Passing through White Plaza last Thursday, students may have noticed a terrible bike accident or some unfortunate fellow moaning that he shouldn’t have been wearing earphones. Returning from class, some may have wondered who left the flier to get those bike tires filled.

Or, perhaps, some saw that impromptu roundabout at Stanford’s affectionately named Intersection of Death and thought, “Hey, good idea.”

These ideas were the product of team efforts by students in ME 377, “Experiences in Innovation and Design Thinking.” The course is the first to be offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school for short.

Launched just last year, the d.school, a unit of the School of Engineering, draws graduate students from a variety of departments across campus, including the Graduate School of Business, computer science, mechanical engineering and education. By gathering different disciplines together, the program aims to teach collaborative innovation — a special skill the school’s leaders dub design thinking.

“Design thinking is a different way of thinking,” said Alex Kazaks, a member of the course’s teaching team. “There are all different kinds of intelligences, and one of these is creative intelligence. Design thinking is an analog for that. This is not something usually taught in a university setting, and we’re trying to make it available to students.”

Also listed as ME 206A and OIT 333, ME 377 is the flagship of the fairly new d.school, which will not confer regular departmental degrees of its own. Introductory in nature, the class focuses primarily on teamwork.

“This is a class for students interested in leading teams and leading innovation within teams,” said teaching team member Perry Klebahn.

In an effort to reach beyond theory, the class is built entirely around team projects. ME 377 students have 24-hour access to their own classroom workspace — a comfortable-looking space with couches, workbenches, whiteboards across every wall and pink carnations in the plastic cups that hold markers.

“In the GSB, we look at case studies and analyze and talk,” said Management Science and Engineering Prof. Bob Sutton, a founding member of the d.school. “The whole d.school is based on doing stuff in interdisciplinary teams.”

The bike safety projects that swept campus the past week were the second of these learning-by-doing assignments.

“We had to spend eight hours making changes that are meant to increase bike safety on campus, and we had to actually do something, not just plan it,” said second-year GSB student Max Pulido London — one of the group that staged the White Plaza bike accident.

An additional constraint required team members to work within 20 feet of one another.

“It was kind of like the d.school version of [reality show] ‘The Apprentice,’” said first-year electrical engineering graduate student Joel Darnauer.

As the mock accident’s victim, Darnauer lay on the ground covered in fake blood as his teammates handed out fliers with bike safety tips. The long yellow fliers, which were made by the campus police, featured a 10 percent-off coupon for a helmet.

Pulido, Darnauer and four other teammates decided on their project after collecting information on bike safety, a process that included interviewing bike shop salespeople, students and the campus deputy.

“There are about 50 reported accidents annually and many more that go unreported — several per day according the bike shop folks,” Darnauer said. “According to the campus deputies, the main problems are: bikers not paying attention to stop signs at busy intersections, riding without a light at night and riding while distracted by a cellphone or an iPod.”

“In general, we found that there is an awareness on campus of the dangers of not wearing helmets,” Pulido said, “Yet people tend to feel that it cannot happen to them, but to someone else.”

Projects, which students presented yesterday afternoon, ranged from awareness campaigns to directing actual bike traffic. All groups collected preliminary data, which included findings on undergraduate attitudes towards bike safety. One such group reported that undergraduate students regarded helmet-wearing as “socially uncool.”

Many students said they were surprised that their week-long exercise in teamwork garnered real and positive reactions.

“We handed out about 200 fliers,” Darnauer said. “Most people were interested in what we had to say. A few visiting high school students stopped to take pictures.”

The group that built the temporary roundabout, complete with police assistance and artwork, presented videos of cyclists using the roundabout to make safe turns. One woman even gave them a thumbs-up.

Another group completed bike inspections on parked bikes, leaving pamphlets for students with flat tires or broken brakes. This group reported seeing students pause to examine their bikes, and no students threw the notices away.

A third group organized a “virus” game, and distributed a phone number for students to report their biggest complaints about biking on campus. The group received 21 calls.

ME 377 students deemed the projects a good experience, allowing them to meet their peers in other disciplines and work in a more hands-on setting. They realized as well that the course’s design was a collaborative project itself.

“The content of this class will drive a lot of the content for the spring quarter,” Klebahn said.

“It’s been a little chaotic,” said first-year mechanical engineering student Michael Ho, another member of the bike safety team. “But it’s exciting to be a part of this.”