Background

Stanford Women in Design (SWID) is the largest organization at Stanford focused on empowering future design leaders. It's composed of several different teams – Design Partnerships, Design Education, Design Community, Marketing, Professional Development, and Special Projects. In my freshman fall at Stanford, I joined SWID as an intern for the Special Projects team, when I helped plan and execute a large-scale conference called Designing for Her: Keeping Mother Nature in Mind.

Once students were sent home due to the pandemic and SWID started back up again virtually in September 2020, I joined the Design Education team as a Project Manager. In that role, I planned workshops to teach students how to use design tools and portfolio review sessions with industry professionals. I also led a task-force for SWID's rebranding and website redesign.

Developing the curriculum

As a sophomore studying Product Design, who was also trying to figure out the design industry and my own design interests, I needed to do a lot of research to develop this curriculum. I read countless Medium articles, scoured through design firm websites, referenced existing design courses, collaborated with older SWID leaders and d.school mentors, and chatted with industry professionals. I gathered as much information as I could about the industry at large – exploring all kinds of career paths – and then synthesized.

I determined that UX/UI would be the most feasible skillset to focus on in my teaching because we were all remote (in the height of the pandemic), Figma was easily accessible and a critical design tool to know, and there was an abundance of UX/UI industry opportunities.

Format

Each week of this 7-week long program consisted of one main meeting with a lesson and activities, a design sprint due at each meeting, a critique/feedback session, and optional office hours. I also compiled a document of design-related terms and definitions for students to reference. Throughout the course of the program, I collected feedback about the program so that I could continually improve and make the experience better throughout each week and the successive quarter.

The lessons covered the Design Thinking Process – step-by-step and as an iterative whole – as well as specific applicable skills like visual design, storytelling, branding, and marketing. The design sprints gave members low-stakes opportunities to work on specific skills and processes in Figma, and they all built on one another to culminate in a final project. This final project culminated in a website/app high-fidelity Figma prototype addressing whatever problem space they're passionate about.

Members only earned the certification if they submitted high-quality work on each design sprint.

See below the curriculum for the Spring 2021 Consultant Certification Program:

Learnings from teaching

Teaching this program meant that I needed to act as the "expert" in these topics – I needed to have answers to the questions that students asked each week. I practiced my lessons plans several times, researched even more on the side, and completed the design sprints along with the students. This pushed me to really internalize the design process and hone my Figma skills quickly.

Getting to create and teach the Consultant Certification Program pushed me to become a more skillful communicator, collaborator, and designer.

I gained valuable, confidence-boosting experience from my time in Stanford Women in Design and specifically in creating and teaching this program.

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Testimonials

A few very kind pieces of feedback I received, which made the infinite hours and research and preparation worth it:

• “I really loved this quarter! I liked the length of the sessions, how digestible the content was, and how neatly presented it was.” 
• “I really appreciate how in-depth the presentations were, and I learned a lot from this program about the design industry/design careers, marketing, branding, and visual design principles!”
• "My favorite part was seeing everyone's final projects!!!! I loved learning about the solutions they came up with and how they designed their apps. I got a bunch of new ideas to help improve my designs in the future."
• "I absolutely loved it. Kyra and Maria were amazing leaders and mentors! I loved all the design sprints and I feel they were helpful and applicable to real world design projects. The weekly emails with the slides, recording, and next steps was very helpful for organization. Thank you for a great quarter!"

Transitioning back to campus

When students were (finally) allowed back on campus in Fall 2021, SWID was (slowly, per COVID protocol) able to host in-person events! Since everyone was getting adjusted to the chaos of on-campus college life again, I decided that for Fall quarter, it'd be more desirable to transition the Design Education programming to a more relaxed survey of different types of design.

I called this the Intro to Design workshop series, where I hosted industry speakers and collaborative workshops associated with different branches of design – Computer Aided Design, Fashion Design, UX/UI Design, Toy Design, and Architectural Design.

This was a fun, low-pressure way to expose 100+ young designers to different aspects of the design industry.

The future of the program

My leadership term as the Director of Design Education ended in Winter of 2022. I made sure that my successor carried on these Design Education initiatives, and they have flourished through the organization!

Now called Design Certification Program, the curriculum that I developed lives on and still certifies members to be part of the Design Consulting Group.

I'm so grateful for the Stanford Women in Design community and all of the incredible opportunities for growth, relationships, and learning that it has given me!