Cut out each icon. Glue one icon to one page in your binder/spiral.

Human Centered WHAT Human Centered (often referred to as "User Centered") is a core tenet of the current design process. By "Human Centered" we mean that our design process is grounded in responding to human needs and user feedback. Throughout the design cycle (from inspiration to validation), we seek to engage with the people who will be affected by our designs so we may develop empathy for them that will inspire & guide our designs. WHY We believe that the best innovations arise out of a thoughtful response to stimuli that we as designers are exposed to in the world. Thus, the methods we use to seek out inspiration and to test our ideas and the activities and people that we expose ourselves to are very important. Rather than being focus on technology as a driver for innovation, we believe that people should provide the inspiration and direction for our ideas. The people who will be affected by our work and the people who are experiencing analogous situations to the ones we are working on, are the most important people to engage and stay close to.

Mindful of Process WHAT Mindfulness of Process is one of the key tenets of design thinking. In essence, it is a call to find ways to be thoughtful not only of the work that you do, but of how you do that work, and of how you will improve on your methods in the future. WHY Being "Mindful of Process" makes you keenly aware of what stage of the design process you are engaged in and what behaviors and goals you may have at any given moment (i.e. when you need to be highly generative vs. when you need to converge on a single path). This conciseness can help you guide yourself and your team into interesting areas and can alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with an open and freewheeling process such as ours. In addition, articulating a process allows you to iterate not just on "what you are working on" but on "how you are working on" it.

Culture of Prototyping WHAT The mindset of creating and maintaining a "Culture of Prototyping" pushes us to design ways for the community to stay experimental, to build to think, to engage people with artifacts, and to elicit and receive feedback in a way that will help us learn more about both our designs and about design thinking. WHY An attitude toward prototyping preserves a highly flexible stance as you develop your "product", allowing you to make changes on the fly, to learn along the way, and to incorporate those learnings into new ideas as you develop increasingly higher resolution models.

Bias Toward Action WHAT We feel that "Bias Toward Action" is a core principle or mindset of design thinking. In the most basic sense, it means that we promote action-oriented behavior, rather than discussion based work. WHY We see action (e.g. getting out and engaging users, prototyping & testing) as a way to get a group unstuck, to inspire new thinking, and to come to agreement as a group.

Show Don't Tell WHAT Let me tell you about "Show Don't Tell“: Show your design don’t tell people about it. WHY Visual thinking is a grounding tenet of the design at Stanford, thus visualization is already engrained in our design thinking psyche. Why? Expressing ideas in a non-verbal way, makes ideas more compelling, helps us see problems & opportunities that discussion may not reveal, it leads to fruitful misunderstandings, and by creating an artifact, it helps groups come to agreement design decisions. As principle, "Show Don't Tell" takes traditional visualization one step further, including sketching and traditional prototyping and adding digital communication and good storytelling to the mix.

Radical Collaboration WHAT The Q is a place for people from disciplines that promote vastly different thinking styles to work together. WHY We hope a shared process -- a shared working style and shared intent -- can help harness the power of bringing different types of thinkers together.