STANFORD D.SCHOOL · LECTURER · 2009 TO PRESENT
15 years building curriculum for territory that doesn't have a map yet.
How might we design learning experiences for spaces, industries, and questions that don't have established answers?
15+
years on faculty
original courses conceived, developed, and/or taught
3
students in Design for Play alone
600+
students from all 7 Stanford schools in Psychedelic Medicine x Design
41
pop-up prototype courses developed over the years
5+
The through-line
Three courses, three completely different subjects, one underlying design challenge: how do you build rigorous curriculum for territory that doesn't have established frameworks or precedents?
Design for Play, Forbidden Design, Psychedelic Medicine x Design. Each one required making an institutional case for why it belonged at the d.school. Each one turned out to be ahead of where the broader culture was heading.
The organizations I work with today are navigating the same kind of territory: spaces where the old frameworks don't apply and the new ones haven't been written yet. That's what 15 years at the d.school was practice for.
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What I built across this work
The work spanned curriculum design, speaker curation, learning experience design, and real-world project partnerships. Being in the room with students, watching where ideas landed and where they didn't, then refining based on what actually worked.
I built and maintained partnerships with stakeholders across industries: clinicians, policymakers, researchers, practitioners, business leaders, artists. Bringing the right outside voices in at the right moments, and sustaining those relationships over time.
Beyond the full courses, I developed more than 5 pop-up prototype courses over the years, testing new ideas and formats before they became permanent offerings.
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The design challenges beneath all of it
Most curriculum is built around established knowledge. These courses were built around the edges of what's known, requiring students to think well in uncertainty rather than absorb existing answers.
That's the design problem most organizations are actually facing right now.
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Course deep-dive | 01 of 03 | Design for Play
One of the d.school's longest-running and most popular courses. Running since 2009.
Most organizations have quietly moved play to the edges: the ping-pong table, the offsite icebreaker, the happy hour.
Play is the opposite of boredom and depression. When people are in a state of play, their neurochemistry changes. Neuroplasticity increases. They make more connections, think more freely, and come up with ideas they couldn't access any other way.
Design for Play was built on that, and on the conviction that most people aren't unplayful. They've been conditioned out of it.
Stuart Brown, one of the leading researchers in the science of play and play personalities, was part of our core teaching faculty. Having him in the room wasn't a citation. It was a collaboration. Students didn't just play; they understood why it works, which is what lets them bring it back into their work and defend it when someone questions whether it belongs there.
Students work on real challenges. How might we make the designated driver experience more joyful? How might we get more people to sign up as organ donors? How might we get more people to show up and vote?
These aren't toy problems. They're some of the hardest design challenges there are, because the barriers are emotional and behavioral. Play is one of the most effective ways in, and one of the most underused tools for difficult dialogue.
The hardest part of teaching play to adults isn't the content. It's the conditioning. Getting people into a play state in the room is one challenge. Getting them to bring it back to their teams, to be brave enough to try it and trust that the people around them are craving it, is another. The course is built for both.
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Course deep-dive | 02 of 03 | Forbidden Design
A course about designing for systems that don't exist yet, industries that aren't legal yet, and experiences so entrenched they seem impossible to change.
Forbidden Design took on questions most design courses won't touch. Electric vehicles, when they were still on the edge of a very entrenched industry. Cannabis, before legal frameworks existed and the entire system had to be imagined from scratch. Death. Marriage. Institutions so embedded in culture that redesigning them feels almost presumptuous.
My contribution was in the experience design: how students moved through the material, how the learning was structured to hold genuine complexity without collapsing it.
The core question the course sat with: how do you design when there's no established path, no legal structure, no cultural permission yet? That question is as relevant now as when the course launched. AI, longevity, climate, workforce transformation. None of those have maps either.
Students learned to sit with ambiguity and work productively inside it, to think in systems, to prototype for futures that may or may not arrive on the timeline anyone expects.
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Course deep-dive | 03 of 03 | Psychedelic Medicine x Design
Stanford's first-ever course on psychedelic medicine and design. Now holds a permanent course number.
Psychedelic medicine was gaining serious traction in clinical research and policy. The design field had no methodology for how you actually design these experiences well, and no course at any university was addressing it.
I conceived the course, made the institutional case for why it belonged at Stanford, navigated the approval process to earn it a permanent course number, and built the curriculum from scratch. That meant curating 27 voices across the psychedelic ecosystem: psychiatrists, palliative care physicians, therapists, lawyers, policymakers, indigenous wisdom keepers, mystics, economists, artists, and musicians. George Kembel, the founding executive director of the d.school, was among them. Getting those people in the room, in the right sequence, required serious thought about what students needed to encounter and in what order.
41 students from all 7 Stanford schools enrolled. Medicine, law, engineering, humanities, business, education, and design. They came with completely different frameworks and vocabularies. The curriculum had to hold all of it.
The MAPS partnership was specific and deliberate. Students explored how both licensed and traditional practitioners might integrate into a formalized healthcare landscape. You can't design well for a system without understanding all the actors in it, including the ones that don't fit the official picture yet.
One team's work on an ibogaine treatment system for veterans was shared directly with the teams at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a model for how design could help shape emerging psychedelic treatment infrastructure. That happened because the work was serious.
Students felt it. One said: 'I used to think there's no way there's ten weeks worth of information about psychedelics. Now I think it's a huge, complex, beautiful subject.' Another: 'It's been powerful seeing where my cohort and I can be held accountable when thinking of how experiences are delivered in the world. These compounds are part of systems just like the rest of healthcare.'
The course also drew on play as a tool for accessing difficult dialogue. Some of the hardest material, trauma, death, altered states, indigenous protocol, opened up differently when students had those frameworks to approach it without shutting down.
It earned an invitation to speak at SXSW. It now holds a permanent course number at the d.school.