When I was in business school, Stanford’s d.school was just a glimmer of a thing living in a trailer across campus, barely known to most of us business students. Five years later, there is much discussion in the business world about design’s evolution from producing of objects to producing a broad framework for ideas and solutions, including recent thought-provoking commentary from both Paola Antonelli and Bruce Nussbaum. Before coming to RISD, I loosely understood “design” and “design thinking” as a methodology focused on ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, and iterative process, already married closely to business innovation. To me, a designer’s tools felt like the combination of social science and business that had attracted me to product marketing: conducting user research, defining a product, testing it and revising. I remember going to a design strategy conference at IIT and being struck at how similar it felt to market research conferences.