Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.

Those successes have made the D.school the envy of universities around the world. Sarah Stein Greenberg, a D.school alum and managing director, says she receives inquiries every week from universities looking to mimic the D.school curriculum.

The school has also become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available. To meet the demand, the D.school is adding full courses and so-called pop-up classes, which focus on a more narrow problem. “Where Did You Go Olympia Snowe?,” a recent pop-up class, challenged students to solve the seemingly most intractable problem of all: rekindling bipartisanship. Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator of Maine, even made a brief guest appearance.

Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.

One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.

That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.

The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.

An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.

A recent boot camp class dispatched students to local hair salons to tackle that age-old problem: the bad haircut.

One group was surprised to learn that sweeping hair off the floor is the bane of many hairdressers. That group designed a prototype for a device that sucks up clippings before they hit the floor. A few courses later, the same students were asked to apply that same analytical process to the shortage of organ donors.

“It’s a guided approach to building that empathy muscle until, pretty soon, they are out there doing it on their own,” Mr. Kelley said.

One of the D.school’s most highly sought courses is “Design for Extreme Affordability.” Over two quarters, students team up with partners from around the world to tackle their real-world problems. So far, “Extreme” students, as they are called, have completed 90 projects with 27 partners in 19 countries. This year, students will work with partners in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Senegal and South Africa.

One of Extreme’s more successful projects is Embrace, a low-cost miniature pouch, not unlike a sleeping bag, that helps prevent newborns from developing hypothermia. Embrace’s inventors say the pouch has helped prevent 22,000 infant deaths.

This year, Ian Connolly and Jeffrey Yang, D.school students, formed a partnership with Miraclefeet, a nonprofit based in North Carolina, to design a brace for children with clubfoot for less than $20.

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data

LOS ANGELES — Forget zombies. The data crunchers are invading Hollywood.

The same kind of numbers analysis that has reshaped areas like politics and online marketing is increasingly being used by the entertainment industry.

Netflix tells customers what to rent based on algorithms that analyze previous selections, Pandora does the same with music, and studios have started using Facebook “likes” and online trailer views to mold advertising and even films.

Now, the slicing and dicing is seeping into one of the last corners of Hollywood where creativity and old-fashioned instinct still hold sway: the screenplay.

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script new evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

His recommendations, delivered in a 20- to 30-page report, might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: more people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick, for instance.

Script “doctors,” as Hollywood refers to writing consultants, have long worked quietly on movie assembly lines. But many top screenwriters — the kind who attain exalted status in the industry, even if they remain largely unknown to the multiplex masses — reject Mr. Bruzzese’s statistical intrusion into their craft.

“This is my worst nightmare” said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” “It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

Mr. Parker drew a breath. “Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,” he said. “But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.”

But a lot of producers, studio executives and major film financiers disagree. Already they have quietly hired Mr. Bruzzese’s company to analyze about 100 scripts, including an early treatment for “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which has taken in $484.8 million worldwide.

Mr. Bruzzese (pronounced brew-ZEZ-ee), who is one of a very few if not the only entrepreneur to use this form of script analysis, is plotting to take it to Broadway and television now that he has traction in movies.

“It takes a lot of the risk out of what I do,” said Scott Steindorff, a producer who used Mr. Bruzzese to evaluate the script for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a hit 2011 crime drama. “Everyone is going to be doing this soon.” Mr. Steindorff added, “The only people who are resistant are the writers: ‘I’m making art, I can’t possibly do this.’ ”