In conversation with David Clifford, it is immediately clear that his role as Director of Design and Making is as much about listening and learning as it is about building and leading. He describes himself as much the school’s ethnographer as curriculum designer—someone embedded in the life of Head-Royce, observing, engaging, and helping to co-create a more robust ecosystem for designing and building a better world.
David resists the idea that his work is about a place—like the Collaboratory or FabLab—or about a specific program.
For him, the real work is creating the conditions and culture where thinking and behaving like an equity-centered designer can flourish—an ideology grounded in the belief that everyone is a designer, capable of designing for good.
His hope is to create experiences that encourage people to see themselves as designers—conscious of their own creative power, guided by what he calls radical curiosity and care for oneself, others, and the planet.
David is quick to point out that Head-Royce already has seeds of a design mindset. “This doesn’t come from a top-down dictate,” he explains. “It’s about learning from what’s already here.” In this way, he is a catalyst and a force-multiplier. His leadership approach is rooted in the Leading for Equity framework, which emphasizes practicing self-awareness, building relational trust, observing, immersing, and engaging with the community.
Since joining Head-Royce this past summer, David has conducted about 40 empathy interviews, generating nearly 700 pages of transcripts, to learn how people at Head-Royce define design and making and to uncover their hopes for what the new Collaboratory could become. Using AI, he developed a “Unicorn Bot” to synthesize patterns and language emerging from the data. He’s developing a philosophical statement for the Collaboratory—one shaped not by a single voice but by many. Once completed, this will serve as a conceptual compass and a living framework for the Collaboratory, fostering a sense of collective ownership to guide pedagogical approaches, project choices, and curricular decisions.
For David, the school itself is an ecosystem—and every system generates what it was designed to create. He poses big questions, like “What is Head-Royce producing, and why?” His concern is that, as a society, “we’re preparing our kids for our past,” even as we stand on the threshold of a future we can’t yet predict. Across the school, he hears a readiness for something new—a desire to learn, to question, to design differently.
That’s where Liberatory Design comes in. David sees it as a way to invite both students and adults to reimagine systems, spaces, and mindsets. Makerspaces for some, he notes, can bring to mind problematic assumptions. “Technology first” rather than “people first” might be the biggest shadow. This misalignment is what he hopes to address, in reclaiming “making” as a human act of meaning and care. “We make to understand our world and share in it,” he says.
He describes the Collaboratory as an “oasis” or “watering hole,” a place where many different disciplines come to nourish themselves and cross-pollinate. “It’s like a flower,” he says, “inviting multiple pollinators encourages an exchange of ideas and creativity, it produces an intentional diversity, and helps create the environment for growth and bounty.” Over time, those interactions can shift the mindsets of future leaders.
As an ethnographer, David is constantly asking, “Where is design already happening in the school?” He sees two fronts: the student-facing and the adult-facing. His job, he says, is to create nutrient-rich soil so that new ideas can take root—bringing adults along to deepen the culture of creativity and the psychological safety required to be truly innovative.
He’s extending an invitation to co-design, encouraging teachers and students to experiment together. In one collaboration, Christy Betts, a 2nd grade teacher, approached him with a project around mixing paint colors. Before beginning a unit on melanin, she introduced something called a “Love Pause”—an activity where students reflected on people who love and believe in them—from their ancestors to their immediate family. From that came a “Love Waterfall,” where students said aloud, all at once, the names of those who came to mind. It’s part of cultivating reflection and empathy, David said, “honoring those who believe in you, so you can believe in yourself,” in addition to cultivating ourselves to be good ancestors.
David connects this to the idea of an Equity Pause, which invites people to slow down and examine potential biases in their decisions. He draws inspiration from scholars like Dr. Lonny Avi Brooks and other afrofuturists who talk about ancestral intelligence—asking, “How can we design conditions for true curiosity and change?”
“We have to make it possible for people to linger in the discomfort long enough to change,” David says. “To be curious about what change might really mean, feel, and look like.”
This ethos is showing up in classrooms throughout the school. David has been working closely with teachers across all grades to cultivate pedagogical opportunities for students to explore, be vulnerable, and apply empathy—so that they can practice navigating change and strengthen it as a capacity—a critical skill in navigating the beautiful complexity of relationships.
For instance, 4th graders and 9th graders are collaborating through a circuitry design challenge that bridges physics and empathy: students redesign each other’s morning routines, designing devices to improve them. In another project, 5th grade world language teachers are working with David and colleagues to design a monthlong cultural exploration of Chinatown, the Mission, and the French Quarter—creating tools for cultural connection and understanding.
Each of these is part of a larger culture shift — one that asks, “How can we create psychologically safe spaces for creativity, empathy, and collaboration?” David’s work, ultimately, is about changing mindsets and behaviors—preparing a generation not for our past, but for the uncertain, possibility-filled future they will design themselves.
Across campus, this philosophy shows up in different ways—but always with the same core moves: empathy, constraint, iteration, and care.
