In my first quarter, I was able to attend business classes at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, as well as a class at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school, if you’re hip to it). I also met with some impressive professors and thinkers on campus and talked to a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, including venture capitalists, farmers, and food-forward thought leaders.

This quarter, I’m excited to be co-teaching a class with Matthew Rothe, co-founder of the FEED Collaborative, where he is an educator-practitioner in design thinking and food system innovation. The FEED Collaborative works with partners and thought-leaders, students, and faculty to collaborate in designing a more sustainable food system. Recent collaborations have included work with Kitchen Table Advisors to develop training tools for the next generation of farmers, and with the San Mateo County Food System Alliance to develop a vision for a local food and farm bill.

Rothe, a Stanford MBA graduate, is the perfect partner on this project, as he was also a fellow in residence at the Stanford d.school, director of Stanford’s Sustainable Food Program, and an operations executive at both Attune Foods and Niman Ranch. With his guidance, we brought together a select group of graduate students to participate in an experimental course that will explore the intersection of design thinking and quantitative data analysis.

An emerging trend and tool being used by notable firms like IDEO, “designing with data” can be a powerful way to develop new insights and potential solutions to tough, messy problems faced by organizations across the spectrum. Design thinking (here’s your very own crash course) is a hands-on approach that focuses on developing empathy for others, generating ideas quickly, and testing rough “prototypes” that can fuel rapid learning for teams and organizations. Some recent applications include: how Airbnb turned itself around; how IBM flipped its traditional technology product development on its head; and how it created design solutions for farmers in Myanmar.