Keen On

Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley both teach at Stanford’s interdisciplinary d.school. They are also the joint authors of Assembling Tomorrow, an intriguing new book in which, using their D School experience, Carter and Doorley provide a guide to designing a thriving future. They argue that the future, in all its socioeconomic complexity, can de designed so that we can mend the mistakes of our past and shape that future for the better. For some viewers this might be a bit annoyingly Stanford in its can-do positivity and virtue signaling. But if Carter and Doorley can indeed successfully instill in their d.school students a degree of moral responsibility about designing the technological and economic future, then they will have done the rest of us a great service. Carissa Carter is a designer, a geoscientist, and the academic director at the Stanford d.school. She’s the author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data (2022) and Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Fut