ABOUT
👩💻 Type: Independent Study
💡 Role: Researcher
🗓️ Timeline: March - June 2023
D.school Launches New Design Major
During the 2022-23 academic year, Stanford’s Design Institute (d.school) relaunched the undergraduate Product Design major as Design. As part of the new major, students get to choose a “Domain Focus Area” which gives them the opportunity to explore an intersectional field where they can leverage design to tackle challenges.
The initial set of Domains were: Climate and Environment, Living Matter, Healthcare and Health Innovation, Oceans, and Global Development.
When the new major launched, many students expressed frustration that they didn’t feel like the Domains represented their intersectional interests. The Domains felt like something that had to do rather than wanted to do.
I experienced this frustration firsthand while declaring Design, and informed by my experience and what I was hearing from peers, my friend Isa and I proposed, launched, and ran a research project focused on bridging the gap between students and the faculty shaping the new major.
Partnering with the d.school
We partnered with Kelly Schmutte, the Undergraduate Degree Design Lead, to align our work with the needs of the d.school. With Kelly, we formulated research questions and a timeline to ensure that our work could build towards something that would be implemented.
BEGINNING WITH Quantitative Research
We began by building and launching a large-scale survey to get a birds-eye view picture how students felt about the Domains. To gather responses, we visited each Design class offered in spring quarter and design-related student organizations. We gathered over 100 responses from both prospective and declared students.
Some of our most interesting findings centered on how the Domains influenced students' decisions to declare, with most students responding that they were either "Unsure" or that they "Would not major" in Design because of the Domains.
Going in-depth WITH QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS
We synthesized the survey responses to identify different profiles of students who we wanted to talk to through more in-depth conversations:
1. Undeclared underclassmen who are interested in Design and evaluating different academic paths
2. Students who felt negatively about the Domains, even to the point that they might not choose Design
3. Students who felt positively about the Domains
From this, we scheduled hour-long interviews with 10 students and created an interview guide to dive deeper into how they were navigating their major declaration decision, what they view as the purpose of the Domains, and how they would structure their dream Domain.
Once we concluded interviewing, we combed through the interviews and grouped quotes into higher-level findings. This process helped illuminate and personalize much of the survey data we had collected.
Domains do not feel additive to education
The scope of each Domain doesn't feel equal
Students really love the Design community
OUR INSIGHTS
By synthesizing both the quantitative and qualitative data that we gathered, we arrived at three main insights to help direct our solutions.
Students understand the goals of the domains but feel that the function is misaligned with purpose.
Students are eager to put in large amounts of effort towards projects that they care about.
Students want to design the world they want to live in.
A MENU OF NEXT STEPS
We created a series of design principles to help direct our solution formation and to eventually help stakeholders evaluate our recommendations:
1. Faculty involvement: We want to rally support from tenured faculty in connected departments to extend the reach of the Design program.
2. Support for students: Create better systems and scaffolding to support students
3. Manage friction: Make the major attractive to students but also maintain design as a community of people who care deeply
Drawing together our insights and design principles, we created a menu of possible solutions to address students' pain points. These solutions were meant to be stackable — not mutually exclusive.
1. By expanding course options within the domains, students will have greater autonomy to select courses that they are truly passionate about, helping Domains become something that students want to do rather than have to do.
2. Domains that speak directly to student interest should be added (i.e. fashion, fine art, education). Though this is a bigger lift than just adding course options to existing Domains, it is a long-term vision as the program scales to ensure that it reflects the areas that students want to engage in.
3. An honors thesis Domain would cater to the students who are passionate about diving deeply into an intensive, self-driven project and who want to work closely with a faculty member.
PRESENTING TO DESIGN LEADERSHIP
As a culmination of our work, we presented to the Undergraduate d.school faculty and Domain Leads, who are the group of professors from other departments who shaped the Domains.
We used our presentation time not only to share our research work but also as a hands-on studio space to iterate on directions for the future-state of the domains.
Below are some images of an ideation exercise we did, thinking through different metaphors for the Domains.
IMPACT
Our findings and recommendations were used as the foundational research to refine the Domains.
As an intermediary step in Fall/Winter 2023, we launched a petition process to give students a formalized way to customize the existing Domains towards their interests.
Then in Spring 2024, we entirely restructured the Domains to make them more customizable and flexible to student interests. They are now "landscapes" that include sub-disciplines that students can select classes from based on their interest. Explore the new Domains here.