Coming from a theater education background, as I have connected with technologically fascinated colleagues around the world, the “new” inquiry-based and collaborative pedagogies they were advocating already seemed well established and self-evident to me. One of these new pedagogies emerges from the design thinking work of the d.school at Stanford. Also deeply cognizant of the importance of environment, this department intentionally crafts the surroundings of its students to foster collaboration and flexible thinking by allowing students to arrange their environment in a way that galvanizes group activity around the problem at hand. But what is most remarkable about design thinking is its entry point of empathy. Well before it asks us to solve a problem, this method asks us to find out about people: what motivates them, what frustrates them, what their process is like, what precedes and follows their engagement with the issue. Only after deeply understanding people do we then begin thinking about what problem to solve.