The Origins of Design Thinking at Stanford

In July of 2013, Tom and Dave Kelley spoke at the Media Lab at MIT.  In addition to giving some good material about the core Design Thinking process, Dave also gave an historical overview of the events which led to the formation of the d.school and teaching Design Thinking at Stanford.

Just for reference, here is a chronology of David and DT;

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 1973 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Kelley took a job at Boeing, where he designed the 747's LAVATORY OCCUPIED sign. He then moved to National Cash Register in Ohio. During the 1973-74 oil embargo a rider in his car pool told David about Stanford's Product Design program.  At Stanford, Kelley met Robert McKim, a pioneer in using experiential psychology in design. McKim, John Arnold (ME/Business) and Matt Kahn (Art), had laid the foundations for the Product Design and Joint Program in Design Programs at Stanford in 1958, Kelley earned his master’s in 1977 from the Stanford Joint Program in Design and began teaching design at Stanford.

1978 - Kelley partnered with Dean Hovey to form Hovey-Kelley Design, opening for business above a dress shop in downtown Palo Alto. 

1981 - Hovey-Kelley creates the first Apple Mouse mouse.

1984 - Kelley co-founded Onset Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. 

1990 - David becomes a Tenured Professor at Stanford. (although he did not have a PhD)

1991 - David Kelley Design merges with Bill Moggridge's ID2 and Mike Nuttall, to form IDEO. David co-founds Edge Innovations with Walt Conti and Edge Innovations, a special-effects company responsible for the whales in the Free Willy movies.

2000 - David was honored with the annual Chrysler Design Award and elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which recognized him for “affecting the practice of design.” 

In 2001, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum presented David and IDEO with the National Design Award in Product Design.

2002 - David is named the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering and spoke at TED 2002 on human-centered design.

In a 2003 meeting with IDEO's CEO, Tim Brown, Kelley had an epiphany: They would stop calling IDEO's approach "design" and start calling it "design thinking.” 

"We moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers. We have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before." -- David Kelley

May 2004 -  Business Week's cover article, “The Power of Design,” profiled IDEO and its work helping companies change the way they innovate.’

2004 - David leads the creation of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, known as the "d.school."

2005 - David receives the Sir Misha Black Medal for his “distinguished services to design education.”

2007 - The Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering was expanded to become the HPI School of Design Thinking, cooperating closely with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

2008 - Stanford and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute announce a $16 million research partnership in which they will investigate "design thinking," a methodology that melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative improvement to produce products, services or experiences.

2009 - Kelley is awarded the Edison Achievement Award by the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and experiences for consumers, as well as his development of an innovative culture that has broad impact.”

2012 - Kelley speaks on building creative confidence at TED.

2013 - Tom and David Kelley publish Creative Confidence