Mauro Silva

This is a small internal project. Almost an exercise in self-expression around the bigger idea of how this company works. We work remotely from different parts of the world, but every quarter we spend five days together somewhere new. Not really doing regular work. Walking in the woods, cooking, talking, getting closer to nature, to each other, and to our own attention. The zine came from these weeks, and also became an opportunity to play with craft. The experience of making something with a risograph is, in itself, part of the project I was aiming for.

Some organizations are created to solve problems. Others are created because the world itself has changed. The Stanford Doerr belongs to the second category. It is the first new Stanford school in more than seventy-five years, founded on the belief that humanity’s greatest challenges no longer fit inside traditional academic disciplines. Climate, energy, food systems, biodiversity, cities, geopolitics, artificial intelligence—they are all deeply connected. The institution itself was designed around that idea. Before it could introduce itself to the world, however, it had to answer a far more fundamental question: Why does this school exist?

The core element of the thinking is the idea that work can be different, if we make it different. Most days we operate at a very high frequency: meetings, calls, deadlines, things that need to happen quickly. Then, for five days every quarter, we deliberately change the frequency. We slow things down and make room for deeper conversations, longer thoughts, and questions about the future of the company that are difficult to access at everyday speed.

I especially like the idea that the way we do things is largely inherited, and not necessarily the best way to do them. The rhythms of work, the cycles, the expectations around time, we inherit them and keep repeating them. Thinking of time itself as a design material invites us to question those rhythms and invent something new.

That search shaped the questions the institution could answer, the language it would use to describe itself, and the ideas that would guide its future. From defining an ecosystem of scholars, solvers, and scalers to articulating its purpose in four simple words “For life on Earth. Forever.” the work created a common language that allows one of the world’s most ambitious academic institutions to function as one while preserving the remarkable diversity of people, disciplines, and ideas that gives it its strength.

The inheritance of tempo

The inheritance of tempo