People
Faculty Advisors
Faculty
Erin MacDonald
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
Erin MacDonald is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in the ME Design Group. She received an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan; and a BS with Honors in Materials Science and Engineering from Brown University. She was a Sloan School of Management Postdoctoral Associate and Mechanical Engineering Instructor at MIT from 2008 to 2009 and an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University from 2009 to 2014.
MacDonald spent several years designing hiking products before returning to graduate school, and holds two patents on consumer product designs. She is the 2012 ASME Design Automation Committee Outstanding Young Investigator, a Big 12 Faculty Fellow, and a former NSF Graduate Fellow. MacDonald’s research integrates concepts from psychology, economics, and marketing into engineering design methods to better represent the user, an effort she terms “quantified cognitive empathy in design engineering.” A main goal of her research is to increase the sustainability of products and technologies by improving the representation of the consumer and other stakeholders in the design process.
Erin MacDonald
Faculty
Sean Follmer
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
Sean Follmer is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in the ME Design Group. His Research in Human-Computer Interaction explores the design of novel tactile physical interfaces.
Dr. Follmer received a PhD and a Masters from the MIT Media Lab in 2015 and 2011 (respectively) for his work in human-computer interaction, and a BS in Engineering with a focus on Product Design from Stanford University. He has received numerous awards for his research and design work, such as Best Paper Awards and nominations from premier conferences in human-computer interaction (ACM UIST and CHI conferences); a Fast Company Innovation By Design Award; a Red Dot Design Award; and a Laval Virtual Award.
Sean Follmer
Faculty
David Kelley
Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
Founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Stanford University
Founder and Chairman of IDEO
David Kelley is the Donald W. Whittier Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in the ME Design Group. He’s also the Founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and the Founder and Chairman of IDEO, a leading design and innovation consulting firm.
Having been on the faculty at Stanford since 1978, Kelley has shown a long commitment to helping students gain confidence in their creative abilities. He has championed a human-centered and project-based methodology called Design Thinking.
Design Thinking is based on building empathy for user needs, developing solutions with iterative prototyping, collaborating in multidisciplinary teams and inspiring ideas for the future through storytelling in an attempt to come up with breakthrough innovations.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has won numerous honors and awards including the Chrysler Design Award, the National Design Award from the Smithsonian / Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Sir Misha Black Medal, the Edison Achievement Award, the Robert Fletcher Award and an honorary PhD from both Dartmouth College and Art Center College. He has been profiled on 60 Minutes and together with his brother has written a New York Times best selling book titled Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.
David Kelley
Faculty
Bill Burnett
Adjunct Professor in Mechanical Engineering – Design, Stanford University
Executive Director of the Product Design Program, Stanford University
Bill Burnett is an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the ME Design Group and the Executive Director of the design programs at Stanford University. He received his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering – Product Design at Stanford in 1979 and 1982.
He directs the undergraduate and graduate program in design and teaches classes at the d.school. In addition, he has worked in startups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple designing award-winning laptops and a number of years in the toy industry designing Star Wars toys. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents and design awards, and in addition to his duties at Stanford, he is on the board of VOZ, a socially responsible fashion start-up, and advises several other start-up companies.
Bill is the co-author of Designing Your Life, a book that captures the lessons from 9 years of teaching the Stanford class of the same name. Based on design thinking and positive psychology, the book attempts to help people answer the age-old question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”
Bill Burnett
Course Instructors
David Beach
Professor (Teaching), Mechanical Engineering
Director, Product Realization Laboratory, Stanford University
David W. Beach, Director of the Product Realization Lab, has been the heart of the Stanford Product Realization Lab since 1977. Beach holds BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. In addition to serving as director of the PRL, Beach is a professor of Mechanical Engineering who teaches and mentors more than 400 students a year. Beach has received every teaching award Stanford bestows, including the prestigious Sudgen, Bass, and Bing University Fellowships and the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford’s highest accolade for excellence in teaching. (Other Gores Award winners include a former U.S. Secretary of State, a Nobel Prize winner, and an Ivy League University President, so Beach is in very good company.) Beach teaches the linchpin mechanical engineering course Design and Manufacture as well as Design for Extreme Affordability and the Magic of Manufacturing. Beach maintains strong ties with industry; he has consulted for Apple Computer, Charles Krug Winery, ICON Aircraft, Failure Analysis Associates, Hewlett Packard, IDEO, and Light & Motion Industries. Professor Beach is also a world-class maker. His bronze and wood zoopraxiscope, Time Stands Still, is held in the permanent collection of Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts.
David Beach
Dev Panaik
Adjunct Professor in Mechanical Engineering – Design, Stanford University
CEO, Jump Associates
Dev Patnaik is the CEO of Jump, a strategy and innovation firm he co-founded in 1998. He is a trusted advisor on strategy and innovation to leaders at many of the world’s most admired companies. Dev is a frequent keynote speaker at major forums, and his writing has appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fast Company, and many others. He is the author of the book Wired to Care, named one of the best books of the year by both Fast Company and Business Week. Malcolm Gladwell called Wired to Care “just what we need for the lean years ahead.”
When not at Jump, Dev is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he teaches a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design, and business strategy to discover insights about people and create new products and services.
Dev holds a B.S. in Product Design from Stanford University.
Dev Patnaik
Craig Milroy
Senior Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Director, Product Realization Lab, Stanford University
Craig Milroy, Director of the Product Realization Lab, is also a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and Stanford School of Medicine Biodesign Collaboratory. Milroy teaches medical device design, computer-aided product creation, engineering drawing in design, and design in construction in wood, and he has advised thousands of students during more than 30 years in the Product Realization Lab. Milroy has strong ties to the medical devises industry. He is the founder of Treu Medical, Stemcor, Neoguide Systems, and Zopus Design Consultancy; and he holds 12 U.S. and international patents.
Craig Milroy
Ryan Baum
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Principle, Jump Associates
Ryan Baum is a partner and advisor to Fortune 500 executives, setting the course for large-scale transformation and aggressive growth.
He helped a major airline clarify and roll-out a new corporate strategy. He partnered with an automotive company to recapture the Millennial market. And he helped a technology giant break into the healthcare space by redefining the long-term care market.
Ryan is an active thought leader in business strategy and innovation. He teaches a class on design research and planning at Stanford University, and is an adjunct professor at The Monterrey Center for Higher Learning of Design. He has guest lectured at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, and the California College of Arts. He has presented at conferences such as The Ideas Economy Conference by The Economist magazine, and the Uncharted Ideas Festival in Berkeley, California. Ryan also sits on the Board of Directors of First Graduate, a nonprofit organization that helps students be the first in their family to graduate from college.
Prior to Jump, Ryan spent several years at ZS Associates consulting for the healthcare industry on sales and marketing strategy. He also helped technology and pharmaceutical startups raise venture capital funding. Ryan has toured the world performing as a member of the Whiffenpoofs, world’s oldest and best known collegiate a cappella group.
Ryan holds a B.A. in Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University, where he completed a thesis on Urban Education and Tax Policy.
Ryan Baum
Kathy Davies
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Managing Director, Life Design Lab, Stanford University
Kathy draws on more than 15 years of Silicon Valley Industry experience developing electromechanical and software products. Kathy is passionate about how human-centered design and the design thinking mindsets can fundamentally shift the way that everyday people engage with their world. Kathy has worked on products ranging from power tools and heart implants to high tech electronics and quality management software. Having realized that design thinking can have a great impact in empowering social change, she traveled to Myanmar to teach design thinking to budding entrepreneurs with the DeBoer Foundation and works with local community groups to impact engagement in health and wellness initiatives. Kathy received a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University and an MS in Engineering (Product Design) from Stanford.
Kathy Davies
John Edmark
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Edmark’s art and design pursuits range from nature-inspired cellular and kinetic works to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Videos of his artwork have received over 60 million views online.
Much of his work celebrates the patterns underlying space and growth. Through kinetic sculptures and transformable objects, he strives to give viewers access to the surprising structures hidden within apparently amorphous space.
He is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches classes in design fundamentals, product design, stop-motion animation, and color theory. Previous to focusing on design, he spent a number of years researching virtual environments at Bell Laboratories. He holds ten U.S. and foreign utility patents.
John Edmark
Patrick Fenton
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Partner, Swayspace
Patrick is a founder of Swayspace, an interaction design and visual thinking consultancy, and a lecturer in the design program at Stanford University. In life and at work he is focused on using design tools and processes to improve experiences and amplify interests. He has a BA in Visual Communications from UCLA, an MFA from Stanford’s Joint Program in Design, and spent two years at Il Bisonte in Italy studying printmaking. Patrick is a Bay Area native who also loves New York and spent 10 years teaching in the Industrial Design and Fine Arts departments at Pratt Institute.
Patrick Fenton
Brett Newman
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Partner, Daylight
Brett has spent fifteen years at the intersection of research and innovation, following his passion for human centered design.
Prior to Daylight, Brett founded and led an innovation center for Azud, a large European products company. There he directed the research and development team for Azud’s new product pipeline, bringing products from paper sketches through market penetration. Before that, Brett led service and product innovation programs at Node, one of Europe’s leading innovation consultancies.
Brett holds a masters degree in design from Stanford University.
Brett Newman
Eli Woolery
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering
Director of Design Education, InVisionApp Inc.
Elijah trained in the Product Design program at Stanford University, where he now teaches as a lecturer. He has a background in photography and filmmaking, as well as product & industrial design.
After working as a lead design engineer with Light & Motion, a vertically integrated manufacturer of consumer underwater video and photography equipment, he pursued graduate studies in marine biology at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and co-founded the print magazine Wetpixel Quarterly in 2007. He was a founder in the second class of Innovation Endeavor’s Runway Program, a venture-backed startup accelerator backed by Eric Schmidt’s fund.
He also founded Out of the Deep Blue, a design consultancy, where he works on web and mobile applications for clients like Genentech and Kaiser Permanente. As a life-long worshipper of the ocean, he loves to surf, dive, and kayak.
Eli Woolery
John Edson
Partner, McKinsey & Company
President, LUNAR
John is a partner at LUNAR, the leading industrial-design firm that joined McKinsey Design following its acquisition in early 2015.
His recent client experience includes managing the birth of successful products for companies such as InFocus, Motorola, Philips, and a variety of start-ups. Products developed under John’s management have been honored with accolades from the I.D. Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, the PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award, and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Born of an engineer and a mathematician, John is a natural problem solver, teacher, and regular guest lecturer at Stanford University. With a strong visual appetite, a love of art, and an innate curiosity, John embodies LUNAR’s trademark: “Creativity that makes a difference.” He hosts the industry podcast “Icon-o-Cast,” and in 2008, he and his team launched “Elements,” a sustainable-design initiative to reduce LUNAR’s environmental footprint, both internally and for clients.
John Edson