Before sunrise on a cold winter morning, several Stanford students gathered in the frost-tipped grass along a campus path and took turns using the battery-operated leaf blowers that campus groundskeepers use in their daily work.
The students were shadowing the groundskeepers as part of a two-quarter elective course called Design for Extreme Affordability (Extreme, for short) in which they learned to apply innovation and design methods to challenges related to poverty in collaboration with communities worldwide.
The course, jointly offered by the Graduate School of Business and the d.school through the School of Engineering since 2003, enrolls up to 40 students from a wide range of majors, and has produced solutions such as medical devices for children with cleft palates in Mexico and collapsible hand washing stations for under-resourced schools in India. Before working on projects with communities outside Stanford, students spend three weeks completing an 11-step design learning process to address issues facing operations departments around campus as part of the Stanford Service Corps (SSC).
The SSC, an element added to the course in 2010, runs eight to 10 projects a year in collaboration with departments across campus. In January, SSC student teams were assigned to work on issues facing staff in the d.school’s communication department, the grounds crew, the bicycle safety program, and the Office of Community Engagement.
“We created the Stanford Service Corps with the idea that we could run a very fast version of our process with people where the stakes are a little lower,” said Stuart Coulson, adjunct professor in the d.school and lecturer at the GSB. “It’s a little easier to ask our students to learn the basics of their process with people across the Stanford campus before they go and take the same process and use it with communities where the stakes are higher and the outcomes more important.”
Changed Perspective
Stanford’s Land, Buildings, and Real Estate’s grounds crew is one of the SSC’s longest standing partnerships. This year, a student team was tasked with addressing challenges related to the department’s recent shift to battery-powered landscaping tools and the more complex recharging process the tools require. During an initial meeting, students peppered the groundskeepers with questions related to space, schedules, infrastructure, goals, safety, budgets, security, and technology. The next step was for the students to experience the challenges firsthand by shadowing the grounds crew in their work.
“What’s so important about going in the field and creating these relationships is the community you’re working with becomes your north star, and that’s really central in Extreme,” said Anastasha Gunawan, a graduate student in design. “The emphasis is not designing for but designing with the community you now have a relationship with.”
The students and groundskeepers headed to a path off El Camino Real where they donned safety goggles and ear protection and picked up leaf-blowers and hedge trimmers.
“It’s heavy!” one student exclaimed as she hoisted up a roughly 30-pound tool. The sun slowly began to light the area as joggers and cyclists coasted by on the trail.
Grounds lead Eduardo Tavera Saldivar said it’s important for students to get hands-on experience to fully understand their work. “Every job takes time to learn and every machine takes time to learn,” Tavera Saldivar said. “It was touching because the students wanted to do it, and it felt good to get the students involved with us.”
As crew lead, Tavera Saldivar ensured that his entire team could participate with the SSC this year. “We want to do it again in the future,” he said. “We feel like people understand our work better and we feel valued. It’s a nice experience.”
“I feel like it’s really eye-opening,” said Amelie Or, ’26, an undergraduate design major. “I’m usually so focused on my class and I hadn’t thought of the people who work to make campus ready. I think this is the most important class I’ve taken because it goes beyond the class.”
In their final presentation, the team presented plans for how the grounds crew could collaborate with battery experts to create a new training protocol for optimizing battery use and charging. They also suggested ongoing conversation with the Office of Sustainability about integrating budget, infrastructure, and sustainability goals.
“We were intending to learn about the infrastructure and all these technical details, but what we came away with was a larger appreciation of the actual people who make our campus so beautiful,” Gunawan said. “Knowing the grounds crew has changed our perspective on Stanford.”
Gunawan plans to use the immersion and relationship-building skills she learned in the SSC in her work on one of the seven Extreme projects being held in Costa Rica this year to help address challenges related to promoting regenerative agriculture, supporting tourism accessibility for those with disabilities, and more.
“This is really helpful to challenge the designer hubris that occurs sometimes,” she explained. “We’re not coming in thinking we have all the solutions. You come in and recognize you’re working with experts, and that framing is really helpful in design work.”
“Seen, Heard, and Valued”
Coulson said the empathy and immersion process helps students get comfortable acknowledging what they don’t know and learn from the communities they’re working with, rather than trying to solve a clearly defined problem right away. “That can be fairly ambiguous and disconcerting,” he said. “But when we get to the stage where the process works, the students get to see how it pays off in the end.”
The SSC experience also gets students accustomed to good habits such as thorough documentation, gives them a chance to experiment with different methods, and serves as a confidence booster, Coulson said.
The connections built between students and staff is the SSC’s “magic,” said grounds services manager Mary Nolan.
“Students bring new perspectives and new enthusiasm,” she said. “You definitely feel like our work really matters and I love showing them the wow factor of how large campus is and what goes on behind the scenes. It also allows us to take a fresh look at our work. Sometimes when they ask the most obvious question, it makes us reconsider why we do it that way.”
While the student teams don’t always arrive at implementable solutions, some of the ideas to come out of the SSC have helped to manage the storage and retrieval of bikes being repaired at the Campus Bike Shop and promote the toweling down of exercise equipment after use in the gyms.
For Nolan, the process is more important than the suggested solutions. “We allow them to develop skills that hopefully will help them go on and do something really important somewhere else,” Nolan explained. “I think we all need to develop the ability to talk, ask questions, listen, and be seen, heard, and valued.”
A version of this story was originally published in Stanford Report on February 28, 2025.
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