Some Takeaways From My Time At The D.School

I’m back from Stanford’s d.school and have a few ideas I jotted in my notebook while I was there:

1. Learn to celebrate failure; watch how you react to it
2. Let go of your desire to control outcomes; with humans involved, nothing ever goes according to plan
3. Try things, practice, iterate
4. Don’t build expense into prototyping; the more it costs, the harder it is to iterate and change and the less you can learn from your failures
5. Don’t make insight generation complicated
6. Where is the burning platform? Look for that place and work on the problems involved
7. Innovation is the outcome of a process, and innovators are the people who do it
8. The design thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and back again
9. The answers are not in this building
10. When empathizing, spend 15% of your time engaging, noticing and following-up and 85% of your time seeking stories
11. The purpose of your empathy research is to capture emotion; what is it? where does it come from?
12. Gravitate in your empathizing and your design thinking process between flaring and focusing
13. When defining, start with an observation, make an inference, then form a hunch that can carry you to insight
14. Solve one problem at a time
15. POV essentials: preserve emotion and the individual, use strong language, sensical wording, non-obvious leaps and generate possibilities that lead to problems the team wants to help solve
16. 5 users are sufficient to capture 85% of usability cases
17. Tail-end users have explicit needs and better represent the implicit needs of median users
18. The future is already here, but it’s not evenly distributed
19. Trusting relationships are the foundation of generative work
20. Learn how things fail before it matters, not when it does
21. You can only learn by doing, not by planning
22. Match prototyping resolution to idea certainty to allow yourself to hear the inevitable critical feedback
23. Testing = empathy; your prototype is your empathy probe
24. The value is in the user and their emotions, not in the prototype or experience model itself
25. The goal is to develop empathy with the user, not the make the prototype perfect; seek understanding
26. All action aims at advancing the frame and the concept towards convergence
27. What do your users say about the concept? The users’ reactions and excitement indicate proximity to convergence and likely next steps
28. 3 elements of storytelling: action, emotion and detail
29. 100% of people who succeed, start
30. Struggle and learning are complements; there is no learning without struggle, and the more one struggles, the more one has opportunity to learn; you can not master new knowledge from a place of comfort

Some or even many of these are probably difficult to make sense of or place without further context about the design thinking process.