digital products and initiatives focused on the future of learning and design. He co-wrote the book Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration and teaches courses in design communication. His work has been featured in museums from San Jose to Helsinki and in publications such as Architecture + Urbanism and the New York Times.
Carissa Carter is a designer, geoscientist, and the academic director at the Stanford d.school. She's the author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data, and teaches design courses on emerging technologies, climate change, and data visualization. Her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain has earned multiple design awards, including Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards.
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, was founded at Stanford University in 2005. Each year, more than a thousand students from all disciplines attend classes, workshops, and programs to learn how the thinking behind design can enrich their own work and unlock their creative potential.
Armando Veve is an award-winning illustrator whose drawings have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, National Geographic, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and Wired, among others. He studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and currently resides in Philadelphia.
The authors applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford d.school, and reported the following:
A bee. Softly but realistically rendered in graphite and resting at the bottom of the page. That’s what you’ll see on page 99. It doesn’t necessarily belong there, but bees come up a couple of times in the book and, because of their repetition, they became a sort of symbol for the clash between nature and technology. Bees helped us to ask the question: How far is too far when tinkering with the natural world? For a book concerned about the future, and how humans, technology, and nature are colliding, it felt like a good metaphor. And so this page 99, while it contains no text, offers a nice, concise (though perhaps obscure) metaphor for the book. However, what is wonderful about page 99, beyond the image, is that it sits as a bridge between two distinctive aspects of the book: a short piece of speculative fiction and a deep exploration on the qualities of design.Visit the Stanford d.school website.
If you turn back one page you’ll be at the very end of a “History of the Future”—a fiction story tucked among the book’s nonfiction passages—titled “Compassion School.” In it we imagine a time when empathy and compassion are the core curriculum at K12 schools, and high achievers in social-emotional learning are lauded as being the best future leaders. How would the world change if capacity for compassion was the driver of success?
If you move ahead two pages, you’ll be at the beginning of chapter 4, which is titled Make-Believe: Our View Is Limited (Yet We Think We See the Full Picture). At the start of this chapter we introduce the idea of Umwelt (“surround-world”), a quirky word used to describe the quirky ways individuals experience the world through the limits of their senses. All creatures have enhanced senses in some area(s), and diminished senses in others. For example, butterflies can see more of the electromagnetic color spectrum, cockroaches are more sensitive to vibrations, and dogs have a tremendous sense of smell. But all of us–including the butterfly, cockroach, and dog–are stuck in our own sensory bubbles, forever unable to see the full picture. Yet we’re not really aware of what we’re missing. And the point is this (and more): “If we can learn to love the search for what we don’t know and can’t sense as much as we cherish what we think we do know, we may find our way to a thriving future.” Much of the book is about getting comfortable with, and finding opportunity within our own limits.
--Marshal Zeringue
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