Designing Autonomous Car to Human Rituals

In Jan 2018, we will be teaching a 2-session pop-up course, partnering with Stanford Center for Design Research. In this pop-up, we will be focusing on the human to machine rituals. We welcome students who are interested in how to create rich interactions in untapped territories of robots and artificial intelligence, and who want to explore humorous, strange, magical, and curious ways to do so.

The class site is here.

Read our write-up of the results of the class –– how people think of their relationships with future smart cars, and what types of interactions help them build trust, control, and understanding of intelligent, autonomous cars.

Ritual Design for Orgs: Team Life Cycles

In October 2017, we will be teaching a 2-session pop-up course, partnering with Microsoft. In this pop-up, we will go after rapid ritual design sprints and look for the high emotional energy zones within teams. We welcome students who are interested in how to create stronger cultures in their own orgs and companies, and who want to explore humorous, strange, magical, and curious ways to do so.

The class site is here.

Read more about what we found in this class write-up of organizational rituals.

Rituals have a special power to bring people together and give them a sense of purpose, values, and meaning. Especially in the realms of sports, politics, and religion, rituals unite people and bring out deep emotions. How can we harness this power of rituals in other kinds of organizations?

In this pop-up we designed new rituals for a company, to explore how design methods and creative improvisation can help us craft more meaningful culture. Students worked in teams to rapidly prototype new rituals for our partner, and they learned video storytelling techniques to capture them. We welcomed students who are interested in how to create stronger cultures in their own orgs and companies, and who want to explore humorous, strange, magical, and curious ways to do so.

See what we created at our write-up here — with lots of videos!. We also have a piece on our process in the class, where you can see a lot more details.

While building on the entire design process, in this class the focus was on developing strong definition and ideation skills and using advanced tools such as experience/user journey mapping, abstract laddering and storyboarding.

We have a write-up of this class, with several of the designs and what we learned.