The Joint Program in Design offered Master of Science degrees for those pursuing an emphasis in product design through mechanical engineering, while the Master of Fine Arts degree was for students creating graphic and visual designs through art. Yet the d.school, an interdisciplinary collaborative workshop environment that does not grant degrees, began in 2005, almost fifty years after Stanford’s Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Art created the Joint Program in Design graduate degree. The d.school’s founder is alumnus David Kelley, who also applied design thinking to the corporate world’s challenges through his company IDEO, a global design powerhouse. “ Design thinking has become a familiar term to people who have never heard of the design discipline.” It is hoped - even promised by those most evangelical about the approach - that design thinking can tackle society’s most intractable problems.ĭesign thinking is a concept whose origin story is largely associated with Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design - the “d.school” - for emphasizing design’s iterative process across academic disciplines. In design thinking’s broad purview, lay people gain abilities in creativity, problem-solving, user-centeredness, the iterative process, feedback loops, prototyping and other aspects of thinking like designers. “Design Thinking” has emerged over the past decade as the design discipline’s major movement, the darling, to a degree, of education, corporations and various institutions. ![]() Their ideas influenced Stanford design alumnus David Kelley whose company IDEO brought design thinking to corporations and institutions globally. Three engineering professors in particular developed concepts in “creative engineering,” “visual thinking,” and “conceptual blockbusting” that will be shown to be foundational to design thinking. The d.school was preceded however by decades of curricular innovation, studio practice and research by faculty in Stanford’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Art as they hosted the Joint Program in Design. The biosafety and social implications of the application of genetic engineering to forestry are grave enough to warrant both an immediate halt to releases of GM trees and renewed attention to the social, historical and political roots of the tree biotech boom.The methodology of Design Thinking is pervasive across design disciplines, and to some degree business culture, with many crediting its origins to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design - the “d.school” - at Stanford University. ![]() ![]() Trees’ long lives and largely undomesticated status, their poorly understood biology and lifecycles, the complexity and fragility of forest ecosystems, and corporate and state control over enormous areas of forest land on which GM trees could be planted combine to create risks which are unique. Yet in many ways, genetic modification in forestry is an even more serious issue than genetic engineering in agriculture. In these respects, the issues raised by GM trees are similar to those raised by GM crops. ![]() That entails alliance-building with groups working against or outside that tradition, from seed savers to communities battling encroachment of industrial tree farms on their land. Tackling the challenge GM trees pose means tackling the industrial and bureaucratic tradition which seeks the radical simplification of landscapes. These processes are also riven by dilemmas and destructive tendencies which chains of technical refinements, no matter how long, are likely to be powerless to overcome. The processes through which genetically engineered trees are being developed are profoundly biased against social arrangements which promote and rely on biological diversity.
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