One of my reasons for going back to school for a PhD after doing my own startups was that I love the academic environment. I either TA’d or taught for 9 out of my 16 quarters at Stanford. It’s refreshing to be surrounded by smart people, and no matter how smart people may be in various tech corporations, there is a sense of independence of thought in academia that is hard to find elsewhere. The best way to learn something, and I mean really master it, is to start teaching it. The act of explaining something to someone else helps to understand things at a different level altogether.

Stanford has had a rich history and tradition of bringing in outside speakers to come in and speak at the University. There are some phenomenal seminar series/talks at Stanford that I thoroughly enjoyed and learned so much from while I was a student. I genuinely miss not having the time to be able to continue to attend or watch some of these seminars online (some of these are open to the public):

• HCI Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design) in Computer Science
• ETL: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series in Management Science and Engineering
• VFTT: View From The Top at the Graduate School of Business
• Social Seminar in the Department of Psychology
• Speakers Bureau organized by the Stanford ASSU

In Human Computer Interaction, one of the things we’re taught is to conduct Contextual Inquiry (From: Wikipedia: A contextual inquiry interview is usually structured as an approximately two-hour, one-on-one interaction in which the researcher watches the user do their normal activities and discusses what they see with the user.) Having attended all these great talks, got me wondering about whether it is possible to apply contextual inquiry to learning from smart people. Steve Blank has also said many a time that in order for a startup to do customer development they need to get out of the building and talk to people.

So taking these two points to heart, I wanted to see whether I can craft a learning experience for students where we get them out of the classroom? And would doing that lead to an interesting form of learning?

Of course organizing such a class is no easy task; first with identifying people who the students should hear from, making arrangements with their company to host a class at their locations, coordinating transportation, and doing all of that within a time slot that is officially “class-time.”

In Spring Quarter 2014, I taught a special topics class at Stanford called CS549: HCI in the Real World as an experiment. It was an experiment in taking academic learning and bridging and mapping that learning into how things actually work in the real world. I limited the class size to under 20 and it was a blast. I learned a lot, the students learned a lot.

The class was unique as instead of inviting speakers in to come in and speak to students we instead took the students out of the classroom to visit a different company each week. We would meet at the Stanford Oval, jump into cars and drive to the company we were visiting. There, we would start by getting a tour of the company and getting a sense of the vibe of the company culture, and then proceed to meet engineers, designers, product managers, and other HCI practitioners who were working at these companies in different roles. The students would hear about how these people got to their position, which skills that they learned as part of their academic training were most useful to them, what advice these practitioners had for students. They would also get a chance to ask questions and have conversations with people in different roles.

Although it’s almost a year and a half later, here is the presentation from my talk in the HCI lunch meetings about the class:

For Fall Quarter 2015, I will be teaching the same class again (sometimes you have to make time to do the things you want to do, even when you don’t have the time for it!). It still remains an experiment as what we will all learn really depends on the make up of the class as well as the companies and the people we get to visit.

If you’re a student at Stanford, with an active interest in HCI, I would welcome and invite you to participate in the class for the fall quarter. Sign up on Axess for CS549 and come by to the first class this Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015.