Designer in Residence 2008-2009 & Lecturer

Carly has been a design thinker her whole life, embodying the "fail early" philosophy to the fullest extent.

Inspired by the 1992 Olympics, the then 7-year-old tried her hand at gymnastics. Two weeks later, she was kicked out for being taller than her instructors. She bounced back unfazed and attacked her next venture, competitive swimming, with fire and tenacity unparalleled by anyone her age: by 12, she'd become the youngest swimmer ever to represent the United States in a major international competition. At 14, she took home a silver medal from the Pan American Games, won a national title, and poised herself as a favorite to make the Olympic team the following year. She woke up one morning with intense pain in her shoulder and was soon diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff. Failure came this time not after 2 weeks of playing in a gym, but after countless hours of work in the pool. Dealing with failure is intensely difficult, but Carly learned early on that it can be intensely generative, as well. She turned that same energy that had made her a great swimmer towards projects ranging from web development to oil painting, from journalism to graphic design, and from biomedical research to Pan-Hellenic leadership.

Carly takes on projects with reckless abandon, which is part of why she's felt so at home in the design community at Stanford. As a masters student in mechanical engineering, she spent two fantastic years as a teaching assistant in the Product Realization Lab: a place where failure in the early stages of product development isn't just encouraged, it's expected. Her time there reinforced that spectacular early failures beget spectacular outcomes if handled with poise and perspective. She now brings to the d.school her passion for teaching design, enthusiasm for creation, and eagerness to help students accept that failure early in the design process is often the single greatest source of inspiration.