RAD Team

The RAD Team: Nicola, Amanda, Anja, Marilyn, Adam

Marilyn Cornelius is co-founder of a venture that focuses on creative problem-solving at the nexus of climate change, wellness, and education. In March 2013, she completed her dissertation in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford, where she specialized in applying behavioral sciences and design thinking to energy use reduction. She was a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. She co-taught a design class in Spring 2011 (ME/ENVRES 380: Collaborating with the future: launching large-scale sustainable transformations).

Amanda Cravens is a nearing-the-end E-IPER PhD student whose research focuses on designing and evaluating visualization software to support collaborative environmental decision-making and conflict resolution processes. She was introduced to user-center design methods in a previous life as an information architect and web editor. At Stanford, she has had the chance to deepen her understanding of design thinking through d.school classes and the RAD project. Her dissertation combines a design perspective on crafting collaborative software and policy processes with an analytical perspective that seeks to improve methods for evaluating the use of decision support tools in marine policy.

Nicola Ulibarri is a PhD Candidate in E-IPER, a Stanford Graduate Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow. In her first quarter at Stanford, she took the d.school’s Design Thinking Bootcamp, and quickly saw the potential for d.thinking in her research. While Nicola’s research interests don’s sound too design-y – she studies the role of collaborative decision-making in river management, with the aim of understanding whether collaboration affects the environmental outcomes of management decisions—she uses design thinking regularly to address the day-to-day challenges of interdisciplinary research.

Adam Royalty is the Lead Research Investigator at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Prior to this role he helped found the d.school’s Environments Collaborative and K-12 Lab. Besides designing tools that allow people to gain confidence in their creative thinking, he works as part of REDlab in the Stanford School of Education to understand the impact of design thinking. Using quantitative and qualitative methods learned through his degrees in Math and Education, Adam started the d.school Measurement and Assessment projects that aim to map the impact design thinking has on people’s creative potential.

Anja Svetina Nabergoj is Assistant Professor at University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Economics, where she teaches design thinking and entrepreneurship courses. Her PhD research was on collective learning and innovation. Recently her research is focusing on the impact of integrating design thinking into entrepreneurship curriculum. She has been visiting at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) since March 2010. At the d.school she co-teaches ME380 Large Scale Transformations class, Executive Education programs and facilitates various workshops. She is one of the founding members of Research as design team. The idea for integrating design thinking into scientific research came on one hand from hew own exploration of how to better foster creative confidence in relation to scientific research and on the other hand from advising PhD students, who often struggle with the less tangible aspects of their research process that is rarely discussed or presented in graduate literature and courses.