Friday was a rather eventful day, and I didn’t even have to step foot inside the office (hence the blog entry about Friday today). Before I left for the evening on Thursday, Christopher mentioned that we’d be heading down to Palo Alto in the morning for the Opening Day of the d.school’s new digs (Building 550, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford). MINE™, if you recall, recently completed a project for the d.school, which I, and many others in attendance today got to see for the first time.

So on Friday I met Christopher outside of Building 550 at 9:30am (I decided to commute by train + bicycle) and we signed-in and got assigned to teams. I had initially thought I was going down there to hear some introductions to the new building and to meet some people, but I soon realized I was wrong. (I should have known better from description of “d.school hootenanny” in the studio’s calendar.) I was now the newest member of “Team 7″ and was being directed to quickly customize my name tag before joining the rest of my team already underway upstairs. For the next 3 hours I got to experience a good dose of design thinking fundamentals in the form of a hands-on design challenge dubbed “Reboot Camp.” My team consisted of a Clorox marketing person, three Stanford professors, and of course little ol’ me, Intern™. Through a flurry of idea generation, rapid note-taking, strategizing, prototyping, testing, revision and reflection, we participated in a project centered around engaging 10,000 kids for 90 minutes a day over the entire summer, as part of a volunteer program. One of the coolest parts of the challenge was having a group of 5th graders come into the room to test out our prototypes and give feedback.

After lunch we attended a small workshop conducted by the editors of Ambidextrous, Stanford’s Journal of Design. There were about 10 of us at this particular workshop, and the goal was to redesign/rethink the magazine specifically for someone else in the room. We paired off and had 5 minutes each to interview the other person. Based off this brief exchange we then had 10 minutes to quickly sketch/construct a prototype of our customized magazine. I have to admit, at first I was a little nervous at being put in this situation with such a small amount of time to work, in a small space, knowing that I’d then have to get up and share it with working professionals. But what nerves did exist quickly dissipated as we got to work and I realized there was absolutely no reason to be nervous. Not only did it turn out to be a fun exercise, but we were given a boxed set of all 12 Ambidextrous magazine issues as a gift. Nice!

To top off an action-packed Friday, we all gathered in the large central hall toward the end of the day and were ceremoniously recognized as co-founders of the new d.school building. Tears were shed by many in the audience (not so much by me, though). Next thing we knew it was 5pm and time to make the trek back home. It was definitely an interesting event to take part in, and probably a bit of an atypical first full day of an internship.