d.school Teaching Team
As soon as he finished his Stanford undergraduate program in psychology and film production, Gayle ran away with the circus of his day, forming a traveling crew of liquid light-show artists and performing at rock concerts. Working with baby oil, blue food coloring, gel wheels and overhead projectors, he and his crew explored many visionary worlds that challenged their perceptions. He enjoyed the immediacy of live performance, skating the edge between art and technology.
After working in the high tech hardware world for a few years, he found his way into the Product Design Masters Program. Here he discovered a course of transformation that began the first day of the Visual Thinking class and continued through his final Masters Project presentation. He saw that what he had learned was less about products and more a way of thinking about problems. Something like what we now call design thinking.
His creative work focused on photography and the tools for manipulating imagery in live collaborative performance. These performances brought together live photomontage, dance and computer music. His daily work moved from film and photography to video and print publication design. These were a natural foundation for the emerging disciplines of information architecture and interaction design for the Web. Gayle worked as Creative Director in the pioneering interactive design firms Vivid Studios and Modem Media, then moved on to a user-interface architect role for several startups. Most recently he was Principal Interaction Designer at Yahoo!
While at Yahoo! he focused on the design strategy for user experience in new products, and he developed a practice area for structured ideation. He created a short course in brainstorming techniques for designers, product managers and developers, and he worked to build the practice and appreciation of design thinking across Yahoo!
Gayle keeps a close connection with the Stanford design community, and he has taught the ME101 and ME313 courses. He also collaborated in the development of CS247 HCI Design Studio and taught this course for many years. He firmly believes in the way we learn here: engage loosely defined projects and proceed through discovery, analysis, ideation, prototyping, testing, and iteration; working both alone and in teams. We see that it works.
