Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Center for Design Research
Rumor has it that Larry first arrived at Stanford, just in time, to register for autumn quarter '58 (class of '62). He was fresh off the high school baseball team and still wet from a summer's surfing at the Rincon and other Santa Barbara south coast wave places. A design-engineering career was vaguely foreshadowed by early experiences with model cars, trains, and airplanes complete with various explosive devices. There was also an introduction the user experience with a classic 40lb balsa board (maybe 5 good people in the water). There had to be a better way, so he built his first foam and fiberglass board when there were 10 souls in the water. By the time he graduated with a BS in "General" Engineering he was on his 4th board (under 20lb) and a typical Rincon day (see also Steamer's Lane, Santa Cruz) would have upwards of 50 nominal delinquents in the water.
Things changed, a six month adventure at Stanford in Florence transformed the quasi-beach boy into a nascent global-entrepreneur. On completing this bioengineering doctoral thesis (neurophysiology of voluntary movement) at Stanford (private pilot license included (ask Bernie)), he worked for NASA, founding a Human Information Processing Lab and did three years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich Switzerland, discovering the country, Europe and a lovely spouse with whom he would come to nurture four children.
Open to interpretation, Larry is one of the few guys on the d.school team who has already lived several d.school lives. With a product design masters ('64), he subsequently taught in the program on returning to Stanford in '76. His experience in bioengineering at Stanford, NASA, and ETHZ is distantly embodied in today's Medical Device Design program. Conceiving and implementing the Smart-Product-Design Program was a precursor to embedded systems and ubiquitous Mechatronics, as we know them today. His founding of the Stanford-VA Rehabilitation Engineering Center is now embodied in the Biomechanics and Bioengineering programs. As it became clear that the "Renaissance-Man" of the 21st century would have to be a diverse "Renaissance-Team," the Stanford Center for Design Research (http://cdr.stanford.edu) was born to the guiding question, "What do designers do when they do design, and how can we help them?" Thinking about design thinking is a line of research that Larry hopes will continue to mature and contribute importantly to the d.school's innovation practice. His experience as founding director of the Stanford Learning Lab (now Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning) and co-designer of Wallenberg Hall lead him to see that design team performance is socially mediated by design-learning, the space we work in, and the technology we use. Things are getting better, the d.school will advance the notion that each individual can, and should, design and manage their own learning career to achieve personal and societal wellbeing.
