Earlier this week the NY Times had a nice overview of Stanford’s D.school and its design thinking approach, which includes:

  • Building students’ “empathy muscle” by getting them “to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.”
  • Encouraging students to “create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.
  • Challenging students to “start small” and gain confidence before moving toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems.

Check out the full article on the NY Times site.