Hasta La Ideas

Graduation is always an occasion for reflection, and even though Julia Davids is still six months away from completing her Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree at Stanford University, she is taking the end of term to reflect on her experience at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a.k.a. the d.school. She easily surpassed her $150 funding goal (to purchase the ISBN) for her self-published e-book about her undergraduate experience—this is an exclusive excerpt of the second chapter.

Imagine you attend one of my design classes in Stanford’s d.school at Building 550. Many of the structural elements of the building have been left exposed so that it has the feel of a partially renovated garage: cement floors, bare walls. Strange furniture is scattered about the floor; tour guides are known to explain that decorators chose “deliberately uncomfortable” seats to encourage activity. A smattering of professors and students have questioned the use of foam squares or wood blocks as chairs, but the seats remain.

You enter a classroom on the second floor, where 30 or so students populate gray plastic chairs. The room—in fact, the entire building—embodies the principle that furniture mixing is proportionally related to idea mixing. Utility pipes unabashedly expose themselves to you. You take a seat on one of the chairs, but your table scoots away from you because it is on casters. The rock music fades and class is underway.

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