Name: Bernie Roth
Age: 82
City: Stanford
Position: Academic director, Stanford d.school
J.:
You’re a mechanical engineer, but as a co-founder of Stanford’s d.school, you teach “design thinking.” What is design thinking, and how is it different from simply “design”?
Bernie Roth: Design itself is a funny word: It usually connotes stuff. We’re using the same methodologies and ideas, but we’re not necessarily applying it to physical things. People said, “Can’t you help us design our organization?” “Can’t you help us lay out the emergency room in a hospital?” So we use the term “design thinking.” We’re training design thinkers who are using this method for anything.
What’s an example of how design thinking might be applied in a non-traditional way?
One thing is pregnancy. How do you make women’s lives better during pregnancy? That might not involve any new accoutrements. It might involve scheduling visits to the doctor, or giving the husband a bigger role.
Another example would be getting more sleep. Or how do you handle obesity? How do you handle teenage pregnancy? Any behavioral thing can be designed and improved by using the ideas of design thinking.
It starts with empathy, getting to know the person you’re designing for and getting to know what their actual needs are, even though they might not know themselves. Then you don’t sit around and think, you start to do. You know you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to have failures. The idea is not to be discouraged by the failures, but to learn from them. Usually people are phobic of making mistakes. Design thinking is more open to a flow, learning by doing.
Why do you think design principles are flexible enough to be applied to so many problems?
Every field can grow from its traditional boundaries and apply its principles to other things, and that’s what’s happening. Traditionally, these things have been done by economists and anthropologists. Now they’re done by teams of people that have professional designers in them.
Design thinking is very popular now. I don’t know how long it will last. It’s a very useful technique for problem-solving in all sorts of ways. It isn’t a magic thing that always works. It’s a useful mindset of problem-solving.
You grew up in the Bronx. What was your Jewish upbringing like?
My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. They spoke Yiddish at home, and Yiddish was my first language in some sense. They weren’t religious; they were socialist types of people. They were active in unionism. We had a Jewish culture in that we celebrated the holidays, but not from a religious point of view. After school, I went to a Yiddish school where I learned to read and write Yiddish. I can’t say I was very serious or a very good student. I was probably a pain to all the teachers. I do speak Yiddish, and I enjoy once in a while meeting someone I can speak Yiddish with. I just went to hear some songs from a Jewish cowboy, a guy up in Petaluma. He sings Yiddish songs, and I knew some of them.
Your book, “The Achievement Habit,” gives life advice based on design principles. How did your experiences as a teacher influence your thoughts in this area?
I was educated in New York City in a very traditional mechanical engineering role, so I started to apply that when I came to teach at Stanford. But my students were just floundering around. They were good technically, but there were things like divorces and suicides going on. I thought I should give them an opportunity to improve [those] parts of their lives, also. People [back then] always wanted to start companies, but they never did because it was a different world. [I wanted to help my students] take responsibility for their lives, implement what they wanted to do and stop pipe dreaming. Small successes led to bigger successes. I developed a course that the book is based upon.
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