Eight 2014-15 Magic Grant award winners joined teams from the Class of 2013-14 at Stanford on June 9 and 10 for the Brown Institute’s quarterly all-hands meeting. The teams introduced themselves, their projects, and engaged in a half-day Design Thinking workshop. The session was facilitated by Umbreen Bhatti, a 2013-14 John S. Knight Fellow and a team of three assistants.
A key goal of “Design Thinking,” as developed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (known informallly as the d.school), is to take a user-centered approach to project and prototype development. To that end, the group first engaged in a rapid prototyping excercise to “redesign the breakfast experience.” After taking in the d.school approach, grantees re-joined their own teams to discuss the best ways to apply design thinking to their individual projects.
Ranjay Krishna, is a Stanford computer science master’s student, whose “Visual Genome” project seeks to enable journalists to effectively gather crowd-sourced breaking news images and videos in near real-time. Krishna, pictured below with Columbia J-School alum Adam Golub, said he enjoyed the community building/design sessions and looked forward to applying the lessons learned to his project.