d.school Levinthal Fellow 2008-2009 & Lecturer

In July of 1983, a young Mexican couple boarded a plane from Korea to California being careful to hide the enormous 8-month-pregnant bulge of what was soon to be Erica Diane Estrada. Luckily enough, they made it in time to the sunny shores of California, where Erica was born, already bound for a life filled with unusual paths and a tendency to go against the norm.

Although she grew up mostly in her beloved Texas, she was lucky enough to be what most call a "Bechtel Brat." Her homes have included Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and her favorite--Venezuela, where she attended 6th grade on Centipede Hill, lovingly named for the fact that everyday she opened her locker to a giant centipede crawling on top of her textbooks.

After being accepted to Stanford, she reveled in knowing that she would be finally reunited with her native soil. She knew early on that her calling was in Mechanical Engineering, and she had to juggle that with her interest in Biology, Political Science and Creative Writing throughout her undergraduate and graduate years.

Then comes the time when "a girl's gotta fall in love," and with Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, Erica did. By day, she worked on a team redesigning the shifting experience for Volkswagen developing a foot-operated gear-shifting system for concept vehicles. By night, she soldered LEDs and cut PVC and Coke cans with her Extreme Affordability Team as they worked toward the goal of providing affordable lighting products to villagers in Burma. After graduating from Stanford, her night job became her day job and her lighting team traveled to Burma and Cambodia prototyping lights and experimenting with batteries. Within a year, d.light design won $250k in venture capital funding from a business plan competition, and subsequently garnered the resources to officially incorporate.

Erica spent another year traveling the world with her trusty travel sheets, lighting up dark villages with LED lights as a product designer and co-founder of d.light design. She became an expert on needfinding methods, rough prototyping and unusual in-the-field bathroom experiences as she visited and re-visited the villages. During this immersion, she made sure to carefully document d.light's users' stories, some of which can be found at http://www.dlightdesign.com/customers.html.

Needing a rejuvenating injection of design thinking in a familiar environment, Erica has come back to the d.school to help others turn their ventures into realities and to get more people excited about the power of design thinking to make a big difference in the developing world.