Director, Stanford Joint Program in Design

 

Originally trained as an architect, Banny Banerjee holds graduate degrees in Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Design.  His many interests sent him on a journey that included architecture, structural engineering, adobe architecture and low energy systems in rural India, computer simulation for energy conservation in complex systems, software engineering, mechanical engineering, product design, industrial design, furniture design, interactive art, and design strategy. 

 

Banny Banerjee is the Director of the Stanford Joint Program in Design, and serves as a bridge between the d.school and the design program.  In addition, he heads the “Design for Change” lab, which is aimed at conducting research through design in the areas of sustainability, technology futures, and the dynamics of rapid change.

 

Prior to Stanford, he worked for IDEO, a leading design company in a number of roles.  He has led projects with companies such as P&G, Intel, Microsoft, HBO, BMW, Samsung, HP, Pfizer, and Ely Lilly.  His interests in the confluence between digital and physical experiences took him to Xerox PARC where he worked on ambient media and physical computing.  His engineering experience included working with Jet Propulsion Laboratories on Mars missions.

 

At Stanford, Banny is working on developing radically new ways in which design thinking could bring about rapid change and be directed towards meaningful impact, especially regarding some of the bigger challenges facing mankind.

 

Banny has conducted studies in environmentally conscious design, design semiotics, ambient media, methodologies for human centered design, cognitive and evolutionary psychology in design, MEMS, micro-fluidics, nanotechnology for thermal applications, use of sensors in interactive systems, thin client technologies, and design methodologies for technology futures.

 

He retains an active interest in working with his hands, and in addition to being a proponent of rapid prototyping, likes to work on furniture or sculpture projects in wood, metal, and cast concrete.

 

 

Trends in economic, environmental, and business scenarios indicate an urgent need for creative and systemic solutions to complex multidimensional problems.  Design, with its fundamentally transformational processes offers a potentially powerful way of bringing about desirable changes at highly strategic and actionable levels.  For this potential to be realized, designers need to cast themselves into new forms of leadership and concurrently, decision making in industry and government needs to make the necessary shifts in attitude to allow design thinking to be leveraged in optimal ways.  Designers need to assume the identity and be equipped with the necessary tools to take on leadership roles, and at the same time, students naturally headed for leadership roles need to be armed with design thinking as a core philosophy.  This presentation will discuss how the Stanford Design Program and the d.school are structured towards creating design leaders.

 

 

The rising popularity of the term “Design Thinking” is emblematic of the paradigm shift that the design field is in the midst of.  “Design Thinking, with its simplicity of means on one hand and its efficacy on the other is an extremely communicable philosophy.  Yet it is deceptively challenging to achieve widespread adoption due to forces both from within the field and without.  This presentation will touch upon some of the efforts that Stanford is engaged in, as well as some of the challenges facing widespread incorporation of Design Thinking into education systems.

 

With an increasing need for holistic and multi-disciplinary ways of approaching challenges, Design Thinking is being recognized as being remarkably effective in bringing about meaningful change.  The four areas most strategic to incorporate Design Thinking in are “post-niche” design programs, business school curricula, K-12 education, and Research.  Stanford is working on each of these fronts, and is innovating new methods of creating strategic impact through design.