David Kelley is the Donald W. Whittier Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, but most know him as the creator of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or simply the d.school. Kelley, who celebrates 50 years at Stanford this year (as both student and professor), presents more like an eloquent historian than an engineering genius. But it should be no surprise that the founder of an institute that invented “outside the box” thinking would be such fun to talk with.  

The founder of design firm IDEO and recipient of numerous honors and awards, Kelley describes his work as“helping people gain confidence in their creative abilities.” He and his brother are the authors of “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” In it, they argue that labeling people, particularly children, as creative or non-creative is as limiting as it is incorrect. In this interview with LearningWell, Kelley talks about the connection between creativity and discovery, how human-centered design is changing the world, and how the d.school got its name.   

LW: I'm very curious about one of the main focuses of your book, which is creative confidence — unleashing the creative potential within us all. What do you think the implications of that idea are in the context of higher education?

DK: Most of my work could be categorized as helping people gain confidence in their creative ability. That would be what I care about the most. And I think we start out by people thinking of themselves as not creative, and I've tried to convince people — and prove — that everybody's wildly creative. They just have blocks in the way of it. So you need to change the mindset from teaching people to be creative to giving them credit that they're already a creative organism and remove the blocks keeping them from doing that. The psychologists call it self-efficacy — that you believe that you can accomplish what you set out to do. I mean, that's just it. Wouldn't you like to give every one of your students the notion that they can accomplish what they set out to do and have that confidence? I really think that's the goal here.

So how do you go about that? The way you go about it, especially with students, is to help them have some success. You set it up so that it's a problem that's easily solved, and you hold people's hands, and you lead them through it, and they're successful at some small thing. Then you do another one, and then you do another one. Pretty soon, people are saying, “Oh my god, I am creative.” So I guess I'll summarize: The main thing about creative confidence is how you help people remove those blocks. And the main reason that they have that block is that they are worried about the judgment of others.

LW: And that has something to do, I imagine, with what they've been told they are, right?

DK: Yes. You do something that's not conventionally creative, or just doesn't seem like it has a direction that's creative, and then pretty soon you're “not creative.” And people hear that when they're nine years old. They hear, “You're not creative,” and then they never address it again. It's like, you try to play the piano, and you're not good when you sit down for the first three seconds. You are not good at playing the piano, so you don't continue. It's hard. Doing things that matter is hard.

"The main thing about creative confidence is how you help people remove those blocks. And the main reason that they have that block is that they are worried about the judgment of others."

LW: So you're encouraging people to have a wider view of creativity and what that can mean?

DK: Yes, for sure. Sometimes, early on — I'm talking about child development — creativity is defined as drawing, believe it or not. If you can't draw well without any practice and you just don't naturally draw well, you're identified as not being creative. Well, maybe this person's musically wildly creative, or maybe they're creative in a different way. So the problem is that, whatever the conventional way of doing something, if you are off that, you're not creative. You're also not conventional. It's a funny dichotomy. But the main thing, yes, is that people are branded as not creative for a bunch of reasons, and we need to see that as wrong. 

LW: It sounds like there's an urgency around this. Because if people are limited in thinking about themselves as being creative, then we have arguably less creative people. Why is it important to have more creative people?

DK: It's only if you care about the future that you think creativity is important. That's how you cure disease and how you make advancements in technology — is people being confident in their career ability and doing new things that change the world for the better. Our phrase that we like to use is: It's your job to paint a picture of the future with your ideas in it. The funny thing is once you can use your creativity and paint a different picture of the future, then everybody else can have an opinion. They can help you. They build on the ideas of other people when they can visualize it — when they can see it. So that ability to visualize the future is inherently a creative task.

LW: Let me ask you a little bit about the founding of the design school.  Can you just give me a quick overview of that?

DK: Back to the notion of creativity — when you have a diverse group of people, you come up with better ideas. You can define diversity in any way you want: age diversity, racial diversity, or geographic diversity. But having those people — the mashup of those different people that come from different viewpoints — greatly increases the probability of you coming up with something new to the world. So that's something I wanted to codify at the university. 

And so basically the notion of the d.school was to have a place that everybody wants to come to. A lot of the classes students take in college are required classes, and so the teacher doesn't really want to teach them, and the students really don't want to be there. I wanted a place where everybody wanted to be there all the time — that they opted into this place because it was so enjoyable, so fulfilling, rewarding, informative. So the d.school is really based on that notion of making a crossroads, where professors and students from all over the university would come together. And I'm so gratified. It turned out so great. And the reason — they all say the same thing, particularly the professors: “When I cross the threshold, I know I'm allowed to act differently here.” And that's just like music to my heart. 

LW: Was it a difficult concept to communicate within the school?

DK: It started out with a bunch of us in a room talking. It wasn't going anywhere particularly, but it got started. And then, fortunately, as we went further along, we had a perfect storm of administration. So we had a department chair and a dean and a provost and a president that all resonated with the idea. It took giving us the donation. I don't know that I ever would've gotten it started if it hadn't been for the generous donation from Hasso Plattner. But the president,  John Hennessy, came to me and said, “What would it take for all Stanford students to be more creative — to be more confident in their creative ability?”

It really helped to have that. I mean, faculty are very siloed and more concerned about their little empire than somebody else's. So getting everybody's attention was difficult. It took a long time to get the place up and running to the point that people were drawn there naturally. But it did snowball. It accelerated beyond my wildest dreams because it turned out to be true — that it was super interesting for these geniuses from different departments to get together and duke it out on different topics. They really liked being there. They liked teaching together. And the way we used to do it before was I'd go in and lecture in somebody else's class, or they'd come in my class and give a lecture. But that's not a collaboration. Once people started to team-teach classes  — somebody from political science teaching with somebody from the ed school or the business school or the law school — when they were actually standing in front of the class together for the whole class, then we knew we had it. That's what we were after.

On a side note, one of the most interesting things that happened was how much the students loved watching the faculty fight. Somehow it was really cathartic for the students. They were used to the sage-on-stage, saying their point of view unchecked by anybody else in the room. So as soon as you get a couple of strong-willed experts in the room talking about a subject and they disagree, it's really interesting. I think, for the students, the faculty became more human to them, and maybe there's not a direct, correct answer to every question. 

LW: I hear there is an interesting story about the naming of the school?

DK: Actually, it is not a school at all. It's completely separate from the academic hierarchy.  I remember sitting around a room — a couple of my graduate students and friends — and we were figuring out how to make this happen. And it wasn't clear. We are a small organization and felt we weren't very well understood. So there was the business school — the “B-school” — that was a really big deal on campus, and to feed off their importance, we decided to call ourselves the d.school.   

LW: That's fantastic! Can you define for our readers what you would call design thinking?

DK: Yeah. Design thinking is just a description of the methodology and process that we use to routinely innovate. The way I talk about it is mostly around human-centered design. So there's plenty of people who have methodologies that are business-based or technology-based, and those are all good, and we employ those. But we seemed to lack a human-centered approach. What's feasible and viable is nice, but what's desirable? How do you make it more useful or convenient for people? How does it fit better into people's lives? To me, that's what design thinking is. It's a human-centered approach. And all the discussion about design thinking is the steps — the methodology — that you use to do that, but it's all centered on: How do you make it better for people?

LW: What has been the reaction to this method at the d.school from the students? 

DK: Well, at first, all of our classes were electives. So the students were choosing something that they were particularly interested in. And by having different faculty, there were two wildly different points of view in the same room. So the students were excited about that. I'm going to go back to the same thing about human-centered design: Everybody can buy into this because it's so human. I mean, we're all humans, and the driving force is: How is this going to be better for the students? Or how is this going to be better for the people we're trying to design something for? That humanness is just really enjoyable.

And today, one of the consequences is that I used to be able to tell the students to design a clock radio or something like that. I'd be shot if I said something like that now. They want to do something that has social value. They want all their projects to be something that's good for the world. And I think that's a consequence of the human-centered approach. What they want to do is improve the lives of people who live in a village somewhere and don't have the internet. As a steady diet, that's what they really want to do, which is encouraging for that whole generation if you ask me.

LW: You've been at this a long time. Any other observations about how your field has changed?

DK: Design was just not a big deal in the world as a discipline. I always say I felt like I was at the kids' table, and then through mine and a lot of other people's efforts, we're now at the adult table. And I think that has to do with our way of thinking — that finding the right problem to work on is as important as the problem we are solving. Before our language, everything was problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And after design started to take off, it was all: What's a project worth working on? Need-finding, more than just problem solving. So that put it front and center: the messiness of trying to understand what people really want, what would make their lives better.

Part of everybody's process now is this human-centered approach where you go out and try to understand — we call it the need-finding —what's valuable to people. It's a messy phase. At most companies, people want to sit there and look at their laptops in a conference room. They don't want to go out into the field and experience what's really going on with people. And I don't understand why that is, but we're getting better and better in that more and more organizations start out by trying to understand what's a good problem to work on by understanding what people really want. And I think that's a consequence of design having more agency in the world.

And I can tell you a million stories. One of the ones that comes to mind with my students is this class called “Liberation Technologies.” They were asked to look at fire prevention in these villages in Africa, and I thought they would end up doing a low cost fire extinguisher. But when they got down there and used our process and talked to the people, they started to realize that, yes, they were afraid of fires, but they're really afraid of losing their documents in the fire — their immigration documents that prove they were allowed to be in this building. And so students changed the problem from fire prevention to document preservation.

Their solution was a pickup truck with a scanner in it. And they went from village to village and scanned everybody's documents and put them up in the cloud. When you have a mindset of understanding what's the real problem by talking to people, then you solve the problem in a completely different way or you even solve a different problem. But for your question, I think that's the contribution of design being in the world and our methodology having some impact.

LW: Do you worry about people making things that aren't good for the world?

DK: We used to teach an ethics class and now there's ethics in every class — to try to understand the consequences of what you're going to do. We have a culture of prototyping, where we take a first pass at what we're going to make, and then you take it out and actually get it into the situation where it's going to be used. So before you've committed to what it's going to be and get it out there, you've seen the consequences of it. Before you commit to doing something bad or something good, you want to know the non-obvious things that are going to happen when that invention enters the world.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.