A DESIGNER'S GUIDE TO...

Their plan? This series of small paperback books that share the power of design mindsets and methods with audiences far and wide. The decade-plus history of the Stanford d.school serving people at all stages of life shows there is a real need and a pervasive appetite to cultivate resourcefulness and inventiveness. People yearn for tactics to help them navigate the ambiguous, sticky challenges they face in work and life whatever their field. This is where these guides will live and thrive.

Each handbook introduces an unexpected fundamental, a creative mindset, or practical method that is destined to become a brick in every reader's creative foundation, meeting them where they are with plain language, practical topics, and a wide range of entry points. Each will be as unique as the author who wrote it, so when you crack open the cover, you are as likely to reveal a graphic instruction manual as you are to uncover a new framework for ideas or a philosophical essay. As a set, they are equal parts "how to" and "how come."

The set consists of two different conceptual frameworks: mindsets and methods.

Mindsets help you think like a designer. Guides to things like Make Believe, Heroes, Wit and Patience. This half of the collection uncovers the attitudes that make design special: plucking meaning from complexity, finding novel solutions to sticky problems, and getting cozy with ambiguity.

Methods give you the tools you need to act like a designer: Noticing, Fieldwork, Feedback, Prototypes are just a few. These guides are all about design tactics: how to get smart quickly, how to work with others, and how to bring ideas into the world, well.

The collection will be completed by a book of assignments to compliment the methods and mindsets the guides have taught, as well as a book about the history and future of design, and how we can use it to positively impact our future.

The first book CREATIVE ACTS FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE will pull design assignments from the syllabi of the professors at the d.school, written by the director herself, Sarah Stein Greenberg, to help readers put in to practice the new ideas they have just discovered.

A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF DESIGN will take dramatic license to tell the story of where the fundamentals of human creation are headed right now by imagining a future that is merely an extension of our present. It will identify and untangle the four key elements that are combining now to create a runaway reality of the future: Radical access, Living Technology, The Imaginary Fabric, and Enhanced Intuition. The book will juxtapose the history of design and a "relic" from the future, a designer's handbook that gives clues as to what the future of design embodies to drive home the reality of the strange changes our future faces and ask the ever-urgent question: what are you going to do about it?

While these short paperbacks and accompanying books will be useful for design professionals, they are made for a much broader audience: the curious. Everyone can benefit from an attitude of resourcefulness & inventiveness.