Silicon Valley: From Orchards to AI
How Design Thinking Built the Digital Age: a short, illustrated history in 2 minutes 18 seconds.
Download: 720p MP4 (9.8 MB) compact MP4 (2 MiB) captions
About the series
Silicon Valley's breakthroughs are usually told as stories of technology. The Silicon Valley Mindset tells them as stories of people: founders, engineers and designers who watched real needs, built quick prototypes and kept iterating, the habits that design thinking later gave a name. Each short episode pairs a turning point in the valley's history with the design thinking lesson behind it.
In this episode
- From fruit orchards to Frederick Terman's Stanford and the HP garage (1939)
- Stanford Industrial Park, Shockley's lab and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor (1951–1957)
- Intel, and how the region got its name: "Silicon Valley U.S.A." (1968–1971)
- Sand Hill Road, Apple and Xerox PARC's Alto; the dot-com boom and bust; Google
- IDEO and Stanford's d.school spread design thinking: start with people's real needs
- The iPhone, ChatGPT and Nvidia's $5 trillion milestone (2007–2025)
A Silicon Valley Design Thinking Club production. Facts checked against the Computer History Museum, the California Office of Historic Preservation, company histories and press reports. Illustrations generated with Google Gemini; narration Kokoro TTS; music Google Lyria. Company names and logos appear for identification and are trademarks of their owners.
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