Sublime

“We teach how to use design to figure out what you want to be when you grow up.”

The result of the program is a set of reference applications rather than reference customers.

opportunity. In this environment, the participants all stand on equal ground—no one is assigned to the traditional role of teacher or student. Instead, anyone who has particular knowledge of, or experience with, a given subject may take on the role of mentor at any time. Mentors provide a sense of structure to guide learning, which they may do by l

productive way to push back.

Ask for Help. The last mind-set of design thinking is perhaps the most important, especially when it comes to designing your life: radical collaboration. What this means is simple—you are not alone. The best designers know that great design requires radical collaboration. It takes a team.

When working with senior designers from IDEO, sometimes called the world’s most influential design company, I was amazed to see how much time the designers spent up front, before beginning a project. “The quality of the creative design process,” one IDEO leader explained to me, “is a function of the quality of the problem statement that defines you

(The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—a multidisciplinary hub of innovation at Stanford where all the classes are based on the design thinking process).

Some people use the term design sprint rather than discovery sprint, but as the purpose of the work—when done well—goes significantly beyond design, I prefer the more general term.

Aesthetics involves human emotion—and we’ve discovered that when emotions are involved, design thinking has proved to be the best problem-solving tool.