Sarah Stein Greenberg on Creative Acts for Curious People

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should read next, playlists, and much more. Check it out at GettingSmart.com. Alright, let’s get to the conversation. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Deric, and today I’m joined by Sarah Stein-Greenberg, the Executive Director

of the Stanford Design School, the D-School, and she’s the recent author of Creative Acts for Curious People, How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Sarah, welcome. Thanks so much, Tom. I’m super excited to be here and to talk with you today.

It’s awesome to have you here. The only thing that would be better would be meeting at the D-School, because it’s a very cool place. I agree. We’ll have to get you back down to the D-School at some point in the near future.

Now that we’re just starting to return to campus and students are there and faculty are there, it’s definitely starting to come alive again. Sarah, we’d better tell our listeners that don’t know, what is the D-School? Who’s it for? Who attends?

What kind of degree and non-degree programs do you have? The D-School is an unconventional institute at Stanford in that we serve students from all over the campus. Stanford has seven different schools and we offer electives to students who are enrolled in any program, any part of campus.

Our faculty also comes from that wide array of disciplines. We teach a human-centered design methodology, which really is a mix of both problem solving, which many people are trained in, regardless of the disciplinary background that you have. Design really includes a fair amount of emphasis on problem framing and problem finding. That balance is really what creates the new opportunities that you often see come out

of our classes. That special attention to, hey, are we solving the right problem? Do we really understand the needs from the end user standpoint? Have we understood the systems where these needs are merging or have been for a long time?

And then this special blend of disciplinary perspectives that come from all of these different students. When you get a group of students who are coming from education, hand engineering, and business, and medicine all together on the same team, they just look at these opportunities in new ways.

That’s really one of our main areas of focus. But I’ll also say that we have a lot of programs that are aimed also at people who are working professionals, so folks who are leaders in the education sector, in the nonprofit and social sector more broadly, in more corporate environments, and also in higher education. Your book opens, talking about the D-School, you say, our purpose is to help everyone

unlock their creative abilities. We cook up special ways for people to interact with each other. I love that summary. Yeah, I really do think about it as a lot of what we do is we just set the stage for behavior change, for people to step into new ways of interacting.

And so much of creative work is really about riffing off of what somebody else is putting out there. Whether that’s you’ve created a prototype and you want someone’s feedback on it, or as Steven Johnson says, you have a hunch and your hunch gets married up with somebody else’s hunch and together a really interesting new idea is created.

And that interaction is sometimes kind of constrained in a lot of environments. And so, yeah, like a lot of our learning experiences are designed about how do you actually help those new kinds of interactions emerge from a team or from a pair. I’m an engineer by original training, and so I think I got a pretty good grounding in computational thinking.

But design thinking, as you said, is different in that it really values the front end and the empathy for a group of customers or a community being served or to be served. Is that fair differentiation? Yeah, I think there are a few areas that design kind of really focuses in. So one is exactly what you’ve just said.

It’s like instead of maybe from a straight up engineering perspective thinking about, wow, what innovation could we create based on this new technology? Right? We have the ability to do something. Let’s figure out what we can do with it.

Design instead really says, well, what are the needs of the people who you might then serve with this new technology? But also maybe there’s a different technology or a different way that the solution might be configured. We often go into a project with the solution or kind of agnostic as to what the solution

is. Actually, that’s a challenge because there is a huge temptation just as a human being. We’re all wired to be problem solvers. So jumping to that solution mindset right away is very, very tempting. There’s a lot of methods that we use that are kind of about training yourself to suspend

that instinct to really jump into the solution until you frame the problem really from the user’s perspective. And often in the kinds of work that we do, the students are having to balance between multiple end users, multiple different perspectives and stakeholders. And so all of that framing gets more complicated in these kinds of open-ended, quite ambiguous

challenges that we like to have students really sink their teeth into. I’ve been wondering for years if design thinking is a methodology or a mindset. Your book may have an answer to that question, but your book also suggests that it’s a tool kit, a set of tools that can be used by groups to frame and address a problem. So is it a mindset, a methodology or a tool kit or a bit of all of those?

It’s a short digression, I will just tell you, that our academic director at the D. School, Bernie Roth, who’s this kind of legendary professor at Stanford, he’s been there for many, many decades. He has a saying, which is just, I’m with and. Bernie is like the really sort of, from a philosophical standpoint, he often kind of

rejects like it’s an either or it’s a but. So he’s all about and. And that’s really the first thing that came to mind when I’m thinking about your question. I actually think it is a methodology and it contains some very important mindsets. And there are a lot of useful tools and methods.

But I think one of the things that I’m trying to express through the even the structure of this book is there is no one set process that you should feel like you need to follow when you’re using design. That’s not really how it’s practiced in the real world. And so although many of us kind of learn one of the various different kind of orienting

frameworks, right? Maybe it’s the hexagons, maybe it’s the double diamond, maybe you like to think about it as an infinity loop or a circle and all of those frameworks are great mental models for thinking about its iterative, its nonlinear, right? But what it comes down to is, can you adapt a process to suit the actual project that

you’re working on in the moment? And so what I wanted to focus on in this book is really the underlying skills and a lot of the different learning experiences that we offer at the D school that help prepare you to do that adaptation, to be more fluent and more confident in your ability to kind of show up to the next problem that you face, even if you haven’t seen it before and feel

ready and feel like you know how to get started and how to navigate. Sarah, we appreciate your application of design thinking tools and methods to public policy. I think that’s a new development in the last 20 years. Is that fair? Yeah, that is fair.

And I’ll say, you know, this is a place where I feel like I keep trying different experiments to really figure out what is a contribution that I can make through design in my teaching or in what we’re doing at the D school. And so I’ve tried a bunch of different things in the policy arena. One year I co-taught a short class with a faculty member who’s a political philosopher

named Rob Riesch. We taught a class that was about designing around bipartisanship. That was a really worthwhile experiment. We obviously did not solve the entire problem, but it was illuminating and it was great to engage the students in that.

And then I worked on a class with another set of faculty, Jeremy Weinstein and Megan Palmer and Eric Olsen, that we really framed around design thinking for public policy innovators. And at the heart of this was we were trying to figure out, you know, there’s a lot of new emerging technologies where the ideas and the things that the technologists are working on are kind of outpacing what policymakers can figure out how to regulate, right, or

know how to regulate. And so we were exploring that topic through the lens of design. What other behavioral mechanisms could you try to create that might actually be kind of unconventional in a policy world, but still could help get the right behaviors going? Then more recently, a project very close to my heart that we ran last summer was just

around designing for a healthy election, right? This was like an election that happened in the midst of a pandemic. How could we actually design the in-person voting experience and support all of the incredible election administrators out there across the country doing heroic work to try to prepare the polling places in the safest way possible?

So those are three very different applications. But I just really continue to be fascinated by this space. There’s been a tremendous uptake of design into government entities. And I think we’re kind of just at the beginning of seeing where that could go and how that’s going to evolve.

What does equity have to do with this? I think your colleagues in the K-12 may have been part of launching liberatory design. They’ve added some components, some steps to try to more fully incorporate equity into the process. But how does equity fit in here?

Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different ways you can think about equity and design. One is, as you mentioned, what are the aspects, what are the methods, what are the practices you’re embedding in the heart of your design work with your teams, with yourself? And then it has to do with understanding your own identity and your positionality. Who are you?

How do you and your personal experiences relate to the problem at hand? What are the power dynamics in the situation? That is a really important component. There’s also the question of who’s on the design team? Who are you thinking about?

Who’s voice matters? And there’s a lot of design work that has happened in the past where even if the end user was considered at certain moments, there wasn’t solid representation of people who really have the lived experience of the situation, making the decisions around what the design was going to be.

And there’s a really powerful quote in my new book that comes from Liz Ogbu, who’s an incredible architect. And she really talks about this idea of having two clients in any design work that she does. She has the person who’s paying for the design work, but also the people who have to live with the results of her design work.

And she puts in tremendous effort to make sure that those voices are really the ones that are elevated because they are often systemically the folks who have the least power. But then the third area I’ll say is also that you can think about design as one way to try to reach more equitable outcomes in the ecosystem that you’re designing within. So Sam and other folks from our K-12 lab for the past year or so have been working on a

program across Northern California with a whole bunch of different school districts. And all of those districts kind of came to the table with a particular equity challenge in mind, given how much the pandemic was exacerbating certain challenges for underserved communities. So just I’ll give one concrete example of that work. The Sam worked with a school district, I think the Fairfield, Suisse and school district,

and they were really looking at issues that facing unhoused students or students who were facing housing instability, again, exacerbated by the pandemic. And the group is quite interesting. It included folks from the district, folks from the county education office, even folks from the local police department and other social services providers.

And through their design work, they have come up with a couple of ideas that they’re piloting and testing. One is an afterschool space where students who are experiencing housing instability can gather, can have a place to do homework, and actually even be connected to some employment opportunities.

And another is like a really solid collection of resources all in one place to help both families and their students navigate because previously this information and resources were distributed across all of these different offices. So that was a great example of where this group really formed around a premise that was about, hey, can we make some progress in the equity issues that are facing this particular subset

of our students, even though we’re also experiencing this pandemic and all of these issues are really quite difficult at the moment. And it’s very exciting to see the work that they’ve done. Sarah, I like tools. And so I get excited when I go to Home Depot and I go to the tool section.

And I had the same experience reading your book. I was like being in the tool section going, this is so cool. It’s just the book is chock full of super practical, creative, interesting tools to help groups better understand, frame, and solve problems. So I’ll mention a couple, if you want to pick a different one, but I love the photo of your

fridge example as an opener. I love the wallet swap, but that made me really nervous. Maybe talk about your, what were you trying to do in terms of sharing those kind of super practical, interesting, creative facilitation tools? Well, I’ll go a little deeper into the fridge example just because we can’t just leave that

hanging in the air. I love that one too. So that one was created by a lecturer and a former fellow at the D school named Leah Ramirez Sebert. And she was working with a group of folks who were tackling issues around obesity.

That is a big topic. So she wanted a way for people on those teams to actually start to build some rapport because trust and rapport are so fundamental to any kind of creative collaboration. But she wanted it to be just not like an average ice breaker. She didn’t want to just do something fluffy at the beginning.

She wanted to start to have a shared language around food and food habits. And so she developed this assignment where she had everybody bring in a picture of the inside of their refrigerator and then share it with somebody who was a total stranger on their team. And that was really the first interaction that she used to launch this.

And you could look at those photos side by side. You could start to ask some questions. And so many interesting stories emerge. It’s about culture. It’s about that recipe that got handed down from your grandmother.

It’s about not having enough time to get to the supermarket. It’s about, you know, in some cases, like the shame or the stress that we feel that when we’re not eating healthy, whatever that means to you. So that’s a great example of one of these very practical but kind of disarmingly powerful ways to get people to start to open up, to start to actually build some of that trust.

And that’s really what I’m trying to do in each of these. So there’s over 80 of these assignments. And actually they all come directly from the classrooms at the D-School. So all of these were developed by someone who teaches at the D-School or who studied at the D-School and now teaches in some other contexts.

And each of them is really a combination of like, here’s the learning experience you can go through, here are the skills that you’re trying to develop, but also the why. Like why is it important to have trust and rapport with a teammate in a creative project? Why is it important to hold space for someone when you’re interviewing them? Why would you ever ask somebody to hand over their wallet as the first time that you’re

interacting with them in a kind of introductory design experience? So I’m trying to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and help people understand some of the philosophy and some of the ideas that go into the D-School pedagogy. I would love to dive into building this book because it’s a crazy interesting collection of tips and tools.

And I’d love how you acknowledge your colleagues at the D-School. Every single chapter opens with an acknowledgement of one of your colleagues’ work. So how on earth did you compile and edit and arrange and sequence and illustrate all of these? Tell us about building this book.

Well, I’m so glad that you picked up on that acknowledgement because it was really important to me to find a way to really show that the D-School is such a creative community. It’s not just a few individual superstars. It’s like this just incredible bench of brilliant inspired educators. And so every assignment came out of either something that I’ve seen someone teach and

just thought it was completely transformative or a set of nearly 100 interviews that we conducted. A couple of years ago to try to start to build the repository that would ultimately result in this book. And in those interviews, I asked people to talk about, you know, what’s your favorite assignment that you’ve ever created?

Or what’s the assignment that you’ve taught that has provoked the most controversy in your class among students or resulted in the biggest transformation? Because I was less interested in sort of comprehensiveness in terms of any one particular methodology and more interested in trying to foreground like what makes for a transformational learning experience in a design context.

So that’s the 80 or so that are in the book are the results of that process. And then I did try to find the right balance between methods that you might use early on in a design project or kind of in the middle or later on. And I’ll say one more thing just about how it’s organized. It really is kind of organized in a sense in the way you might encounter from front to

back these these experiences in a D school class. But you do not have to read it from front to back. In fact, I expect very few people will. So you know, you might be interested in sharpening your powers of observation and noticing and there’s a whole cluster that is related to that, or you might be interested in figuring

out, you know, how do I really push myself to try to build? My my ideas into a physical form so I can share them and get better feedback. And there’s a whole a whole cluster for that. And there’s a whole section that’s really about working on ethics and equity and really understanding the implications of your design work as well.

I appreciate you mentioning your lens. I know from your Instagram account, you’re quite a photographer. You like birds and marine invertebrates. I thought about that when I was reading the widen your lens section of the of the book, you had some really great tips for helping people sort of reframe how they’re experiencing a problem.

Is that something you think about in your work? Yeah, I mean, I really I open that chapter by talking about my obsession with scuba diving and and photography underwater. And, you know, I use sometimes a very wide lens. And what’s what’s kind of thought provoking about that is that you have to actually get

quite close to a subject. If you have a wide lens, even though you’re trying to get this whole landscape, you’re also really up close with something. And it’s I think that balance. It served as a metaphor for thinking about in design, you focus right up close on the

the critical details and you need the ability to kind of pan out and really understand the landscape and the whole space that you’re designing in the history, the social forces, the stakeholders. And so design work in a way requires you to kind of toggle back and forth between that really close up view and that really abstract, distant view.

And I think that’s a that’s an important idea for folks to adopt. You know, the best designers that I know have that ability to kind of go back and forth between those two those two perspectives. I loved Chapter 41. It’s called Everyone Design.

So I love that ethic and it opens with a thought from cream colleague, whose words embody an essential design principle that design is about being intentional and deliberate. Just invite you to think about everyone designs and then this act of intentionality. I mean, I think intentionality really is at the core of a lot of design work. It’s like that ability to step back and to think about what am I doing and why at just

about every step along the way. And Karim, you know, has this perspective that like there’s so much clutter in the world, right? There is actually so much that’s kind of done in an unintentional way. And his goal as an educator and a designer is to inspire more of that intentionality.

And that, yeah, that quote from him, I think is really, is really powerful because it’s it’s something that we believe everyone can do, but not all of us do on a regular basis. So if these assignments inspire folks to be just like one click more intentional, I will be, I will be so, so excited and happy. We’d love to have the book ends with a set of reward projects.

I guess it wouldn’t be a D school project. If it didn’t, but super practical examples. What could you tell us about those reward projects at the end? Yeah, so, you know, in our in our classes, students are learning through all of these different assignments, but they’re doing it in the context of some of these, you know,

like holistic design projects. So you might be working on a project that’s around working partners, you know, around working partnering with a service organization at Stanford, like the grounds keepers or the maintenance folks and trying to actually solve some kind of problem or challenge that they’re facing.

Or students might be working in one of our classes on partnering with people who have experienced a disaster, like a natural disaster, like a wildfire, for example, and figuring out what are some of the financial tools and services that they need and that banks or insurance companies could be providing to people who are who have experienced that kind of calamity in their lives.

So these are really challenging kind of messy open ended problems that we love and design. They don’t have one right answer. And that’s what really allows students to start to step into that ambiguity and to figure out, oh, these are kind of these are the problems that I’m going to have to navigate throughout my career, throughout my life.

And this is a really powerful way to start to learn to apply my creative abilities. And so that last chapter is a collection of some of those assignments and project briefs from over the years at the D school. And then surrounding those examples are some thoughts about this kind of behind the scenes mechanism that we use in design, but we don’t talk about a lot, which is

about framing and scoping a problem. Right. And the way in which you frame and scope a problem, one allows you to figure out, can I, is this tractable in the time that I, that I have and with the team and the resources that I have, that’s kind of the scoping part. And the framing part is about how constrained is this?

Is it just for one very particular defined user group or do I find who it’s for along the way? Do I already have a sense of what the solution space is or is it wide open? And the way in which you start to develop the facility to frame your own, your own projects, that’s kind of, it’s almost a graduation step.

It’s like when you actually start to have some more mastery over, over the way in which you can apply design then in all kinds of different contexts throughout your life. We’re talking to Sarah Stein Greenberg about her amazing new book called Creative Acts for Curious People. Sarah, many of our listeners are educators.

How could you imagine teacher leaders making use of this book? Well, one assignment that comes from our K-12 team that, you know, maybe some of your listeners are already familiar with is the practice around shadowing a student. So this is a practice in which an administrator or a teacher, some, a school leader really steps into the experience from bus stop to bus stop, pick up to drop

throughout the entire day, really understanding what is it like to be a student in my school? And often when folks do this, you come back with this huge range of insights, you know, ranging from like, wow, you know, we’re asking our students to sit too much. And that’s physically uncomfortable. And that’s getting in the way of learning.

Or one example that’s in the book is of a teacher who did this and then realized like, we are not representing our student work in a powerful way. They can’t see themselves in our school on the walls. And so she came up with this idea for kind of a gallery experience for student work. So all kinds of different opportunities are spotted.

But I’ll also say that I think there’s some other assignments that are really useful for folks in leadership positions in general. And one of the ones that I just love is about how to give feedback. And, you know, a lot of us who are leaders or managers, we have to give feedback all the time. And this is less about like performance feedback and more drawn from

the way that we give feedback on creative work, where what you’re trying to do is to support someone to do their best work. But you’re also you’re evaluating the work, but you’re not actually evaluating the person. And you learn how to separate those things so that everyone can focus on the work. And I think that assignment is particularly helpful for anybody who’s trying to create a

more creative culture in their school or in their organization, because it puts a lot of the agency in the hands of the group rather than just of the leader. Right. If the leader is the only taste maker, the only evaluator, you’re narrowing sort of this your sensibility as an organization. And so I think that one in particular could be really useful to somebody who’s trying

to like lift up a bunch of different voices about, hey, what does good work look like? What do we actually want to see from the kinds of programs or changes or offerings that we’re creating in this school or in this organization? Can you imagine ways that a school might be different and better if it more fully embraced design and design thinking and its learner experience?

I mean, I think that, you know, students face a set of challenges that are probably pretty unlike what any of us who are in the teacher leader positions face, right? Whether it’s just like the role, the time in which the time in your life during which you’ve experienced this crazy pandemic or the experience of growing up in a fully digital world.

Students today are really, I don’t want to say they’re different, but they have their own set of generational experiences. And so I do think that the ability to really think about the student as having an important perspective and thinking about what is a truly student-centered learning environment look and feel like, that’s where design can really, really

come in handy. And the other thing I’ll just say, you know, really inspired by that work that I mentioned before with all the districts in Northern California is having the, you know, thinking about education as not just the province of a school, but it’s situated within this broader community of practitioners.

And so the way in which you might configure a design team that includes those multi, it’s that multidisciplinary principle, right? If you include people who are stakeholders from across the range of services that a young person might be encountering, that just opens up a totally different set of possibilities for the solutions that you might design.

So I think that, you know, that’s kind of an ambitious goal to aspire to is like how can design actually help fuel some of those new kinds of collaborations. Sarah, I want to go back to your opening comments about the importance of problem finding and problem framing. I was back in schools last week and I saw a lot of

problems handed to kids on worksheets where they were very defined tasks. They were small, defined tasks. And your book really says the first task is to identify a problem worth solving and then to frame it accurately with empathy for people experiencing that. So I’m wondering how more schools could invite more young people into problem

finding and problem framing. That’s uncomfortable territory for us as educators because it’s wandering into areas that where we really don’t know the answer to the problem. But thoughts on how kids could get exposed to big problems without easy answers, problems that might not have been framed.

Yeah, I mean, one great example that has stayed with me for a long time. There was a fellow that we had at the D’squanney Melissa Pellequino, who has a long background in education. And she had this really amazing approach where she basically created design challenges with her students around the books that they were reading.

So she was working with a set of remedial readers. They were reading a book about bullying and she used that as kind of the empathy work, trying to figure out, OK, how could she get the students to name the challenges that they were seeing in this story and then design solutions around that? So she found this very elegant way to actually kind of stick with the core of her remit,

right, which was the, you know, she was really working on reading, but also to invite this level of engagement with her students that was completely open and completely about them connecting to what they found meaningful in the content. And I’ve always just loved that example of like, it doesn’t mean you have to build a design center.

It doesn’t mean you have to completely change all of your pedagogy. But can you find those small opportunities to build more agency in for your students to get them thinking about what are those problems in the world that they might frame and then run these kind of short problem solving experiences for them to sink their teeth into? You must have had some design anxiety about this book,

like being the director of the D school and doing a book about design. This book had to be really cool, right? Tom, it’s like you’re in my brain. So, yeah, I mean that like I one thing I’ll just say on a kind of a personal note, you know, this is the first book that I’ve written and I have quite a strong inner critic

who really likes to pipe up at really inconvenient moments, like right when I’m sitting down to try to like get a whole chapter done or something like that. And I’ll tell you that what I found really helpful was actually writing down what my inner critic was saying to me and just being able to externalize it and then be like, oh, OK, I understand.

She’s really worried about being really rigorous and she’s really worried about being original. Well, let me get, OK, now that I understand that, I will I know how to attend to that at a later stage in my process to make sure that this is going to kind of meet those criteria. So I learned a lot about how to work with my my own inner critic. The other thing I just say is like back on the theme of collaboration,

this book was such a team effort. So Charlotte Burgess Auburn was a really important collaborator, our illustrator, Mike Herschin just did genius work in terms of like trying to express all of the emotions that are at the heart of doing creative work and learning in these new ways. And so, you know, the final product is this, you know, tremendous group effort.

Annie Marino, who is the book designer, I mean, just like the whole team and with the publisher was incredible. It was an incredible collaborative process to get this get this made. It’s beautiful and useful and inspiring. And we’d recommend everybody get it. We’ve been talking to Sarah Stein Greenberg about her cool new book called Creative Acts

for Curious People. If you lead a team, if you’re going to lead a meeting anytime soon, if you lead a school, if you lead an organization, you will love and use this book. It’s the kind of book that you will throw in your backpack and read when you’ve got eight minutes between meetings because you could read it frontwards or backwards.

You could crack it open and find useful stuff. Everybody needs a copy of this. Buy one for your kids. Get one for your friends. Creative Acts for Curious People. It’s it’s really terrific.

Sarah, thanks for your contribution and for being on the Getting Smart podcast. Thanks so much, Tom. It was such a pleasure. Hi, I’m Tom Van Der Rijek. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to everybody on the Getting Smart team for making this podcast possible. Thanks to our creative director and producer, Mason Pasha.

Keep learning and keep innovating for equity. See you next week.