At the begnning of fall 2019, Zhen was invited to a research meeting convened by the Stanford Center for Design Reseach, and the David Ramsey Map Center. In this session, she joined longtime friend and partner, Ade Mabogunje from the Stanford D-school and his colleague, Salim Mohd, Head of the Rumsey Center, together with 15 different experts. This event was conbened to integrate perspectives on Innovation Ecosystem and Design Thinking.

"The concept for the meeting was a synergy of five realizations. First, from research done by Malte Jung et al. we know that the creative design process depends on two critical actions - perceiving and acting, and two critical objects - a context, and a purpose. Second, to paraphrase the research of Barbara Tversky, spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and, from moving in the world, humans construct spatial maps in the brain which supports maps of time, of social relations, of ideas, and of values. Third, technology innovations require the confluence of these same constructs viz place, time, design teams, scientific ideas, and human values expressed in terms of proxies such as needs and problems, rewards and risks, credits and debits. Fourth, the David Rumsey Map Center has the facility to prototype and test a variety of ways in which a set of researchers and practitioners can be convened and supported while nurturing the growth of mission focused start-up ventures and organizations in an ecosystem. Fifth, given the coming challenges of global climate change, there will be a strong need to design, develop, deploy, and test the effectiveness of many such prototypes in the near future. This meeting provided us the opportunity to create and test an early prototype." [1]

You can learn more about the whole program here.

[1] Stanford Libraries. accessed 28 Oct 2021.