Carissa Carter & Scott Doorley: Assembling Tomorrow with Future Visions

How can educators and designers cultivate learning experiences that prepare us for a future that is constantly unfolding?

In a world where the pace of technological change accelerates, what roles do emotion and creativity play in shaping our educational paradigms?

Carissa Carter is a designer geoscientist and the Academic Director at the Stanford D School. Carissa guides the development of the D School’s pedagogy, leads instructors, and shapes its class offerings. She is known for her expertise in emerging tech, climate change, and data visualization and has played a pivotal role in the creation of educational resources that blend design with real-world applications.

Scott Dawley is a writer, designer, and the Creative Director at the Stanford D School. Scott has been instrumental in overseeing projects ranging from books to digital products focused on the future of learning and design. He co-authored “Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration” and has taught numerous courses in design communication.

In this episode, we delve into the heart of speculative design and its implications for education and future thinking. Carissa and Scott, co-authors of the influential book “Assembling Tomorrow,” discuss their journey of writing and their experiences at the Stanford D School. They explore how speculative design can act as a powerful tool in educational settings, allowing both educators and students to experiment with future scenarios in safe and meaningful ways.

Listeners will gain insights into the process of creating a book that not only discusses future possibilities but also actively engages with these ideas through a series of speculative fiction stories. The discussion also touches on the role of emotion and creativity in shaping learning experiences that are not only informative but transformative.

This conversation is not just about the theories of future learning but a profound look at how these ideas are practically applied and continuously evolved to meet the ever-changing demands of society and technology.

[TRANSCRIPT AUTO GENERATED]

Louka Parry (11:03.75)
Hello team and welcome again to the learning future podcast. I'm your host Luke Karpary and today's beautiful episode actually, because it kind of heralds the end of a whole suite of conversations we've had with these phenomenal designers and educators, innovators from the Stanford D school. I'm speaking to the co -authors of a wonderful book called assembling tomorrow, Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter, a guide to designing a thriving future.

Carissa is a designer geoscientist and the academic director at the Stanford D School. She actually guides the development of the D School's pedagogy, leading instructors and shaping its class offerings. She was actually the first conversation with this series with one of her first books called The Secret Language of Maps, How to Tell Visual Stories with Data. And she teaches design courses on emerging tech, climate change and data visualization.

Scott is a writer, designer and the creative director at the Stanford D school and has overseen everything from books to workspaces to 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. And he also has this kind of been his brainchild, like putting together these wonderful Stanford D school guides that we've been profiling now.

Over a whole suite of conversations on this podcast series. So we're going to dive into this and like, what does it mean to assemble tomorrow to kind of think about the history of the future and this gorgeous tone that I have in my hand here as we go to recording. So thank you so much, Krista and Scott for joining us for this conversation today.

Carissa (12:46.488)
Thanks so much for having us, Louka.

Scott (12:48.026)
Thanks so much Louka.

Louka Parry (12:49.592)
It's just great to reconnect. isn't it funny, know, like it's like a history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. know, you end up in the same place, having, you know, like seeing both of you again. I'll start with our first question, which is always where we get started, which is what's something that, that you've been learning recently, maybe even specific to this process of creating this wonderful book here.

Scott (13:14.289)
Yeah, one of the things about working on this book, as you mentioned, Chris and I have both written other books, but those books were really about work that we had done. And then we were capturing it in a new way to share with other people. This book was really about how do we find our way into the future? What are we imagining will come? And that is a completely different problem and a different opportunity.

And I will say it's not an easy one, but it is a rewarding one because you're trying to come up with new ideas alongside other people. And writing can be sort of such an individual sport because it's so much about the way you think and what your mental models are that Chris and I would sit down, we'd agree on something we wanted to write on, and then we'd kind of sneak off and start writing and we would diverge on what that meant to us, you know, our mental.

Chris's mental model of one thing might be one way, mine might be another way, then we'd have to come back together and put those things back together again, which was always a pretty hard process, but it brought us to somewhere that I think neither of us could have gotten to by ourselves. So it really helped us create new material together.

Louka Parry (14:31.095)
Mm.

Carissa (14:33.439)
agree with that and then build on by sharing that we really did the bulk of the work researching and writing for this book over a couple years and those two years were deep in the pandemic and deep in the wave of AI blossoming and it was a time period that both felt really surreal as well as like a real quickening of pace of life and rapid rapid change and

Louka Parry (14:33.648)
Beautiful.

Carissa (15:03.49)
You know, we would agree on what we were gonna write about, like Scott said, and then like something that was a prediction of ours for the future like came, would come true, right? And like, so things that we were just posing as ideas started to come true really quickly. So beyond just working together, it felt like we were like working amongst a new world order.

Louka Parry (15:14.384)
Mm.

Louka Parry (15:24.942)
Hmm. I really think the idea of assembling the future, you know, and, this. A deep construct that we always talk about when we discuss kind of progressive and impactful education is agency. You know, the ability to shape the life you live, the learning you are taking place, that's taking place around you. And tell us a bit more about, you know, the history of the future, because the way you frame the entire book, you know, it's, it's kind of speculative design.

which can be quite unsettling for us because as human beings, like certainty. We like, you know, clarity. We like knowing. And yet in this, future worlds that you've built in this book, I mean, you know, there's who knows what's going to happen. And so that the playfulness that comes with speculative design, take us a bit into the power of actually designing a book from the future as opposed to one even for it.

Carissa (16:21.87)
Oof.

I love that way of framing it from the future and to share with your listeners the way that the book is structured. It's very much a nonfiction book that sets the scene for why today, this day and age feels quite unsettling and messy. And that has to do with how technology is emerging with humans, is affecting the planet. And those three things are really one affecting the other and you almost can't pull them apart.

and there's reasons why that's happening.

We go into why that is, and then we also go into very actionable things that any individual can do to have agency and assemble this bright future that we talk about. But critical to the book, and I think was really honestly the most fun for both Scott and I, was writing these, what we call histories of the future, that are spread throughout the book. And they're these very short, 20 of them, speculative fiction stories.

Each one paints the story of a moment in the fairly near future, 20 -ish years, 50 -ish years from now. And it's our way of allowing the reader to try on some possibilities and see how we like. it like, how do these relationships change when the AI lives inside your brain and whispers to you what to say on a date? How do we like it if our...

Carissa (17:54.583)
genes that we're encoding in the bees that we're programming alter and change on their own. Like, you get to try on the future before it happens and see if you like how you show up. And so for us, that like try on feature is what we mean by a history of the future.

Louka Parry (18:03.408)
Hmm.

Scott (18:13.735)
And I would say too, I'm just reminded, Chris, about how we came up with that idea of sort of retrospective futures, which was 10 years ago now. We were working on a project called Stanford 2025. This was in 2014. And we designing, know, what does the future of on -campus education look like? And we'd come up with all these ideas.

And we were gearing up to sort of present them mostly to the university. So like, know, the university president's coming by, the dean of our department. And then also we're bringing instructors from all around Stanford to kind of think about this problem. And I don't know if you've worked with a lot of faculty members at a university, but they're not like the most open hearted bunch. A few people are going to be mad at me for saying that, but you know, they're trained to have a critical eye.

Louka Parry (19:01.373)
Yeah.

Scott (19:05.829)
So we're trying to figure out how are we gonna get them to accept these like really wild ideas that we're trying to present to them about the future of education. And Carissa just one day like was like, I'm just gonna write in the past tense and wrote like took the ideas and wrote them from the future looking back. So we actually made this whole conceit where, okay, it's a hundred years from now and you're looking back at the changes that have happened since we made these changes that were.

Louka Parry (19:20.088)
you

Scott (19:33.479)
we're promoting or proposing for 10 years from now, right? A little bit awkward timeline there, but, and what we realized was once you can put people in a space where it's a concrete thing, that's a story that's beyond you, it really allows you to entertain ideas that if you just talked about, you just speculated on, would feel threatening or might be hard to entertain. worked like a charm. And so that, was the extension here.

Louka Parry (19:59.878)
That's beautiful. I, it is something that makes it so much more tangible, you know, and you talk about intangibles and tangibles, you know, across the whole board, but this, you know, yeah, like to try on a future, you know, that's a really, that's a really powerful way of thinking. in the strategy work we do with schools, we, we do a lot of, future world building. And so we'd kind of strategic planning like, like if futurists, so it's from the future that we want, you know,

And so often I think it calls us to be bolder because we have to step into discomfort. And I think to your point around faculty in an academy, Scott, where there's a lot of hierarchy structure and there's very clear progression, it's very much kind of linear in some ways. You know, the rigor of thought and intellect is fantastic, but yet it's also, it's held in such a kind of a structured way, whereas

kind of emerging future is always ungraspable in some way. Seems to be the great opportunity as well as the great challenge for all of us. Is there a story for both of you that kind of is your favourite from everything that you've put into this book? Because there really is. I mean, it's very broad, you know, in some of the fictional pieces in particular. You know, it's quite

Carissa (21:11.959)
You

Carissa (21:21.837)
Yeah, we have, I think we both have many favorites and one that I sideways referenced when I was speaking before is one that's called Love Machine. And it's one that Scott wrote that is my favorite because what it is is it's describing there's these two people on a date. Okay, it's just, it's all that's happening. They're on a date and the guy is using some sort of

AI implant to help him know what to say. And that's pretty much all I need to tell you. The rest that I could tell you is that it just goes into the most delightfully awkward and sweaty moments. And if you've ever been in an on an awkward date of your own or witnessed one from another table at a restaurant, what this story does is it

It adds AI to it in a way that makes you question, what are we giving AI the agency to do that previously we had to handle ourselves as humans? And it makes you wrestle with the emotions around that, the social dynamics around that. And it's a very simple setup and a very sophisticated set of ideas to wrestle with. And it's just so funny, which is the best.

Louka Parry (22:25.872)
Mm.

Scott (22:43.323)
And I feel like I can brag here too, because one of the places where we did write separately were the stories. And so I can brag on Chris's stories. there are several, there are two that really stick out to me all the time that I can't stop thinking about. One of which is called compassion school. And it's about, it's the moment where a person's trying to figure out the level of compassion that a young girl has.

Louka Parry (22:57.914)
Mm.

Scott (23:10.361)
so that she can be admitted into this academy that's basically a future academy for leaders. And the entry is not necessarily intellect or achievement in volunteerism, it's compassion. it's just a great idea, first of all. The fact that it just even comes up really brings into question, like, what do we prioritize? And also, what do we not know?

Louka Parry (23:25.498)
Yeah. Beautiful.

Scott (23:39.495)
about being a good leader. Why don't we already judge leaders on compassion? It seems like a mess. And then also just the story is just this wonderful moment of a girl, the person who's judging her and her grandmother that just like you just get into the story, but really forces you to question our priorities a lot. It's kind of amazing.

Louka Parry (23:45.246)
yeah.

Louka Parry (24:03.815)
I think it's a Charlie Munger line, it's show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. And it is something I'd kind of love your reflection on as two people that have been at the forefront of, I would say, pedagogy, design, education, even at Stanford and beyond. Because that point on metrics and measurement and quote unquote success seems to still be the largest issue when we look at.

even at a school level, we're trying to, how we're trying to articulate our future. The academic achievement paradigm seems to have reached its limits. And so, I take note that a thriving future, it's also in our vision, really, like it's thriving. We call it a world, we cultivate a world of thriving learners. That's our vision for the future and helping leaders to lead for the future. And so...

What is one of your, your scenarios where you can see like compassion actually being, you know, more of a metric of success or an attribute of leadership. I, one joke that we have, it's not a joke so much as like a, an interesting provocation is, know, when you drive past a school here in Australia or anywhere else and they show you, know, the number of results or the average.

academic achievement of the cohort and well done to the young people for working really hard. But it always just seems so narrow. And I always say, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had heart rate variability as the average? Cause that's a bit, that's a better predictor of thriving and longevity and vitality than a very smart person that may not actually be very happy. And there's many of them in the world. I'm afraid many of are in leadership positions, Chris and Scott.

Carissa (25:36.546)
Mm

Scott (25:49.958)
I was gonna say, many of them are creating the world, yeah.

Carissa (25:50.432)
Yeah.

Louka Parry (25:53.19)
Especially as we go into 2024 elections. yeah, what's your thinking around that? You one of the future scenarios that has kind of been made possible through this inquiry that you've delved into.

Carissa (25:59.106)
Ugh.

Carissa (26:06.241)
I love that idea of the heart rate variability being what might be posted. And then that's like, it's a super generative prompt too of like, what else could you experiment with posting? I feel like you could take a school that you partner with and have them try things and see what types of reactions you get. mean, you're spot on, right? Like what you choose to measure becomes what gets valued. And that is...

Louka Parry (26:16.497)
Mm

Carissa (26:35.49)
you know, well known and also like if you don't ever measure anything, are you even?

you know, moving in the right direction. But how are we deciding what we measure and why, especially within the realm of education? I think I'm both heartened to see, you know, of course, the increase in social emotional learning type curriculum being something that's valued at least way more than when I was a student. I see it much more in what my my children are learning and what's part of their curriculum and how they're evaluated. And then I also am

heartened and hopeful that we're moving to a world where we value neurodivergence more and not just the people that can consume content through reading and more, you know, a structured day of learning that kind of dates back to, you know, factory, factory systems of education.

Louka Parry (27:33.956)
Hmm.

Carissa (27:37.366)
Because I think we have a huge on tap resource in people that learn in pictures and learn in sound and have mental models of machines that none of us that learn through books and narrative, you know, there's not one way that's better than the other. There's just one that we've taught towards.

Louka Parry (27:53.636)
Mmm.

Scott (27:55.706)
Yeah, and I think that point that when the measurement becomes the goal, that's when you start to get into trouble. As an example with social media, if you're thinking about, I want to see how many likes this post gets, well, that's not a purpose. But then people start to cater toward that, and then you'll do anything to get the number of likes, and then you totally lose your sense of purpose.

Louka Parry (28:22.387)
are

Scott (28:23.193)
And so, but at the same time, as Chris was saying, you need to measure something to know, you know, how change is happening. And I think Louka, your example of heart rate variability, that is a perfect one. It measures these things that we're talking about in the book that we call intangibles, which are sort of the relationships between things and the things that go hidden that we, that are a little bit harder for people to see because they're kind of ethereal and they're kind of pass in time.

Louka Parry (28:39.622)
Mm.

Scott (28:51.578)
But if we can look at those, they're actually the more fundamental things. How do you measure a relationship? How do you measure the change from one moment to the next? How do you measure the mood of someone over time? They're just harder to measure, but they're actually the things that we should be focusing on.

Louka Parry (28:57.659)
Yeah.

Louka Parry (29:12.262)
Beautiful. think of the, we know more than we ever have about the power of relationships, for example, to thrive. In fact, you know, if you look at the Harvard study into adult health, which is, know, the 85 year study now, and it's, it's, a quality of relationships kind of trumps everything. And the, you know, the bad joke is it's better that you smoke and drink than that you're alone. And so the point is don't do those things, but you know,

Scott (29:37.702)
Wait.

Carissa (29:39.778)
Hmm. Yeah.

Scott (29:40.709)
Right? Best if you don't. Yeah, there's some incredible research here by a guy named Jamil Zaki, who's doing research in the dorms here. I happen to be sort of a, I'm a resident fellow, so I live in a student dorm. And he looks at, he has people self -report their connections to other people and how much they feel that relationship is impacting them and how much they're impacting that relationship.

Louka Parry (29:41.776)
cultivate relationships.

Louka Parry (29:51.844)
interest.

Scott (30:07.768)
And this is still work in progress and I'm probably getting it a little bit wrong. So I apologize to Jamil. But what he's finding is a lot of it has to do with your interpretation of the impact that you're having on other people in your network. So the relationship is a lot about like, how much am I helping? Right. And he measures that through these connections and self -identified reports, which is, you know, kind of an advanced way to measure things, but it's hard to see that it's hard to even know that that's the thing that's important.

And we wouldn't always think that making a contribution is a way to feel like you belong more. Sometimes we try to cater to what somebody needs or service them better, but actually letting them participate is often the best way to get people to interact. But it's hard to see.

Louka Parry (30:55.206)
Yeah. I was going to come back to prepositions at that point, Scott, you know, doing things with people done by them instead of done to them or spoken at them, you know, or even for, yeah, the kind of, yeah, absolutely. That's a journalistic view. I have a question on again, cause it's so good having gone into the, all these different future worlds. and it's kind of about the learning experiences that you think are emergent in the future world.

Scott (31:01.52)
Yeah, with...

Carissa (31:02.542)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Scott (31:05.67)
or even four, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Carissa (31:06.7)
Yeah, for them.

Louka Parry (31:25.254)
You know, we're in this moment now and a of the, lot of the conversations that I'm having are really about generative AI. And I was lucky. I hosted a session with Salman Khan from Khan Academy last week here in Melbourne, in Australia. And that was, I was really insightful, you know, with Khan Migo and these tutors and the use cases and all this kind of stuff, you know, like it kind goes back to the Stanford 2025 inquiry, which is what, what might the future of on -campus learning.

look like because it's a question I think that schools in K12 are now grappling with as well, which is what, you know, is it more experiential? Is it more Socratic? Can we do the kind of cognitive development piece augmented with AI? Firstly, what are you what are your kind of your future possibilities, I guess that you've kind of that are in your mind and in your field?

Carissa (32:20.431)
A few ideas. One is it could be much more personalized. And one of the ideas that actually came out of Stanford 2025 is that the pace of education isn't the same for everyone, right? And the fact that you go to...

college usually for four years in your early 20s or late teens. Like, why don't we like radically shake up when that is and learning becomes something that you like not just take in this one dose in our life, but it really is normalized throughout. And I think like that's an interesting place where, where when you are both like ready.

Louka Parry (32:59.216)
you

Carissa (33:07.637)
met like from a maturity standpoint to learn like that varies

Like sometimes you're dealing with the health of a family member that you need to care for. Sometimes you're getting way more out of learning from contributing towards like building homes in your community, helping with a disaster recovery effort, doing something like Scott was referencing of feeling like you're contributing. Like you may get way more out of that than school book learning, but we don't currently have ways of capturing and valuing that. What we do.

is we value when you have a degree that's stamped next to your name. And that's what earns you more. And so we have many societal structures set up that say this kind of learning matters and this doesn't. But I'm very heartened with a bunch of new work that organizations using blockchain and other ways to give credential to.

types of learning experiences and skills that don't, you know, that we haven't ever had ways to value before.

Scott (34:18.887)
Yeah, I think there were actually several things that came out of that earlier 2025 project that we haven't realized yet. Credentialing is one. And I do think that blockchain offers this way to be credentialed that you can prove, but is not necessarily stuck in an institution, which is great. I think the main thing that people think about, particularly with generative AI, is content delivery. And it does feel like...

It's going to be much easier to create content on the fly. It's going to be much easier to customize content. It's going to be much easier to do that. And I think that's really important and also great. And that gets into the pace of education. So my worry with advancements in education is that the goal is just to get through quicker. We even had this idea where people could go through Stanford at their own pace. So one person it might take six months to accomplish a certain, say, freshman year.

but it might take another person three months or 18 months. However, the issue there is there's gonna be a lot of stigma for the person who goes through in 18 months, whereas the other person went through in three, especially around here. And I just think that downplays the value of experience. And we need to really look at like, how does experience factor into education? How does it help you with your maturity?

How does it prepare you for things that you don't know are to come, which is mostly everything now, right? We really don't know what's to come. And sometimes taking a little more extra time, failing in a safe place, you know, there's all kinds of components in there, but I think this valuing of experience and taking time when it's possible, I think we need to think about how we want to expand that and use the advancements to allow for more of that rather than less of that.

Louka Parry (35:58.682)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (36:08.006)
Beautiful. I mean, I'm a bit of a fan of John Dewey. still he was definitely out of his time, but this idea, and I think of Larry Rosenstock, he's a mentor of mine and just say, Dewey or don't we, it's one of his sayings over and over again. just kind of resonates in my mind, but you know, this idea that education is not preparation for life. Education is life itself. And I just think this is like, I think that's what's unlocking and be it, you know, some of the other

Scott (36:24.88)
That's hilarious.

Louka Parry (36:35.878)
great organizations and thinkers we've had on this podcast, you know, the learning economy foundation, Chris, so that you and I both contribute to, know, this idea of unlocking true human potential by removing some of these structures that continually confine us, you know, so that we can be organized and understand. But it seems like, yeah, there's a lot of things unfolding at this point. So my question to both of you is if we're having this

Carissa (36:42.306)
Mm

Louka Parry (37:04.678)
conversation in 2040, because you've gone out, I think it's 70 years, you know, you've gone, gone out to the far, I say far future, you know, some of these ideas, you know, near mid far, to use Michio Kaku's kind of framing. So I just wonder, like, if we have this conversation in, you know, 15 years, even at the Stanford D school, which I think is one of the most wonderfully transdisciplinary learning environments I've ever been able to be a part of.

Carissa (37:13.336)
Mm

Louka Parry (37:33.264)
know, what do think the conversation is? What do think the reality is? You know, what's the kind of world even preferred thriving future that you might put your flag, you know, put your flag onto that hill and say, this is actually what we're fighting for.

Carissa (37:49.038)
wow. So is your question in 2040, what does education look like? Or are you even bigger than that with what does the world look like?

Louka Parry (37:56.166)
Well, let's go to education because the world is like a whole, could go double click on a lot of different components. Education as it's currently, you know, articulated, what if it's 2040, we're having a conversation now we look around what's happening for learners.

Carissa (38:14.862)
Well.

Let me just pick up and I'm going off the cuff here, but let's pick up on some of the threads that we've been talking about already in terms of metrics for things that we're not currently measuring. So are we measuring, do we truly understand what creativity looks like and how are we measuring ingenuity and things that really are new to the world and teaching students to find them? How are we really training

Louka Parry (38:38.31)
Mmm.

Carissa (38:45.706)
people to be in touch emotionally with themselves and with others? How have we learned to sense way beyond ourselves? One of the themes that runs through our entire book is about seeing the unseen.

Louka Parry (39:04.238)
Mmm.

Carissa (39:08.111)
personal learning for me throughout the research and just like side reading and what I'm interested in.

that shows up in this book is around how animals sense the planet. And there's the stuff on the Umwelt, Ed Yong's book on an immense world where he goes into how all different animals use all of these different sensory tools that they have to envision a world that is so beyond what us as humans can take in. And right now I'm Zoe Schlanger's

Louka Parry (39:24.394)
Yeah

Louka Parry (39:42.852)
Mmm.

Carissa (39:47.288)
book called The Light Eaters, which is the unseen world of plant intelligence. And it's like equally blowing my mind with how plants like it may like plants don't have a brain proper. She talks about in here, but it may be that the plant, the whole plant is a brain and like it is just wild.

Louka Parry (39:54.832)
haha

Louka Parry (40:06.138)
you

Carissa (40:09.554)
that there are so many ways of sensing and knowing and existing and communicating beyond the human experience. And I feel like we're going to be able to be so much more in tune with how we show up as citizens of the planet when we're aware of how the rest of the planet is communicating, how it's feeling.

And so that's one of my hopes for expanding our own sensory experiences within the learning environment.

Louka Parry (40:46.182)
Beautiful. Scott, what would you have?

Scott (40:49.411)
Yeah, two things came to mind. First of all, just the light eaters with great title. So good. Yeah, yeah. The light eaters. I love it. Two things came to mind. One was sort of like how technology sort of pushes on.

Carissa (40:55.124)
so good, right? The book is so, I'm halfway through, so like, yeah.

Louka Parry (40:55.364)
Yeah, I know. Sounds a bit strange of things, know.

Scott (41:10.867)
higher education, education writ large, like higher education. don't think higher education has really grappled with the information age yet, which I think is starting to come to a close, frankly. And that is to say that like the access to information, know, universities really just the way they're set up lecture halls, libraries, sources of knowledge, they're really set up to disseminate information, you know, they're teaching and learning. But a lot of it's about really shaped around that content experts delivering content.

You know, I think the information ages upended that and the universities haven't really been able to react totally. Now you've got what it feels like maybe mentorship that's going to be replicated out there. So it's not just that information is being delivered. It's that, that sort of real time guidance. It's almost like the teaching is now out in the world. And that's great for so many reasons, because it helps people navigate the world. It makes things more equitable. It's fantastic. But I wonder.

you know, how we are going to be able to as a university deal with that, you know, like our, our, you know, our kind of thing that we have now is the people and the ability to like grow alongside other people. And I'm not saying technology is going to replace that, but it certainly like changes the paradigm. So I think it may feel a lot different in terms of like coming in and out and you're not, you know, you're not like what it looks like to be involved with the university might not feel like a four year track.

It might feel like, I'm coming here to work on this project or study this thing, and then I'm going to take it out for a little while, but I'm still enrolled, so I'll come back in. And then I feel like the other thing that I, more of like in line with the preferred future situation gets into what Chris is talking about, where it's like we're really looking at what is it that we're developing in people? It's not just about, so.

Louka Parry (42:37.67)
Mm.

Louka Parry (43:01.648)
Mmm.

Scott (43:03.782)
Because contents now can be delivered anywhere and we maybe don't have to be as responsible for the content, what does that allow us to do? And does it allow us to work on these other things like emotion or creativity or the ability to navigate the world and deal with things that you might not be able to predict? That seems like a huge opportunity to me.

Louka Parry (43:22.15)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (43:27.082)
I obviously think about this question a lot. It's kind of the core of our work with the system. I love those responses as well. Scott, one thing that I'm curious about is the frames of reference as well, like the knowledge economy. When people talk about the knowledge economy, I think they are misunderstanding what that means because knowledge actually can be inert. It's actually applied knowledge. So it's a creation economy is the way that I would frame it.

Scott (43:29.111)
I I bet, yeah.

Louka Parry (43:55.94)
And I think that's increasingly the case in the higher education sector shifting into applied sciences for everything. Inert knowledge actually doesn't, there's the law of use, the things need to be deployed, right? Because if we have these wonderfully smart young people, but they can't, they haven't got the enterprise, they haven't got the creativity, they haven't got the, frankly, the design chops often, because designers build things, they ship them.

And that's, think, why both the work that I continue to learn about that both of you represent, think is, how do young people think of themselves as designers, not just students? I'm constantly absorbing. How is that transmuting into a creative act? It's just such a fascinating thing to think about. my gosh, I double click on so many different things there.

Scott (44:47.75)
I was just, just to add to that, I mean, I feel like that's that the students seeing themselves as creators. And of course we work in design. So we're dealing with a lot of students who are coming for that reason, but you see it at Stanford and Stanford's another locus for that kind of activity. But, know, I had a, a student in my dorm who's the president of the sophomore class. So this is a very high achieving student and he left.

Carissa (44:48.448)
hahaha

Scott (45:14.054)
because he was like, I need to be going out and making stuff like I just have to be making stuff. He eventually came back a couple of years later after he went through a startup and didn't go great, but he learned a ton and came back, finished his degree, which is great. But I think there is just this motivation to like, well, and it was almost like he had an anxiety about, I need to be able to be making now because I'm watching my friends over here who are 20 and they're making stuff.

person down the hall is a celebrity online and there's an anxiety about it, but there is just an impetus to really have an impact and make an effect on the world and they wrap their learning in that already, I think.

Louka Parry (45:53.152)
That's a beautiful segue into kind of my penultimate question to you both, which is this idea of a call to action. You you end the book with this call to action of design for healing. And I'd love you to explain why that's what matters. Cause I think, know, users, was thinking human centered design has been co -opted to become user centered design, which has been co -opted to be consumer centered design in some ways, right? That's probably a straight line there.

And that means that's why we are where we are. So why designed for healing and what can we, the people listening and kind of absorbing your perspectives do like what action might we take at this point?

Carissa (46:37.379)
Well, what Design for Healing really refers to is that absolutely everything that we make and put into the world, even if it functions entirely as intended, it will break something. It might break a system that it is nested within. It may affect people's behaviors or feelings. You may not see that.

breakage, you know, right away, it may be 10, 20, 30 years down the line. And by breakage, like that can be catastrophic or that could be subtle. And often when we have a lot of, as makers, like we have a lot of hubris, we, and a lot of hope, right, that my creation will cause great things to happen. And we want that optimism. Yeah, you have to, right? Like that's what manifests it. And what we're advocating for with Design for Healing is that

Louka Parry (47:27.77)
You have to believe it.

Carissa (47:35.908)
that along with that great hope, let's bring through a culture of shepherding what we make into the future and being ready to adjust for those points of breakage when they happen.

Scott (47:51.48)
And the other part of it is that we think of design as the output, you know, like the chair that was designed or the product. And of course, design is also a way of working. It's the process and the practice of getting there. And I think you're seeing a lot of people create in ways where the act of making the thing is actually also an act of healing. It's bringing people together. We have an example in the book from an architect by the name of Francis K. Ray, who's

Louka Parry (47:51.846)
Beautiful.

Scott (48:21.399)
A Pritzker prize winning architect who works in Burkina Faso where he's from, he designs these beautiful schools and hospitals, but he doesn't just leave behind the hospital. He works with local people to help them learn how to design a hospital. So when he leaves, he's leaving behind the ability to create a building, not just a building. And that's sort of what we're talking about where the act of design can be about bringing together.

Louka Parry (48:29.35)
Hmm.

Louka Parry (48:50.128)
Beautiful.

Scott (48:50.456)
rather than just like, you know, creative disruption or breakthrough innovation or those kinds of things.

Louka Parry (48:57.158)
That's so good. just, it does. It feels like so much of it is about paradigm mindset. You know, am I building a school or am I designing an environment in which wondrous creative learning could take place? You know, like that they will end up at a different place, I guess, if you, if you ask a different question in beginning, team, I've got a final question for you, which is going to be like, what's your take home message? And so while you're thinking about that, I'm going to read just

Scott (49:14.916)
Absolutely.

Louka Parry (49:26.032)
the last bit of the book because I just think it's so wonderful. In this quote, there is beauty in enabling others to be beautiful. It's just so, so resonant. I love this piece here. Design belongs to the future. It is always in service of moments to come. Like it or not, the things we create end up there via the most reliable and relentless delivery system. is the passage of time. We are always on the verge of flying apart and always on the verge of beautiful reassembly.

It just gives me kind of goosebumps thinking about the power that we have to create beauty, be that through powerful learning experiences, be that through designing great products that make the world better in some way. so thank you for putting this beautiful artifact together that, that many of us will be able to delight in. what would you like to leave us with and that the people listening to this conversation.

Carissa (50:21.923)
to if I can build off of.

the quote that you just read, I'll say that it references the quote that we actually opened the book with that has guided and inspired us consistently throughout this writing. And it comes from a woman, Katherine Ann Porter, article she wrote called The Future is Now in Mademoiselle Magazine in 1950. And so it's worth remembering that this is the age of the atomic bomb that she's writing this. so she's feeling similarly

consumed by the technologies, their possibility for harm, their impact on the planet, on people. It's not very different from how a lot of us are feeling today about how technology and environment and people are being affected. And what she says is that it may be that what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one still in shapeless fragments waiting to be put together properly.

Louka Parry (50:57.83)
Mm.

Carissa (51:23.074)
that's where assembly comes in, right? We've got the pieces and we have to keep figuring out how they need to be put together. And I think that there's a lot of personal agency in that. And I think that everybody should feel like they're a part of that assembly.

Louka Parry (51:25.369)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (51:38.95)
Beautiful. Scott?

Scott (51:41.036)
Yeah. mean, I'm not sure I can do better than that one. Maybe we should go. Maybe we should just close it there. but if I must, I'll say there, we, we end the book with a chapter about aiming for imperfection. And actually that was, I forget what the chapter was titled before the end there. Our editor actually gave us that title and I was like, wow. Yeah.

Louka Parry (51:43.066)
Yeah, that's pretty good, That was really, really beautiful.

Scott (52:05.216)
aiming for imperfection. And it sounds so strange that you would want to get things imperfect, which implies that you're getting things wrong. But there is something where we are always getting things wrong. And I think it's just important to admit that and not look at it as a detriment, just look at it as a reality. The sun comes up in the morning, we make mistakes. And the idea of aiming for imperfection just means that

Louka Parry (52:07.174)
Hmm.

Scott (52:33.883)
You're not trying to fix things, meaning you're not trying to create something that's never going to fall apart. You're not going to have it fixed. Fixed both means to fix and means unmoving. And I think the idea is that everything's going to keep moving, everything's going to break. And so we just have to be ready to respond to the problems that we create. And we're going to create them. My lunch is these poor

Louka Parry (52:43.162)
Yeah.

Scott (53:02.374)
conscious plants, I'm like cutting half their brain off with my salad. So, you know, even my salad at lunch was as healthy for me as a catastrophe for the plants. you know, like from the other side of things, you know, there's always something going on. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't live in the world. We have to. But we need to just be honest about what we're doing and be ready to respond when it goes the way we're not expecting.

Carissa (53:14.978)
Hmm.

Louka Parry (53:16.134)
Hmm.

Louka Parry (53:30.064)
Hmm. Beautifully. I feel like, I like that it's assembling. It's a constant act, you know, a constant, in some ways disassembling and reassembling of, of what we pay attention to, how we learn, and the future that we want. Thank you to both of you, Carissa, Scott, for spending time with us at the learning future podcast today and for this wonderful book.

Assembling Tomorrow, a guide to designing a thriving future from the Stanford D school, the last in the wonderful D school guides that we've been profiling on this podcast. Thanks to you both. Keep up the great work.

Carissa (54:07.064)
Thank you so much, Louka. It was fun to talk with you today.

Scott (54:09.882)
Thanks, Louka.