On Campus Podcast – Human-Centered Learning: The Power of Design Thinking in Higher Ed

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1. Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:06) The host introduces the podcast and its educational purpose.
2. Guest Introduction (00:00:47) Laura McBain is welcomed to the podcast as a designer and managing director at Stanford d.school.
3. Laura’s Background (00:01:02) Laura shares her journey to Stanford and her path into design.
4. Defining Design Thinking (00:04:32) Laura explains design thinking as a human-centered approach to problem-solving.
5. The Sidewalk Theory (00:05:41) An analogy illustrating design thinking through observing traffic patterns on university campuses.
6. Design Thinking vs. Traditional Problem Solving (00:07:10) Laura discusses how design thinking differs from traditional methods and emphasizes community context.
7. Engagement in Universities (00:09:02) Laura shares examples of how design thinking can enhance student engagement in universities.
8. Addressing Loneliness in Students (00:12:11) The importance of creating events to combat student loneliness and foster connection.
9. Applying Design in Teaching and Research (00:13:19) Laura discusses how faculty can use design thinking in their teaching and research methodologies.
10. Co-Creating with Communities (00:16:28) The significance of engaging local communities in the design process.
11. Challenges in Adopting Design Thinking (00:19:08) Laura outlines potential challenges universities face when integrating design thinking into their practices.
12. Small Scale Experimentation (00:21:51) Discusses the importance of small-scale prototypes to improve outcomes for students and faculty.
13. Thinking Big vs. Small (00:22:20) Explores the balance between addressing small issues and tackling larger initiatives in education.
14. Misconceptions About Design Thinking (00:24:04) Addresses common misconceptions about design thinking being a linear process and its true nature.
15. Skills for New Designers (00:26:11) Highlights essential skills and mindsets for those new to design thinking to enhance problem-solving abilities.
16. Embracing Ambiguity in Learning (00:27:40) Encourages students to navigate ambiguity and emotional challenges during the learning process.
17. Future of Design in Higher Education (00:28:44) Discusses the evolving role of design in reimagining educational systems and experiences.
18. Design is for Everyone (00:30:30) Emphasizes the belief that design should be accessible to all, with resources available for everyone.

Ed Butch: Welcome to On Campus with CITI Program, the podcast where we explore the complexities of the campus experience with higher education experts and researchers. I’m your host, Ed Butch, and I’m thrilled to have you with us today. Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not designed to provide legal advice or guidance. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests. With today’s episode, we continue our season’s theme of the engaged university with the topic of design thinking. Our guest, Laura McBain, is a designer, adjunct professor, and the managing director at the Stanford d.school. Welcome to the pod, Laura.

Laura McBain: Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a joy to talk about our work. Thank you.

Ed Butch: Awesome. We’re excited and I’m excited to dive into this fascinating topic. But before we do, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and the path that led you to Stanford?

Laura McBain: I love that question because other folks asked me and it feels like a little bit serendipitous of how I landed at Stanford. I actually grew up in Ohio as we talked about, the university, Oxford, Ohio, but I wasn’t trained as a designer. I went to school and I studied English, political science, and Spanish. Design was not necessarily a degree or human-centered design was not a thing that was offered to me actually. I didn’t have a background in engineering. I have a background in humanities being English and political science and Spanish. So, I ended up falling into teaching actually after I left Ohio and moved to California and started teaching folks in project-based learning, progressive education.

Then about I would say 15 years ago, I started learning about design and I realized that design methodologies or design thinking as some people call them… We just call it design really. It’s like design … was this language that I didn’t know about but was doing. So, design is a way to understand the world, to improve the world, to uncover problems that maybe people don’t see, to make the invisible visible to others. So, as someone who was a K-12 teacher, principal, middle school, and also pretty creative or positive deviant as we say person, I was always finding ways to come up with different ways of approaching things. I had a career in which I’ve had a career where every couple years, I’m trying to tackle a new problem or a new way of doing something or a new skill to learn.

So, when I discovered design, I was like, “Oh, that’s what I am.” It gave me this title or this language of this world that just described what I already was doing. So, I think in 2017, I became the K-12 lab co-director because I had been working on initiatives that were bringing design to K-12 schools. So, I had colleagues here at the d.school and I knew what was going on in that world. So, as serendipity happens, I happened to know the woman that was leaving. Through our work, I won’t go into the full story, but I was at an event, someone said she was leaving, and then I ran into her and she’s like, “Oh, I meant to talk to you about that.”

So I became the K-12 lab co-director and then started building initiatives, community partnerships, training educators. Then since 2021, I have served as our managing director. This is now super meta for the last number of years. I have been involved in really thinking about how do we redesign the d.school for the next 20 years. So, that involves organizational strategy, culture, partnerships, philanthropy, and working across sectors in for-profit, non-profit, government, education, higher ed, you name it, and how we can use design to uncover and tackle big problems facing industries and people.

Ed Butch: Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. Especially you talked about wanting to challenge yourself and building in your career and everything, I love that. I really relate to that as well. So, that’s really fantastic to hear in a really cool career path there as well. You went into it obviously a little bit there, but when we think about design or design thinking, how would you really just define that for someone who’s never heard of it before and why do you think it’s really relevant in a university setting?

Laura McBain: So we say design thinking or design is really relatively simple. It is a way to uncover and approach problems differently, to come up with novel ways of solving them, period. Now most people assume design is around product design or engineering or visual design or graphic design, but human-centered design is really thinking about how we use problem finding and problem solving to really create new things for the world, new systems, new technologies, new implications, new experiences. So, design for me is really about how we live and operate in the world to improve it.

Ed Butch: That’s awesome. Very cool. I think that’s great. I think that’s really important to think about because yeah, especially when you said that you all just call it design in the d.school. I’m like, “Well, I guess when I hear design, it makes me think of some of those other things that you mentioned,” but I think that human-centered is a really important aspect there for sure.

Laura McBain: Yeah, and I’ll give an example just to illustrate it because we all see design in different ways. So, I’m in a university. You’re near a university and design involves really looking and noticing what’s working, what’s not working for people. There’s a lovely analogy that most people have seen, especially at universities, and I know you’re near one, we call the sidewalk theory. So, the best example of sometimes of design is when you’re seeing on a university campus, you’ll see that they sometimes in the best-case scenarios, they don’t build the sidewalks first. Why do you think that is?

Ed Butch: I think I have an idea of this, but is it because they look for the traffic patterns of where people are walking?

Laura McBain: Yup. So, instead of trying to move people to something we’re not going, how do you notice where the traffic pattern, where people are flowing? We build around that. That’s a human-centered approach. Very simple. There’s way more complex design challenges, of course, but I say that as an illustration. Design shows up in so many novel ways around us whether you’re going into the Apple Store around universities, and it really is a way of working with people to tackle these types of problems.

Ed Butch: Definitely. That’s a great example. That’s awesome. Excuse me, you mentioned that as a simple methodology to that, but I think a lot of times when we hear design and design thinking, we think about innovation and innovative practices, right? So would you consider this different from, I guess, more traditional problem-solving methods or are they similar or a little bit of both?

Laura McBain: I mean, it’s probably a little bit of both. I think that design has always been associated with innovation. Innovation doesn’t mean always something creating new. It might be remixing something that did exist for a different context, or it might be putting different pieces together to find something different. So, innovation is always about novel to them, right? Often we often associate, I think, design or design thinking innovation with a tech solution. That’s like the commonplace, right?

Ed Butch: Right.

Laura McBain: Design thinking or design that we think about is innovation is always done in context with communities. That doesn’t mean it’s a tech solution. In fact, it might be a novel way of approaching something that’s happening in a community. So, I lead classes here. Our students work with communities around the globe. We have a class called Design for Extreme Affordability. While sometimes our students come up with tech solutions, many times they’re not.

Many times they’re lo-fi almost solutions that were already in front of them, but needed to go through the process in order to see, “Oh, we should try this. That is the right way to approach this problem, not some app or some type of solution that we think they might want.” It’s something that they can do and they need for themselves.

Ed Butch: Definitely. That’s great. So, I am intrigued. I mentioned as we were starting that the season three of the podcast, we are really looking at the engaged university and how administrators and faculty and staff can really work with students in what they can do to engage the students that they’re working with. So, what role do you really design in terms of making universities more engaged with their communities, especially the students?

Laura McBain: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you an example and any university can do this. I mean, we saw a lot of this during post-COVID or pre-COVID and things like that. One of the big challenges facing universities right now continuing or stating I would say bit large, the US and probably the world a bit even broader, is this question of loneliness, disconnection, connected to our phones. My colleague Seamus here was noticing that. So, he started creating what we call satellite sessions or party with a purpose, which was basically evening events for students to come and gather at the d.school, where they engage in design-based activities that are very future-focused and very cutting-edge and fun. But there’s also a band, there’s also joyful things. So, that experience of oh, there’s a loneliness epidemic.

How do we actually serve students? When you’re thinking about engagement, what does that look like? Are we talking about pedagogy, learning experiences, or are we talking about helping young people connect and uncover the agency that they already have? So design is a great way, and we do it obviously through our satellite sessions, through our classes. Other universities have used it. We have a university innovation fellows program that works with universities all over the globe. We have trained fellows, probably 500 fellows at this point who are basically trying to tackle little, I would say, important problems at the university level with students. Sometimes that looks like student club recruitment.

Sometimes that looks like thinking about faculty mentorship or it could be as simple as, “How do we pay people in 30 days?” Any one of those are design challenges. So, I see universities really thinking about right now we have so many people that have been disenfranchised by universities are not coming. So, what we see, particularly, I love your term engagement, is what is engagement to that student is different. Context is important. So, understanding the human experience that young people are facing as they’re going through universities is paramount to every single university.

So, design, because as we said, is so human centered, it requires us to embody empathy. It requires us to notice how people are showing up or when they’re not showing up. It requires to notice how they’re walking on campus. All of those aspects are really important to thinking about what an engaged university really needs to be and become for our students today.

Ed Butch: Those are some great human-centered examples. I feel like a lot of us, and I say us, having worked at different universities for 15+ years, I don’t think we would necessarily think of college students as lonely, but it truly is, especially I think in these post-COVID times that people just aren’t connecting necessarily in the way that they used to, including college students, high school students, and things like that. So, I think that’s great having those sorts of events and programs for the students there in the d.school.

Laura McBain: That’s one example. I think I see a lot of the universities uncovering ways to meet their students where they are. So, that’s a really simple thing. One of the aims is obviously having a diverse range of students that serve us. So, we create different ways of engaging and recruiting students so that they feel like they are at home here. Sometime that means a pop-up space. Sometimes it looks like mentorship. Sometimes it means actually going outside of our actual buildings and meeting students where they are and deciding for that context.

Engagement, I think to your describing, is noticing where are they, where are the students, where are they meeting? That puts the power on us as faculty to meet them, not demand that they come to us. That’s the shift. I think engaged universities to your title really requires us to think about the mutuality of that.

Ed Butch: Definitely. I would completely agree, but I am interested in looking at that other side though because you did mention it in your previous answer real quick on that teaching, learning, research side of things. I guess, do you have some examples or ways that faculty can apply design in those areas of teaching, learning, and research?

Laura McBain: Absolutely. So, I think that one of the misnomers I think of design is we have design thinking sprints. We have ways of thinking about coming up with ideas, but when you think about what we often call our design abilities, we have core eight design abilities here at the d.school that we use with our students. They’re not about I did this empathy round and then I did this synthesis or I did this ideation process. That is a process that some people will go through. While people might use a process, we notice that that process is not linear. So, when I think about universities, it’s actually like where am I at within my problem finding and problem solving and what is the right ability or scale I need to apply in order to help me get unstuck or uncover a radical way or a new insight?

So our design abilities are really centered on this idea of, number one, how do we navigate ambiguity? So how do we uncover and endure moments where we don’t know the answer or don’t know how to best proceed? That one is paramount to anyone creating, I would say, new innovations, new research, new ways of being in the world. All many universities are research centered, and so navigating ambiguity is paramount for anyone who’s coming up with something new.

Ed Butch: And something we love so much, right?

Laura McBain: That’s right. Exactly, that’s right. So, that is a skill or a mindset that actually anyone can use and we want to talk about it. To your point, we actually want to bring up what you just said is we don’t love it. Well, why? How do you actually hold ourselves through those moments of ambiguity and not just get frozen in a moment where we can’t move forward? So that’s paramount. Then there are many other ones which is like, how do we synthesize information in new and novel ways? How do we experiment rapidly in different mediums so that we’re uncovering new ways of building something? So those are not about just a process that we’re going through, but methodologies or mindsets we can apply at any stage of our research.

So, whether you are a historian or whether you’re a scientist or whether you’re a researcher, the idea of learning with people in their context is a skillset that actually is transcendent through anyone that’s doing something new. So, I encourage people to think not just where do I do a design challenge in my work, but how do I apply and understand what design ability I need to flex right now to help me move to a new radical way or move me forward? So I usually use those design abilities with my classes so that the students are aware of the ability that they want to flex so that they can move forward in their work.

Ed Butch: Right. Great. Well, I feel like we’re really just building out from that individual student to the classroom and to the university as a whole. Now I really want to go out to that town gown relationship. How can universities really think about co-creating solutions with local communities rather than just for them?

Laura McBain: I love that because I think many universities, what you don’t want to be is extractive. I think often in many universities, there is a moment where I’ve got students, let’s just go into the community, and that is the 12th ask the community has had on the same topic in a different iteration, right?

Ed Butch: Yup.

Laura McBain: So you want to avoid that. I think there’s a couple ways to do it. One, acknowledging that, number one. Have these folks engaged with you before? What’s the context? Is it going to be meaningful for them? If it’s going to feel like it’s a freebie and it’s just for the students, that may be not the right time to engage that partner. I mean, that’s paramount, number one is having that acknowledgement of who are our partners, how often we engage them. Again, we want to be mutually beneficial. We want learning because learning is key, but we want to be learning with our partners.

So, what that looks like for us, I would say and I would encourage other universities as well as we think through this and we do this for our classes as well, is how do we engage our partners in the process, not just telling them this is the result. So, for us, that looks like co-design or community-led design where we actually are in the process with our students through the design process with our partners the entire time. What that looks like is not just like, “Hey, here are results,” but actually teaching and working with the community partners to teach them about the design process. So, I’ll give you an example.

In our class that I teach and I’ll be teaching very soon, one of the things that I have my students do is we work with our partners and they spend nine weeks just working with the partners, understanding their problem space so that we can offer a novel solution. But what’s really paramount is actually all the things that we teach in class, I have my students bring that and co-facilitate with the challenge with the partners on that process so that they are actually equipped with the design skills that I’m teaching my student. But we’re building capacity together, not just assuming that universities will solve that for them. So, that is one thing that I do a lot with my students so that the partners are feeling like they actually are learning with the students, not just being an interview partner, a one and done type thing. That always doesn’t feel good.

Ed Butch: That is for sure. That’s for sure. So, obviously, there’s going to be some challenges that happen when a university is trying to adopt some of these approaches. So, what do you think some of those biggest challenges might be for a university when trying to adopt design thinking?

Laura McBain: Well, I think the question is what does adoption look like?

Ed Butch: It’s true.

Laura McBain: I think that most people are like, “I’m adopting this process.” I don’t know if that’s ever a strategy for great implementation. Part of it is where do you want to start? I wouldn’t say just adopt these processes. My colleague Leticia runs a program called TLS, which is Teaching Learning Summit with university partners and university faculty where she teaches universities about design thinking and how we can apply design methodologies. One of the beautiful things she talks about is what she calls it, a sneaky experiment, which is where the small design processes that you can start doing to solve a problem that’s really sticky for folks. So, I think part of this idea of using or applying or adopting is can you start as small as possible? How do you start thinking about just stakeholder mapping, understanding your community partners?

That’s a methodology for design and understanding all the stakeholders that we’ve engaged in our community. What was the success factor? What does that look like? What are the paramounts for partnering with communities? That alone is a design process and that is not launching an entirely new design project across the university. It’s helping us to understand our own behavior so that we can do it better. That is a way you could get started, going back to our community partnership example, or it could be as simple as how do I design, as we were talking about a better way to pay contractors, which is always a process at universities. That’s a finance one. It’s not shiny, it’s not big. But if you get that right, the impact on people is huge.

Ed Butch: Yes.

Laura McBain: How do we understand what does that process look like? And that could be a very simple process. Our colleague at Sevilla in Detroit, one of the things that they did, which I would view with universities is they were looking at signing up for assistance for example. So, they printed out all the pages that all the forms that anyone who’s signing up for assistance would need to do. You can imagine it was like 50 pages.

Ed Butch: Oh, geez. Yeah.

Laura McBain: I would do the same thing with contractors for universities as well, is what are all the steps and can we make that processes more simple? That is a design process. I mean, again, people can adopt them big and small, but I think the way to get started is to start embedding, finding small challenges to solve, and then from a mindset perspective, start to bring in what we call stokes, which is like what’s the mindset we want people to engage in this meeting? That could be deploying some ideation strategies and constraints.

It could be thinking about small prototypes that the whole team is going to do and we’re going to do five different prototypes and we’re going to do them small and then we’re going to come back and learn. That is I think how you get to adoption is small scale experimentation so that people feel like they’re not trying to adopt something new, but we’re inviting them into a way of working that improves the outcomes for students and faculty and community.

Ed Butch: Yeah, I’m sitting here thinking as you’re talking through this, thinking back to my days as an administrator, and I was like, “I would not have thought about that.” We always want to think big. We always want to think, how can I change the entire college, university, whatever it might be. But yeah, just focusing in on one small issue to start, and then ideally, it snowballs that people see how well that one process goes and they want to start and do one of their processes and keeps going and going and going.

Laura McBain: I mean, that’s true. My colleague Scott Doyle did talk of, “What are the minimal problems?” The other way is go really big. Focus on a big problem and bring folks in to tackle in new ways. Again, there’s no either/or.

Ed Butch: Sure.

Laura McBain: But I do think we do want to think about what is right, what’s the flow or scale or strategy we want folks to do? Sometimes you need both, and that’s okay. But I think sometimes we often go to the big thing, and that tends to be with big initiatives, and then it takes a long time. You definitely can use design for those and I encourage people to do it, but I think if we’re talking about, “What are everyday things you can start doing that improve the daily lives of people right away?”, that actually builds trust and confidence in the process so that you can tackle some of the bigger initiatives.

Ed Butch: Definitely, definitely. So, when you talk about this, you’re teaching classes on it, you’re working with other universities. Are there common misconceptions that you hear about design and that you think really should be addressed and talked about?

Laura McBain: Well, I mean I think there’s always a lot. I mean, design or design thinking is scaled for 20+ years, and most people think it’s an engineering process or it’s just linear step-by-step process. I think that’s just farthest from the truth. I think anyone that’s done design work knows that it’s often this squiggle. It’s like you’re in this process. There is a moment where you feel like, “Oh, my gosh. This is really hard. I don’t know the answer.” That is part of the process. So, I think that’s number one. Then the other thing that I think is really important, and again, my opinion on this is good design is equitable. Good design is accessible. Good design serves people. Good design is in community and with community. Good design is not extractive. Good design heals.

I think from a high level perspective, we’ve seen good examples of design and bad examples of design, but when you are actually being a designer, a human-centered designer, you’re always thinking about your own biases, your experience, your race, and how that shows up in your design work. That is paramount, number one. Then you’re always thinking about the long-term implications of your design work. You’re not trying to create something to get the clicks.

You want to be thinking through the first and second and third order changes, unintended and intended consequences of your design work. If you are being a good designer in the world, that is an embodiment of your design work, not just the creation of a tool. So, I think that’s often a misnomer, and I think great designers are always doing that.

Ed Butch: So important, so important. Thank you for that. As we’re closing in on the end here, I can’t help but think about you’re probably teaching some students or I guess faculty and staff as well that are hearing about this for the first time. Are there certain skills or mindsets that you talk to those that are new to this type of process to help them become better problem solvers through this process?

Laura McBain: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I do, one is we show or reveal, not tell. So, one of the key things, and we get many students that are coming in who’s never experienced design. So, a couple things that we try to do is one of the very first things I actually do in my class is because I want them to embrace being a designer, which means navigating ambiguity, that means learning with people, the very first thing that I do is have them actually map out what we call a journey map. I have them map on two different lines one is a learning experience they’ve had in and out of school and what they learned and then I have them map the emotional arc from that experience. So, how that learning moment felt.

Then they build an artifact that represents or a talisman of what they needed in the moment where they felt like it was really struggling. So, part of why I do that is twofold. One is that I remind them that when you’re learning something new, there might be a moment of emotional dip and that’s okay. That’s actually part of the learning process. We talk about productive struggle, Carol Dweck here on campus. I actually remind them of that first and foremost, because humans are learners by default. Sometimes learning is not a linear, and sometimes you have dips. So, that’s the very first thing that I do because I remind them to be in a learning stance if they’ve not experienced that. We all have had those moments in our life.

Ed Butch: That’s for sure.

Laura McBain: That’s the fair amount. Then the other thing that I do is I really get them started right away. I will do small design challenges. How can you reimagine your day, or the common challenge is how do I have a better wake-up experience?

Ed Butch: That should be fun with college students.

Laura McBain: Great. Part of the reason why I do that is they’re everyday problems that people have. They’re universal problems. So, how can I help them use design to tackle something that is seemingly nascent, just getting your alarm set up, but can we work with someone else to uncover new ways of approaching this problem? So even that level of a design challenge, just to get them started in that way makes them realize like, “Oh, I can use design for anything, not just creating this big thing.”

Ed Butch: Very good. Very good. Thank you. So, I guess as we end, I always like to look to the future and things. So, as you look into the future and think more about this, how do you really see the role of design evolving in higher education?

Laura McBain: Yeah, I mean, I think historically across universities, design has been regulated or been part of either the arts program or the engineering school. I think what we’re seeing now, particularly as a higher ed changes over the years, is design is a way of re-imagining experiences, systems, and long-term implications of design. So, yes, we will still have tech, we’ll still have products, but I see design tackling more than just the creation of a new innovative tool or tech. Design is starting to paramount into, “How do we reimagine government systems? How do we reimagine the first year freshmen experience? How do we reimagine applying for student loans within universities?”

Design, I think, is moving from the product design into system design and really finding ways for universities, particularly now where they might feel strapped with resources. It’s happening across all universities. Understanding and leveraging some of the design skills will be a really paramount use because we all have constraints no matter what, physical. So, we’re seeing folks using design methodologies to find a new way to solve something when the resources are limited. So, we’re seeing that a lot across universities right now trying to tackle problems that used to be easy to solve, but now some things have been scrapped. So, how they can use design to help them do that.

Ed Butch: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for this great conversation. You have me thinking about things in my own work and personal life and everything about that and how I need to start looking at some of them. So, I really appreciate it and I hope all of the listeners agree and take something from this as well. Any last thoughts or comments before we sign off?

Laura McBain: No, I mean, thank you so much. I would say the only thing is everybody can be a designer. I think design is for everyone, and I think that is our mission, is we have tools and resources and free stuff on our website because we believe that design can be and should be for everyone. So, that’s part of our mission at Stanford and at the d.school is to provide open source resources so that anyone can jump in. Everything that I just described is on our website for free. So, allowing people to access it and use it in their own context and to make it better for their context is really important to us.

Ed Butch: Fantastic. Thanks so much.

Laura McBain: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Ed Butch: I invite all of our listeners to visit citiprogram.org to learn more about our courses and webinars on research, ethics, compliance, and higher education. I look forward to bringing you more expert guests to discuss what’s happening on campus.