page_title: Michael Sturtz
section_title: Stanford
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Sturtz / Stanford
caption_attribution_description: English: ReDesigning Theater
context_page_description: Michael Sturtz is a sculptor, designer, consultant, international speaker, innovator and facilitator of creative thinking. He is the founder of The Crucible, a nonprofit industrial arts school in Oakland, California, United States, and served as its Executive Director from 1999 to 2011.
  Sturtz joined Stanford University's d.school in 2012, where he spearheaded a new artistic genre of live performance as director of the ReDesigning Theater Project. In 2014, Sturtz founded Stanford’s Creative Ignition Lab at Autodesk in San Francisco. This new lab explored the potential for visual, experiential, and embodied thinking to unlock the future of making and learning. While at Autodesk, Michael joined the Applied Research & Innovation team at Pier 9, where he helped innovate new ways to utilize machine learning within robotic welding.
  In 2017 and 2018, Michael led the prototyping lab at Google X, where he led his own moonshot investigation and collaborated to pioneer the future of automated manufacturing.
context_section_description: Sturtz retired from The Crucible on January 15, 2011 to join Stanford University, accepting a teaching appointment in the Mechanical Engineering Design Group. He went on to teach at The Stanford School of Design, where he spearheaded and then directed the ReDesigning Theater Project, a creative program focusing on cutting edge live performance appealing to the 21 to 35-year-old demographic.
  In 2014, Sturtz became the Executive Director of The Stanford Creative Ignition Lab @ Autodesk. The lab explored the potential for visual, experiential, and embodied thinking to advance the future of learning, design, and making. The program's aim was to pioneer new ways to more purposefully bring the tools of invention and production seamlessly into creative processes.
  Sturtz participated in TEDx Stanford's “Above and Beyond“ series, to speak about finding your creative voice and harnessing your creativity.
caption: reDesigning Theater
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