Imagine walking into your classroom every morning not knowing what it is going to look like. The large blocks of foam that functioned as chairs yesterday are now stacked against the walls or placed in wooden boxes and pushed together to create makeshift work surfaces. The portable whiteboards that were used for brainstorming the day before are now used as walls.

This might sound uncharacteristic of an academic setting, but that sense of constant change is exactly what makes the new Design School (d.school) building so unique. Today is the d.school’s official opening in its Escondido Mall home.

“Our philosophy is very purposed towards the future,” said Banny Banerjee, the director of the Stanford Design Program and an assistant professor in Stanford’s mechanical engineering department. “You have no way of knowing what’s going to be appropriate tomorrow, what any situation is going to demand. And so we need our space to reflect that.”

Walking around the new building, one can see that designers Cody Anderson Wasney (CAW) & MK Think have tried to make every inch reflect the school’s philosophy. The d.school has been continuously reinventing itself, having moved four times, starting from doublewide trailers, and finally ending up in its fifth and final home in Building 550 on Escondido Mall.

According to David Kelley, the founder of the d.school and innovation and design firm IDEO, “We believe you can learn anything about an organization 30 seconds after walking into their workspace.”

“People sitting in cubicles have cubicle shaped thoughts,” Banerjee added. “The d.school encourages highly expansive, collaborative, inventive thinking, and we need spaces that allow that, spaces that obscure rules that inhibit creativity.”

The primary aim of the building, reads the d.school’s website, was “to create innovators rather than any particular innovation.” The building’s flexible design and fluid atmosphere are intended to foster that environment of innovation.

The fluid and flexible spaces are meant to cater to every circumstance and every project’s demands. Walls, that are usually made of white boards are impermanent, and can slide around to open up spaces or divide spaces up. In general, almost everything in the d.school is on wheels.

While Stanford does have an established program in design, the d.school itself is unaffiliated with a particular degree-granting program and is available to all graduate students from every major. Walk into the d.school any day, and you will find yourself also surrounded by students and professors of engineering, medicine, education, business and humanities.

Instead of pristine spaces, beautiful fittings and ostentatious fountains, many parts of the building have a rough, unfinished feel to them–intended to create a flexible environment that removes any idea of permanence that might impose constraints on creativity.

One such example is the “Jacks and Pegs” system, which consists of a series of unfinished two-by-two wooden planks which have pegs that hold light-weight, portable dry-erase boards. These boards can be scribbled on, used as tack-boards and can be easily removed and transported. The entire system can also slide on long tracks, doubling up as a space divider.

That’s a lot of philosophy to pack into a single building, now the permanent home of the d.school.

So far, reactions of students who use the d.school are mixed.

Riah Forbes, a first year MS&E coterm, is very enthusiastic about her experience in the building.

“It’s my first class in the d.school!” she said. “I realize this is not a big deal for you, but being in a class where I can sit on a large foam block, makes me quite excited.”

However, the space is taking some time to get used to.

This is the first time that the Mechanical Engineering Design group and the d.school are housed in the same building. The space has also been opened up to undergraduate classes and sections. While this is closer to Kelley’s vision of creating a place where people from diverse backgrounds can come together to collaborate, older graduate students are concerned about the loss of community that might come with these changes.

“I feel unwelcome,” said Danika Patrick, a second year graduate student in the design program. “I don’t run into people anymore.”

Second year student Stephanie Carter, from Stanford’s graduate design program, shares some of Patrick’s concerns.

“By combining more departments to the original d.school crowd, some intimacy is lost and there isn’t as much a sense of a tight-knit community as there used to be,” she said.

But Carter added: “I think it is a beautifully designed space and I greatly appreciate the attention to providing small work spaces for students to use collaboratively and spontaneously.”

If there is one thing the d.school has nailed down, it is the process of prototyping. Looking back, Kelley explains how the annual shifting and reinventing, while taxing, allowed the founders of the school to practice the same “design thinking” that they teach. Each shift allowed them to prototype experiences in each space, to try and find the best possible environment to encourage innovation.

Kelley stressed that spaces are not designed only once, and that constant reconfiguration is needed for improvement.

“As a school, we are very student-centered,” he said. “We are constantly changing and improving, based on the feedback we get from our students. And with 300 intelligent Stanford students, I know we will have better ideas to implement every day!”