thought you were
working on is something that’s much more important
to the people that you are trying to help (figure 14).
I have hundreds of examples. Take our students
who took the course called Liberation Technology. 7
They go to Africa, where they’ve been hired to look at
fire prevention. They look at the probl em and they
use our method. They go into the village, they inter-
view the people, and they try to understand what’s
meaningful to them. They get to know them, and
what they find out in the village is that what people
are really afraid of is losing their documents, having
their documents destroyed or losing them. A fire that
burns their documents is really scary because the
documents allow them to be in this country, to be in
this building, to get food, whatever. The documents
are important.
So when the students get there, they realize that
they’ve changed the problem from fire prevention
to document preservation. Based on this realization,
they develop their solution to the problem. They start
a company with a pick-up truck and a scanner in the
back of the truck. They go around scanning every-
body’s documents and they put them up in the cloud.
The innovation came from reframing the
problem. We are full of stories like that…. We look at
lunch in high schools. We reframe it in the context
of a new realization—“People don’t care about lunch.
They care about the socialization of being with their
friends.” So we design a fantastic socialization experi-
ence at lunch, and then we slide a little food in. The
problem started as “lunch,” but that’s not what was
really needed.
MC: Could you say that these reframing activities are
a tool that enables designers to be creative?
DK: It’s a consequence of the human-centered ap-
proach. It’s a consequence of the fact that somebody
came up with a problem, but when you go in to un-
derstand the problem by understanding human fac-
tors, talking with the people, the problems are messy.
Designers that use our method don’t just roll over
and say, “Oh yeah … that’s the problem.” They almost
always reframe it (figure 15).
Figure 13 Users testing new service prototypes for Lufthansa. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

98 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
Figure 14 A student’s work in progress at the d.school. Re-framing the
problem at the Design for Extreme Affordability course. Photo by Maria
Camacho.
Figure 15 Designers at IDEO work on an early phase prototype. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.

99
MC: Sometimes you hear that design thinking, the
tools, come from some tools used by designers.
DK: Yes, they do.
MC: So when you say “designers,” are you talking
about those who were trained as industrial product
designers?
DK: Any kind of designers. I’m talking about those
who were trained as fashion designers, airplane
designers, any designers in the sense that they do
everything with intention. To me, the definition of
a designer is they do everything with intention. So
designers are perfectly suited to teach design thinking
because that is what they do.
MC: I was trained as an industrial designer, and I
personally do see a dierence. Sometimes another
designer will ask you, “What would you teach about
design thinking to another designer, if it’s the
tools of a designer?” And I still feel there are many
dierences.
DK: When you put together a group to do design
thinking, there are all these dierent people in there.
There’s a businessperson, a technical person … well
one of these people is an industrial designer, and you
don’t expect them to be like this, but you expect all
these people to buy into design thinking.
If you look at IDEO, there’s a profession called
industrial design, and industrial designers are super
important. They do the magical part in some ways,
they do the artistic part, but that doesn’t make them
more central than the person who has to figure out
what it costs.
MC: Any of those could be the leader of a project?
DK: Any could be. Many times, it’s an industrial de-
signer. We are doing those schools in Peru, the Innova
project.
For the first time I can remember, the business-
people ran it, because what they determined was the
school would be totally unsuccessful if it cost more
than US$100 per month. An industrial designer would
think, “I’ll build the most beautiful school that we
can possibly build.” It would be gorgeous, and make
everything else look like a prison. This school would
be beautiful and function well. But if it costs US$125 it
would be a complete waste of time.
In that particular project, you want the busi-
nessperson to take lead. That’s because they can say,
“No, you can’t do that.” Or they can say, “You have to
be more clever about how you use the teachers. We
have to move them around, because we can’t aord
more teachers. That’s because we have to make our
$100 budget.” It’s just like this here. I’m in charge of
the product design program here at the d.school. In a
d.school project, there are product designers that go
to the d.school and take its classes, and they play one
of these roles.
MC: And then they’re learning specific things that
they don’t learn in their own design.
DK: They’re learning about this team dynamic,
about how you work on projects in a team…. They
might never have worked on a project that involved
service design or experience design, because they’ve
been making bicycles the whole time. Here, they’ve
been given the experience of taking the train to San
Francisco. They’ve got to learn dierent things, but
they have something to oer. They are very good at
designing the seats, or at designing the experience of
buying the ticket, but everybody becomes responsible
for the whole thing. It’s just that you bring a certain
muscle with you (figure 16).
MC: What do you know about ME310? Why do you
think it’s so dierent to d.school?
DK: I don’t know much about 310. I took it in 1976,
but that’s got nothing to do with 310 today. I just
know there’s no overlap between the d.school and
ME310.
MC: Are you sure about that?
DK: Well I’m sure there’s no faculty overlap.
MC: Conceptually, in the things that are taught?
DK: Whatever is taught in 310 about design thinking
is a version that the faculty there have developed
from their years of teaching the class, and their ver-
sion of human-centered design. This is true for faculty
throughout the country as they update their view of
design and design thinking. When we first started the
Figure 16 All ideas are welcome in IDEO brainstorm sessions. Photo
courtesy of IDEO.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO

100 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016
d.school, 310 continued to be the way it always was. It
was team-based, but the dierence was the problem
statement was given from the client. There was no
needfinding or very little needfinding. There was no
focus on multidisciplinary people. Everybody in the
room was a mechanical engineer.
MC: Nowadays, ME310 has managed to get around
that by bringing in other global schools with students
from other disciplines (figure 17).
DK: Yeah, but if I go upstairs, everybody in those
teams are 310. If you go into a d.school thing, there
are five students; everyone is from a dierent school
in the university. So there are dierences. 8
MC: This is a more personal question. Why has IDEO
become so involved in social problems?
DK: For the same reason the d.school has. I’m not a
“do-gooder.” This has nothing do to with me. I’m not
the one who’s interested in social good. I mean, I’m
interested in social good as a person, but not as an ed-
ucator. The reason for working on social problems is
that if I want to teach students about design thinking
as methodology, the best way to teach them is to give
them a problem that they care about.
MC: So this is for motivational purposes?
DK: Yes, it’s for motivation. For many years, students
didn’t care about social innovation, so I gave them
design problems about bicycles and cars. Now, this
generation, if you interview them, they care a lot
about social innovation. They also care a lot about
sports. In my last class, students had to redesign the
experience of going to a San Jose hockey game. They
were excited about that.
We also gave them problems involving social
good. In my opinion, the social good part comes
from what students want to work on. If I ask them to
design a McDonald’s, nobody is interested. If I have
them design a solar car or a way to recycle garbage,
they are totally excited.
MC: That’s funny. Sometimes it’s dierent in Co-
lombia. I guess that’s the case because it’s a devel-
oping country, and the context is what it is. In Co-
lombia, many students would be more motivated by
working on a McDonald’s project.
DK: That used to be the case here, but it’s not that
way now. I look at my teenage daughter— she would
be oended if the project didn’t have some social
responsibility.
MC: You’re referring to it as social innovation. That’s
another term that’s becoming famous.
DK: The most popular classes at the d.school are all
that way.
MC: It’s very interesting, along with the work that
you are doing with IDEO.org.
DK: We were doing those kinds of projects inside
IDEO. Then not-for-profit funders like The Gates
Foundation came to us and said, “Look, if you were
not-for-profit, we’d give you a lot more projects.” We
said, “We want more projects,” so we changed the
company. It’s an independent organization. You have
to quit IDEO to work for IDEO.org. IDEO.org mostly
hires its own people, but it’s a separate company.
1 Tim Brown, Change by Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
2 Here, David Kelley refers to Maria Camacho’s research on models
of design thinking.
3 ME310, or simply 310, is an iconic engineering master level
course that has been running at Stanford from the 60s to this day.
Students take on real design innovation challenges from corporate
sponsors and produce functional results in one academic year.
From the mid 2000s, the course is run in conjunction with global
academic partners, adding a level of diversity to the student
teams. For more information see: http://Me310.stanford.edu.
4 Robert H. McKim, Experiences in Visual Thinking (Pacic Grove, CA:
Brooks/Cole, 1980).
5 ME101, or simply 101, is another iconic and historic Stanford
course, which has been run jointly for over 40 years by the depart-
ments of Mechanical Engineering and Art. McKim called it “visual
thinking” after his book, and it is an introduction to design and
creativity.
6 Here, David Kelley describes the PhD degree as a common
standard for hiring, tenure, and promotion at North American
research universities. Hiring and tenure practices differ in other
nations. In some nations, general labor laws make academic
positions permanent based on responsible performance for a
designated time. In these nations, labor law treats academic
workers in much the same way as factory workers or government
administrators, and it serves as the equivalent of tenure. The PhD
degree may be a condition for appointment to some academic
positions without being a condition for permanent employment.
Figure 17 ME310 students working at the d.school. Photo by Maria
Camacho.

101
At some research universities, signicant achievements, research,
or publications are a sufcient basis for promotion to full professor
with or without the PhD. In some universities outside North
America, promotion to full professor is also treated as an adminis-
trative promotion for heads of school or deans, without respect to
academic achievement or research. This in turn creates confusion
when deans without a PhD set standards for staff within their
faculties. While Kelley’s comments are valid for North American
research universities in most disciplines, differences on this issue
make it difcult to compare the situation of design academics at
Stanford with design academics at universities in other nations. In
most North American research universities, the MFA is considered
the terminal degree in art and design, and the equivalent of a PhD
for the purposes of hiring and promotion. The PhD remains the
standard degree in engineering disciplines.
7 The Program on Liberation Technology is a course that “seeks to
understand how information technology can be used to improve
governance, empower the poor, defend human rights, promote
economic development, and pursue a variety of other social
goods.” See http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/libtech/ for more informa-
tion.
8 Nowadays, ME310 clients present more open briefs; re-dening
the problem and neednding are crucial elements of the design
process. Moreover, there is a high level of diversity, with students
working in multidisciplinary and distributed teams from several
universities and countries.
David Kelley: From Design to Design Thinking at Stanford and IDEO