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Extreme @ Stanford

"a journey of imagination, values-driven design & social innovation, rooted in community"

Design for Extreme Affordability (often referred to as “Extreme”) is a two-quarter elective course jointly offered by the Graduate School of Business and the School of Engineering at Stanford University. Each year, students across Stanford University sign up to learn how to use the latest innovation and design methods to address real-world challenges of poverty in collaboration with partners and the communities globally. The result is real implementable solutions that have touched the lives of 180 million people worldwide.

Our Impact

Students

773

Projects

196

Partners

People Impacted

180,000,000

Extreme Community Voices

“Extreme teams have the time and outside perspective to think deeply and creatively about a concept. The organizational reality for us is that we need to move fast and execute efficiently, and this creates pressure to stick with “safe” ideas. We leverage the creativity of Extreme teams to explore totally new ideas and keep us thinking outside the box.”

“It's really inspiring to see the reach that something like Extreme can do with people. It's really a great example of academia at work, working to create change. It's really inspiring to hopefully see this new generation coming in with that vision that they can change their lives and transform their own realities and hopefully their community and country.”

“The Extreme community to me is a group of creative individuals who are here not to compete with one another, it's a group of people who are here to help serve communities. And so we're all here to support each other's projects and help develop a larger impact from the class generally, not just within our own work. And it's creative. We're in a studio together where we're all looking at each other's work and we're learning from one another, asking how they're using certain tools and how we might develop from those tools.”

“I’ve never had an experience like this before where not only have I been able to work on a project for an extended period of time, but being able to immerse myself in the community that I’m impacting through the project by being able to actually travel there and talk with dozens of people was really impactful. I’ve never had that depth of immersion in any project before.”