Make Possibilities Happen

How to Transform Ideas into Reality

by Grace Hawthorne and Stanford d.school

Scheme the impossible! Turn your vision into reality! Transform what if into what’s next! Discover how to make your ideas work for you with this transformative guide from Stanford University’s d.school.

“An operator’s manual to design thinking.”—John Maeda, Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft

Possibility is the ability to see something in your imagination and materialize it in real life. You already possess (almost) everything you need to make things happen—Make Possibilities Happen helps you find your way.

Discover tools and strategies for overcoming the hang-ups that prevent you from getting things done or even starting. Learn exercises for building the creative capacity of your brain. Explore ways to build on the momentum of your work so that you can keep going. Award-winning author Grace Hawthorne shares insights, ideas, and activities from the Stanford University d.school courses she teaches, as well as scientific research and entrepreneurial escapades to get you thinking productively toward making possibilities a reality.

It’s hard to begin, uncomfortable to not know, natural to question yourself, easy to be impatient, and challenging to swallow setbacks. This book addresses all of these hurdles and walks you through four main stages of turning your idea into reality: SEE (imagine what’s to come), START (just begin, this is everything), DO (show up and work), and FINISH (follow through).

You can positively alter your life—and other people’s lives—by making the inklings of your imagination real. All you need to do is pick up this book and START.

Paperback | 144 pages | Ten Speed Press | 2023

Grace Hawthorne is an entrepreneur, artist, author, and educator. She is the Founder/CEO of Paper Punk, an award-winning Origami meets LEGO mashup that helps people exercise their creativity, and Foldmade, an innovative work supply system that helps people get stuff done. She co-authored the critically acclaimed book on reuse design, ReadyMade: How to Make (Almost) Everything (Random House/Potter). Her artwork has been exhibited in several national museums including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Triennial. Grace has dedicated her life to making things and experiences that cultivate human creativity through the marriage of art + commerce.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, was founded at Stanford in 2005. Each year, more than a thousand students from all disciplines attend classes, workshops, and programs to learn how the thinking behind design can enrich their own work and unlock their creative potential.