Karachi
The secret to success and innovation lies with people who keep learning all their lives as compared to the ‘learned’ since the latter often find themselves in a world which no longer exists while the former inherit the future.
It is the people who keep learning who have the ability to keep up with the times and come up with innovative solutions to problems, said Sarah Stein Greenberg, the executive director of the Institute of Design at Stanford University.
Delivering a lecture at the Habib University on Friday, she elaborated that the design process of thinking combined engineering with the tools and skills learnt from social sciences and the business worlds. She said at the ‘d school’ of Stanford, students learnt both processes together, by deeply understanding the problems first before going out to define it and then provide a solution suited best for the user.
Just before concluding her lecture, she engaged the audience in a little exercise, asking everyone to draw a portrait of the person sitting next to them in only 60 seconds. “Most of you may not know how to draw but you should do it anyway. You will see in the next attempt that you will understand how to draw the person better and will have a better idea of how to sketch that person,” Greenberg remarked.
Elaborating more on the approach of d school, she said students learnt methodology for innovation which combined creative and analytical thinking.
She said that by separating creative and analytical approaches to disciplines and categorising them accordingly wasted a lot of innovative human potential across the world. During her lecture she shared some of the tools and approaches used at the d school to bring out the innovators in students studying even hardcore analytical subjects.
Greenberg explained that the philosophy of teaching at the d school revolved around designing learning experiences and fostered an educational environment that enabled students to go through the process of productive struggle by digging deep into their creative abilities rather than being goal oriented about their GPAs and following the norms.
She also shared the story of Pulse — a famous iPad app which was later bought by Linkedin — designed by two students while spending their time at a coffee shop. She related how one of the students used to be so shy that he had trouble even getting out of his car, and how the process of developing Pulse also transformed into a much more confident person.
Greenberg, an MBA from Stanford University and a BA in History from Oberlin College, has been travelling the world to speak and facilitate groups in using design thinking.
Since 2010, she has been leading the d school that nurtures innovators and produces entrepreneurs. Previously, she used to work in the innovation practice of Monitor Group in the US and India and advised multinational companies on developing innovation capabilities. Her background includes developing new products and services in a number of emerging markets in Asia and Africa.
