Inspiration and Motivation

The entry point into the Extreme program is a two-quarter elective class often considered some of the hardest credits a Stanford student will earn. For the teaching team, student recruitment is one-half of a nervous annual matchmaking process, with the other half being partner and challenge selection. These six-month processes are taken very seriously.

FIGURE 11-1

Profile of Extreme students

Each year, the Extreme teaching team embarks on a student recruitment roadshow, with videos, interactive information sessions, social media outreach, campus posters, mailing list posts, and alumni word-of-mouth campaigns. During the information sessions, the potentially system-gaming question “what are you looking for in a successful applicant?” gives us the first chance to introduce the ambiguity that will be such an important part of the Extreme experience. We show the slide depicted in figure 11-1 to help address this question.

The student’s initial application is by online form, which includes a number of short essay questions and a student’s résumé. At this stage, we are primarily trying to detect passion for the mission and commitment to the program. Whenever asked what he would need in order to select an Extreme student, Mechanical Engineering professor Dave Beach, one of the founding members of the teaching team, always gave the engineer’s solution, “a detector that you could place on the head of each student and read off their passion score.”

A short list of students is invited to attend an in-person application event, where there is a chance to experience a little of the class content in a multidisciplinary, team-based design challenge for a couple of hours. We apologize for the degrading touch of pinning students’ names to their backs like ballroom dance competitors, but we are expecting as much movement from the students as you would from the dancers, and we need a way to know who’s who in the resulting melee.

At this event, we are looking for all the other characteristics in figure 11-1. Is everyone willing to jump in and try our approach? Do those who “talk to think” pause long enough for those who “think before talking”? Do teammates recognize the ability of others and then contribute when theirs is the skill set needed? For many students, this event may be the first time they have worked in a team with students from different schools or even a different department within their own school. Whether an applicant is successful in gaining a place in the class or not, we hope they experience a little of the methods, tools, and multidisciplinary nature of our innovation approach.

At the same time as we are meeting our new prospective students for the first time, we are also reaching out across our networks for partners who will provide interesting—and we hope worthwhile—challenges for our student teams to work on.

Our basic question to prospective partners is, “If you had a motivated multi-disciplinary team of Stanford students available to tackle the next challenge space you are considering, what would that be?”

Why “challenge space”? As a partner, we bring many constraints, but perhaps the biggest stems from support for our dual missions—educating future social innovators and providing our partners with impactful outcomes. It is human nature to express problems in terms of the solutions we imagine; we all do it. Given a little encouragement, a partner can express the problem they wish Extreme would address, but a “full-cycle” innovation experience requires exposure to the phases of problem discovery and definition, so we step back further with our partners and ask for a “challenge space,” an area to investigate that our partner believes has important problems to be found that when addressed can have an impact in support of our partner’s mission.

Another of the many constraints we bring to any partnership is the limit on our time and resources. We will start discovery and fluency in January and complete a cycle of innovation through early prototyping of solutions in June, regardless of the partner’s timetable. And despite what students might hope for sometimes, there are still only twenty-four hours in their day, and partners must remember that all our students are taking a full class load alongside Extreme. Sizing our challenges appropriately is therefore an important consideration. Our summer and following academic year lab programs give students willing to work for no academic credit the chance to bring their solutions to market.

We regularly receive the question, “Why don’t you go after the grand challenges?” First, our student teams are unlikely to get through the innovation cycle within the time and resources available. Second, to the extent we can foresee, challenges need to have a potential “white-space” solution area. If a student team discovers that many large multinational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been working on their challenge for years, they are not likely to be inspired to dig in. For similar reasons, we try to ensure that, for example, a quick Google search does not result in a $2.99 solution readily available from Alibaba—which would not be a very good first day for an Extreme student team.

The initial meeting that perhaps best illustrates our ideal partner and project occurred at the d.school a few years ago. Chesca Colloredo-Mansfeld was introducing MiracleFeet, the organization she cofounded with a mission to eliminate untreated clubfoot, a painful and stigmatizing birth defect. Chesca explained how a low-cost, minimally invasive treatment called the Ponseti Method is perfect for infants in low-income settings, except that it requires the use of a brace to complete the treatment. Existing braces were either too expensive or medically ineffectual. As with all our projects, it’s a difficult story to hear. But Chesca’s next sentence made our eyes light up: “My problem is that clubfoot only affects one in eight hundred babies born, and is not concentrated in any one geography, so nobody is focused on the problem” (emphasis added). Perfect! A neglected social issue, a clear white space between the cost and effectiveness of existing solutions, and, most importantly, a community-connected, experienced, and expert partner.

Student teams have completed a number of projects with MiracleFeet since that first meeting, including the development and launch of the MiracleFeet brace,² an affordable, easy-to-use, durable brace with novel design features such as a flat base to allow older kids to stand while wearing it and detachable shoes with interchangeable parts to make it easier for parents to fit and more affordable to resize as the child grows. In the student team’s design for the manufacturing phase, plastic injection molding provided low cost and easy replicability, as well as not looking like a “medical device.” And a business model including support from industry partners for manufacturing and distribution ensures real-world impact. It’s only one in eight hundred babies.

Just to get to the point of having a class of students and a cohort of partners and projects takes many hundreds of hours each year, and that’s before we prepare and develop any curriculum.

Ambiguity and Constraints

A Google image search for “design thinking” is guaranteed to display many different versions of the five hexagons: empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test. In the embryonic d.school, originally housed in a recycled doublewide trailer with IKEA furniture³ on the edge of the Stanford campus, the challenge was to quickly convey the design thinking approach to boot camp students. There were seven-step models, circle-based diagrams, some with arrows, some without. One boot camp fellow wondered why so much emphasis was placed on empathy when it did not appear in any of these early graphic representations. A seven-circle model became a five-circle version, empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test. But circles only touch at one tangential point, and the nonlinearity of design thinking was not reflected in an orderly row of activities. On a whim, the circles were converted to tiled hexagons so they would fit together, did not obviously line up in a single row (so as to wrongly suggest a linear process), and could be reconfigured in any order—a design thinking Lego. In the following year’s design thinking boot camp, a random wavy layout of “the hexs” was used to introduce the concept, which escaped into the wild, and the rest is the result of that Google image search.⁴

The static hexagons might not be a bad place to start when becoming familiar with the concept, but they do not capture the way in which design thinking is, and should be, practiced. Design thinking is a deeply messy experience, requiring judicious, and often repeated, use of abilities, methods, and tools. Recognizing this, the d.school approach to understanding and mastering design thinking now rests on the eight core design abilities, as illustrated in figure 11-2. (Of course, we have also upped our graphical representation game from the days of the “hexs.”)

FIGURE 11-2

The eight design abilities of the Stanford d.school

Of these abilities, one of the first that Extreme focuses on, and often the hardest for students to internalize, is navigating ambiguity.⁵ Almost every aspect of the Extreme experience will require a level of comfort with, or at least acceptance of, that unsettling feeling that you are not quite sure what the challenge is and where it will lead you. Open-ended project challenges, unfamiliar environments, ill-specified goals, external partnerships, and team dynamics all contribute to the ambiguity of the students’ own experience, the ambiguity of their project, and the potential for a valuable, impactful, real-world outcome.

Why is it so hard for these students to come to terms with ambiguity? They perhaps have spent two decades in an education system that rewards successfully getting the right answer, the first time, to thousands of well-designed, fully constructed questions and problems. Helping our students get comfortable in a messier world is a two-pronged approach: exposure and confidence building.

On the first day of class, students are allocated to multidisciplinary teams and assigned a task to design a large-scale physical prototype that will be needed to perform a measurable task in five days. The current challenge is not described here, since it is intended to be a surprise and more importantly requires the students to produce a first prototype from scratch. We have already had to redesign the assignment because students looked for “inspiration” from course alumni. The previous incarnation was the Monsoon Challenge—design a solution that will catch and store as much water as possible from a “monsoon” (in reality, an irrigation sprinkler attached to the top of a stepladder).

The ambiguity starts with the specification of the criteria for success. In addition to defining the measurable performance of the prototypes in action, the assignment also states that “points will be awarded for designs that exhibit outrageous visual appeal, monstrous complexity, elegant simplicity, infectious team spirit, and multi-sensory engagement. Consideration will be given to the most catastrophic failure, and to the most amazing interpretation of the rules/purpose (that still meets the challenge).”

In addition to ambiguity, the assignment introduces maker skills, rapid prototyping, multidisciplinary teamwork, project planning, affordable design, the importance of testing, and how failure is an option (it turns out that water is quite heavy). It also does not hurt that the assignment taps into the students’ competitive spirit.

Exposure to ambiguity continues with a design thinking cliché, the whiteboard covered in Post-it notes, and the old d.school joke, “If I’d have known it was going to turn out this way, I would have bought shares in 3M.” Space saturation is an important tool in taming ambiguity, team communication, and collecting, processing, and quickly reorganizing large amounts of input, but in the age of word processing, electronic slideshows, and cut-and-pasted images and videos, creating informative, constructive, and engaging physical representations of your information opens up new (or rediscovered) ways of thinking creatively. Students are regularly tasked with saturating their dedicated team studio space with “vast amounts of empathy data—interviews, sketches, photos, maps, physical artifacts, etc.” and then synthesizing using “character sketches, maps, diagrams, graphs, flowcharts, timelines, storyboards and more.”

The teaching team needs to exercise caution here—introducing ambiguity can be fun. It is easy to enjoy overdoing the reveals and surprises, and even the student’s confusion when building familiarity with the topic. We try to resist the temptation. Navigating ambiguity is one of the most powerful abilities future designers will need, and often one of the least comfortable to master.

As part of the process, members of the teaching team need to exhibit their own comfort and willingness to embrace ambiguity. Traditionally, on the evening when students find out which team and project they will work on, and after a rapid-fire in-class project research assignment designed to kick-start their challenge fluency and discovery journey, we make a scary statement: “As of right now, the teaching team no longer knows more about your project than you do.” While we do have some domain knowledge, and the experience of working on similar projects for many years, our task is to provide the tools of empathy, innovation, design, and business modeling, not to spoon-feed the information that should come from the student’s own discovery processes. Application of these abilities will allow the students to build expertise and arrive at solutions to the challenge itself. Although it can be underwhelming at first for a student to hear, we regularly answer questions with “I don’t know, but here’s a way to … ”

_____________

It is easy to imagine us all sinking gracefully into a sea of ambiguity, never to reemerge. However, to push the analogy too far, there are some swimming floats out there. First among them are constraints, which usually have a negative connotation, but in design work, constraints are your friend.

Constraints remove some responsibilities, make automatic decisions, and reduce the number of pathways. They are particularly important when narrowing and making choices. In the normal trajectory of the class, this happens at least twice, once when declaring the problem that will be addressed and again when a specific solution strategy must be selected. Both are hard, but deciding which problem to work on has become known as “the lost week” because of the struggle and angst the student teams suffer.

The lost week occurs after teams have spent significant time with their partners and more importantly their end users and stakeholders, gaining empathy and insight into the challenge space and the needs contained within it. They have also become fluent in the challenges, ecosystems, geography, and economics of their clients, and the perceived wisdom, competitive landscape, costs, and applicability of the solutions already available. They have encountered many issues they would like to solve and have built a strong rapport with the people they would like to help. Constraints can help here, but many teams struggle with the idea that introducing and being cognizant of their own constraints—bringing themselves into the design criteria—is somehow wrong.

In addition to many other constraints, selecting on the basis of achievability is important for two reasons. The pedantic one is that we want each student to experience the whole innovation process; attempting too big a project can result in a slow or incomplete journey. The more inspiring reason is that the real-world nature of the projects, and the engagement of the partners, is best served if the student team can produce, at a minimum, a field-testable solution prototype. We often visit and talk to partners who point to the shelf where they keep all the reports and plans that have been generated through university engagements in the past. Our aim is not to be another file on those shelves. We want to provide actual working solutions, which is why sometimes student teams win pitch competitions to support their ongoing work. While most entrants are showing their slide decks, Extreme teams are holding baby incubators and treadle pumps or showing video footage of a donor skin bank in action. The teaching team is also not averse to plopping a solar lantern or a cardboard respiratory inhaler spacer on a dean’s conference room table when the need arises.

Empathy and Humility

Some aspects of the design thinking process sound obvious when you say them out loud. For example, discovering what your customer or client wants offers a much higher chance of ultimate success than making assumptions and guesses based on your own experiences, biases, and understanding—in other words, the ability to learn from others.

The underlying challenge for students in this context is humility—the willingness and self-awareness to discard their own preconceptions in favor of the experience of their clients. While struggling with the ambiguity of their challenge, they now have to set aside whatever preexisting knowledge they thought they had in favor of the picture they can build and empathetic understanding they can gain for the needs, desires, and world of those they are designing for. Building competence in navigating ambiguity and learning from others both require a little unlearning.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the projects Extreme students tackle can provide a small advantage in their ability to learn from others. At the time of writing, student teams have worked on challenges in thirty-two low-income countries across the globe. While a few students might have some existing connection to the communities, most will be approaching their challenges with little or no personal experience. In this context, it is somewhat easier to come to terms with the fact that you know very little about the lives or needs of the people you are engaging with and therefore start the empathy process with an open mind and blank sheet.

It turns out that there is a great resource on every university campus that can give students a chance to practice their ability to learn from others. As soon as the first week’s assignment is delivered, students are reassigned into new teams and are given a new challenge we call the Stanford Service Corps (SSC) project. Wonderful colleagues across the Stanford campus, working in residential and dining services, building maintenance, grounds and landscaping, transportation and parking, the police department, the bike shop, the athletics department, and many others, volunteer to have our teams practice their design skills on challenges they provide.

Sadly, but in this case to our advantage, while we all benefit from the hard work and professionalism of these colleagues, we know very little about how they operate or even who they are. It is a perfect practice environment, with the advantages of access, safety, insider understanding, and, since most of our clients are repeat volunteers, a more forgiving engagement.

Humility comes early in the relationship. After nearly two decades, patterns and repeating moments emerge that the teaching team enjoys watching for. One often occurs in the first meeting between the student team and an SSC partner—the only meeting that a teaching team member also attends. Invariably, the conversation goes something like this:

Student: We would love to accompany you on your workday to get a better sense of what you do.

SSC Partner: Great! When would you like to do that?

Student: As soon as possible.

SSC Partner: We could do it tomorrow. We like to get our work done before the campus gets too busy. We start at 6 a.m.

This incites a moment of student panic and humility.

Almost every student completes the SSC assignment with a new understanding and respect for the people who make their campus experience happen.

Ethics and Equity

The design of the Extreme program brings together a number of activities and interactions that require specific ethical behavior by the student and teaching teams. Responsible and ethical conduct in academic research, particularly in interacting with human subjects, has long been recognized as an area where students and faculty need awareness and constant vigilance. Ethics in Design also focuses on issues related to collaboration with those for whom we are designing but also brings in responsibilities in how we conduct our work, and the ethical appropriateness of the solutions we produce. In a team- and project-based university course, working cooperatively with teammates of different backgrounds, skill sets, ages, genders, and ethnicities requires an ethical response to ensure everyone receives support and proper academic recognition for their work. On top of all those responsibilities, Extreme’s mission to design products and services for the world’s poorest citizens is rife with ongoing ethical concerns regarding whether such a mission is appropriate and, if so, how best to accomplish it. Combining a real-world challenge with a student learning experience asks questions concerning whether it is appropriate to ask partners and their communities of clients to spend precious time and resources helping our teams hone the skills they might need to become social innovators.

That is a long list of important issues for a novice designer to address. We do not claim to be able to fully cover all the ethical issues that arise in our work, but we can strive to provide a solid foundational understanding that students will build on in their future careers.

The initial approach is to provide awareness. For many students, Extreme is their first exposure to many of the ethical considerations listed here, and while it could be argued that some should be part of any student’s concern, some will certainly be new scenarios.

Some initial insight comes from our emphasis on humility and respect for the knowledge and experience of those we are designing for. Some ethical misbehavior stems from the imbalance of power between the designer and their clients. There is an ugly practice of “parachute research,” or in our case “parachute design”—where the all-knowing, tech-savvy, supposedly better-educated designer arrives in a low-resource community, declares what the “obvious” solution should be, and leaves quickly without looking back, leaving the community no better, or, worse, still saddled with an ineffectual solution that at best will eat up scarce time and resources with no result. The humility of our students, their mastery of empathetic problem discovery, and our encouragement and emphasis on co-design are some of the tools we use to avert this behavior.

Building an informed and sophisticated response to the ethical considerations of what we do is hard for students to achieve in a six-month class. Our project partners provide us with many head starts as the students embrace their challenges. The teaching team spends many hours in the fall each year selecting partners and helping develop their challenge statements, including making in-country visits to observe how each partner operates and connects to the communities it serves. One of the many criteria we are there to confirm is how the ethics of the organization manifest in the relationship, working environment, and engagement with the community. As our students get to know both the partners and their clients through available telecommunications and in-person visits, unaccompanied by the teaching team, we want to be sure that there is a healthy environment for the students to inherit.

Another foundational and practical introduction to this topic comes from our friends and colleagues at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, whose mission is to connect Stanford students to community service—locally, nationally, and globally. They have consciously focused on the ethics of their work and that of their students, and since 2002 have produced and regularly updated their Principles of Ethical and Effective Service,⁶ a publication that has proven to be an excellent first step for Extreme students in considering their own behaviors and motivations.

Facilitated by the flexible and dynamic classroom and studio layout possibilities at the d.school,⁷ Extreme classes can take on dramatically different formats and can readily incorporate experiential teaching. In focusing on the ethics of designing for low-income environments and communities, one of our class formats includes a “high school debate.” Groups of students gather around large tables and are tasked with taking opposite positions on some of the most important and current ethical issues within the space. At the end of the session, the class votes on their support for the various positions. At a basic level, this is an introduction to the topic and instills a desire to know more and consider more. But an outcome that surprises the students every year is that there is never 100 percent agreement on any topic. In fact, there are often very close 50/50 results. The meta message is, we hope, that these are complex and multifaceted issues that require constant work.

Like ethics, there are many facets to considerations of equity within the Extreme ecosystem. Some are inherited from the environment in which we operate and are difficult for a small program to affect significantly. Stanford’s faculty makeup and, as an elective class for already admitted students, student body makeup both fall into this category. Luckily, although there is a long way to go, the university, each of the schools we interact with, and particularly initiatives at the d.school are making strides in correcting inequities in these areas.

Within the field of design, and its application to global poverty, there are many inequities for our students to identify, understand, and overcome. The first step is recognition and acknowledgment that it is often as a result of privilege and inequity that our students find themselves at Stanford and in our program. “Designer,” “innovator,” and “entrepreneur” are not career or skill choices that are equally available to all. The role the students are playing as designers of solutions for communities with significantly different access to resources requires particular focus on how they present themselves in any relationship.

We are fortunate to be surrounded by many colleagues who explore these issues in great depth and can share personal experiences and provide guidance and tools to help our students proceed on their personal equity journeys. In one class session, our students hear from designers and practitioners who have personally battled against inequity in order to be where they are today. We encourage students to share their own difficult journeys if they are comfortable doing so.

Early in the students’ journey, we spend time considering how each of us presents ourselves as designers, interviewers, and collaborators, so much of the students’ work will revolve around building relationships of trust, where first impressions, knowledge, and power dynamics will all play such an important role. One by-product of our SSC practice project and other team activities is that when our students are in their ultimate Extreme project team, they have classmates around them who have very recent experience of seeing how they present and operate as design team members. On a couple of occasions during the course, we facilitate an opportunity for students to go back to their earlier teammates to check in on these and other team-related issues on which they might want some feedback and advice. This feedback and advice is peer based, coming from a source sharing the same experiences but, importantly, not from current teammates, where the feedback may be more awkward to give or receive.

The reader will have noticed that there can be strong overlap between ethics and equity and our human-centered design approach incorporating humility and empathy. One practice we encourage that brings these together is the concept of co-designing with the end user or client. As an example of how this is facilitated, we place an emphasis on communicating through low-resolution prototypes—physical artifacts that can be used in discovery, problem definition, and solution development. We introduce the idea of shoulder-to-shoulder meetings, not face-to-face ones, with designer and user side-by-side sharing and manipulating a “conversation prototype”—a low-resolution, clearly low-investment artifact inviting criticism, change, and even rejection without dismissing significant effort or hurting anyone’s pride. Our students learn to anticipate the most important and useful feedback as soon as a user reaches out to take hold of the simple conversation prototype.

Making for Feasibility, Modeling for Viability

Design thinking and human-centered design are often used interchangeably. Tim Brown, chairman at IDEO, distinguished the two, with human-centered design being the creative approach to problem solving and design thinking being the human-centered approach to innovation—finding the sweet spot between desirability, feasibility, and viability (as illustrated in figure 11-3).⁸ Extreme students are presented with this multipronged approach many times, from recruitment information sessions onward.

The early days of Extreme focused on bringing together business and mechanical engineering students to address challenges that might be solved with … well … business and mechanical engineering skills. Over the years, we have significantly widened the scope for both projects and students (as well as increased the numbers of both that we bring together each year). Students now join Extreme from across all the schools on campus, and projects range from physical products to services—although it is our experience that every viable product needs a service component, and every successful service delivery includes physical artifacts.

Since the foundation of Stanford University, there has always been what we might now call a maker space on the Stanford campus. Jane Stanford was adamant that a “Student Shop” be part of the initial infrastructure of the university. Speaking about her recently deceased son, to whom the university is dedicated, she is quoted as saying, “If my boy were still alive, this is where he would be.”

Extreme and our students are privileged to have access to the modern version of that Student Shop, now called the Product Realization Laboratory (PRL).⁹ At the PRL’s multiple campus locations, our students can learn to make things with metal, wood, plastic, foam core, cardboard, soft goods, pink foam, and electronic components. They can glue, nail, weld, form, inject, 3D print, machine, cast, laser cut, sew, solder, and paint. Regardless of their background and major, every Extreme student takes some of our classes at the PRL and is assigned individual and group practice projects that require maker time. Even if one is not already comfortable, crossing the threshold of the PRL and engaging with the very friendly and knowledgeable course assistants more than once is a core part of the course.

FIGURE 11-3

Design innovation: the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability

Why the focus on maker skills for everyone, particularly since many of the projects may ultimately not need complex fabrication? For some, the answer is straightforward. Our student teams have developed many physical product solutions over the years, and continue to do so, from treadle pumps, drip irrigation systems, and crop processing to foot braces, premature baby warmers, negative pressure wound treatment devices, and low-cost nasoendoscopes. For these solutions, clearly a strong product design and fabrication capability is important, but not just for the engineers or product designers on the team. Knowing the capabilities of raw materials and manufacturing processes, calculating costs and resources, and understanding how to cater for device usability are important for all team members if a truly viable solution is to be developed. In a number of cases, the innovation that has made a product solution viable has not been so much its critical function or usable design but how inexpensively or practically it can be shipped and delivered, with last-mile distribution being a big challenge in the markets we design for. The student teams’ insights that dramatically reducing the shipping by volume costs for a stander support for kids with cerebral palsy through designing a collapsible device or modularizing a hazelnut drying solution so it could be transported stacked on the back of a motorcycle through mountainous Bhutan, were the difference between an interesting engineering project and a viable impactful solution.

Many Extreme projects do not need expertise in plastic vacuum forming, TIG welding, or additive manufacturing. Nevertheless, the value of making, or at least thinking and communicating, with your hands is often a novel, instructive, and enlightening skill set.

For their final presentation to their Stanford Service Corps “practice” project clients, the assignment asks students to:

Craft your story and then think about your audience and what medium might help you convey the message best. Because we cannot guarantee AV setups at in-country partner locations, you will be practicing your “in-the-field” presentation skills (i.e., no digital slideshows allowed), [so] bring artifacts and materials that you can display without any digital AV help. Don’t just recreate a slide presentation on paper, develop novel and stimulating artifacts that will help you present, as well as engage and inspire your partner audience.

There is newfound power, freedom, and insight when designing and communicating without a computer, reverting to “arts and crafts” skills that a student may not have used since elementary school. If there is any early skepticism about the validity of this approach, we often refer to the initial prototype for one of Extreme’s earliest successful projects, the tripod treadle irrigation pump (see figure 11-4).

The treadle pump that started as popsicle sticks and dry erase markers has been distributed to over 100,000 farmers in Myanmar by Extreme’s partner Proximity Designs, although it is now being replaced with new technologies such as the Lotus solar-powered irrigation pump,¹⁰ also originally designed by Extreme students.

FIGURE 11-4

Prototyping the tripod treadle irrigation pump

Regardless of the ultimate trajectory of a particular project, we continue to encourage the design ability to build and craft intentionally, often for the purpose of communicating deliberately as a valuable addition to the designer’s tool kit when exploring usability and feasibility.

A possible definition for feasibility as we use the concept is being able to build a single prototype of a product, or deliver one instance of a service, that performs the critical function envisaged. However, for students to be motivated by the possibility of real-world change and for partners to have an opportunity to initiate that change, we need to create viable solutions—for our purposes, solutions that fit within the ecosystem and constraints for which they were designed, which will reach the end users for whom they were designed and can be implemented and replicated at scale to have the impact envisaged. Feasibility is a prototyping journey, but viability is a wider and often more complex systemic challenge, with the added complication of being often impossible to prototype. Consequently, we have to rely on modeling as our design vehicle.

We begin our modeling, perhaps not surprisingly, with an Extreme-modified version of Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas (BMC).¹¹ Many students, particularly those from the business school, are familiar with this tool. In the same way that business students might have relied on their engineering or product design classmates in the PRL, it is now time to pay back the favor.

To start, we use the BMC as an analysis tool. One of our liveliest class sessions is when as a class we analyze a nonprofit business that we are all part of—Stanford University. From there, we analyze business models of organizations closer to our domain. An assignment that gives everyone some fluency with the tools while facilitating their discovery journey is the creation of four BMCs. The students select two organizations that operate in their project’s economy (usually country) but not necessarily in the same sector as their project and then two organizations that deliver solutions in their project’s challenge space but not necessarily in the economy in which the student’s solution will be offered. Using publicly available information, contacts, and interviews, the students build pictures of how viable solutions are delivered and how the ecosystems of the country in which they will operate might dictate aspects of their ultimate solution design.

In the same way that our design thinking abilities are nonlinear, feasibility and viability are approached in parallel. As with the cerebral palsy stander and the hazelnut dryer solutions, viability challenges need to be incorporated into a feasible design at an early stage and are often the key innovation that others have missed.

Conclusion

What proceeds is not an attempt to provide a “how-to” for running Extreme but some of the “why” that has guided the teaching team in their ongoing development and enhancement of the program.

Inspiration and motivation are powerful sources of energy. Ambiguity and constraints turn out, perhaps a little counterintuitively, to be strong drivers for innovation and design. Empathy and humility are the most productive approaches for learning from and creating for others. Ethics and equity are the twin guiding stars of collaboration. Feasibility and viability enable hard work to result in real impact.

FOR FURTHER READING

Design for Extreme Affordability utilizes and applies the tools, methods, and abilities developed at the d.school. Details can be found at dschool.stanford.edu and in the d.school’s publications. Further information on Design for Extreme Affordability can be found at extreme.stanford.edu and on Instagram @extreme_affordability. Some of the early inspiration for creating the Extreme program came from the late Paul Polak and the ideas expressed in his book Out of Poverty (Berrett-Koehler, 2009).

Notes

There is a large community of people who have created, nurtured, and continue to support Extreme, too many to mention here, but some need to be called out. I am joined in the ongoing delivery and design of the program by amazing teaching team colleagues Nell Garcia, Marlo Kohn, Dara Silverstein, Sarah Stein Greenberg, and Manasa Yeturu. Many aspects of the program mentioned in this chapter, such as Stanford Service Corps and Social E Lab, are the creations of former teaching fellow Erica Estrada-Liou. Most importantly, any success we all enjoy is based on the incredible work of the founding teaching team: Dave Beach, Julian Gorodsky, and in particular Jim Patell. Anything important described here is a direct result of these people’s imagination and dedication. Finally, each year approximately forty students suspend a little disbelief and start a journey with us that many of them continue with passion and energy long after our support has faded—thank you for your trust and your impactful work.

1. 1. Stanford Digital Repository, Stanford University Library, https://purl.stanford.edu/bz978md4965. Bringing us right up to date, the words of this Jane Stanford address are still included in Stanford’s annual Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax (IRS Form 990).

2. 2. MiracleFeet, https://www.miraclefeet.org/the-miraclefeet-brace.

3. 3. Stanford d.school, https://dschool.stanford.edu/redcouch.

4. 4. As told to the author by d.school colleague Scott Doorley, who, along with Perry Klebhan and Thomas Both, have the slightly dubious honor of cocreating “the hexs.”

5. 5. Stanford d.school, https://dlibrary.stanford.edu/ambiguity.

6. 6. Haas Center for Public Service, Stanford University, Principles of Ethical and Effective Service, https://haas.stanford.edu/about/our-approach/principles-ethical-and-effective-service.

7. 7. Stanford d.school, https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/make-space-excerpts.

8. 8. IDEO, https://designthinking.ideo.com/faq/whats-the-difference-between-human-centered-design-and-design-thinking.

9. 9. Stanford Product Realization Laboratory, http://productrealization.stanford.edu.

10. 10. Proximity Designs, https://proximitydesigns.org/service/farm-tech.

11. 11. Strategyzer AG, https://www.strategyzer.com.