As a 10-year-old, Maureen fell in love with Harriet, the delightful heroine of Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s book Harriet the Spy. Harriet was a fifth-grader who loved to spy on a quirky cast of neighbors, friends and classmates and record her observations in her diary. Maureen and her best friend Judi decided to emulate Harriet, and formed the Harriet the Spy Club, whose members eavesdropped on people, climbed trees, and had adventures throughout Fresh Meadows, a New York City neighborhood filled with lots to see and lots to learn. Maureen didn’t end up pursuing a career as a spy, but those early adventures shaped her passions as a writer, a designer, and a people-watcher. For Maureen, inspiration comes from collisions of thoughts, ideas, textures, colors, and sounds — she believes that there is nothing quite so enticing as a blank page.
As a founder of the design consultancy Lime Design, Maureen has the opportunity to craft experiences that foster creativity, innovation and design in both educational and corporate settings. In addition to her work at Lime, Maureen has been teaching at Stanford University’s d.school for over a decade. Her courses include SparkTruck: Designing Mobile Interventions for Education, Design Thinking Studio: Designing with Radical Agency, and Serendipity Studio. She also led the quarterly K12Lab Network introductory design thinking workshops. Maureen is currently working on a research project that combines machine learning and qualitative research methods in order to understand more about the transformation that happens during students’ d.school learning journeys.
As a lecturer in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, Maureen co-taught Educating Young STEM Thinkers – a course that integrated design thinking and STEM and gave Stanford students the opportunity to mentor East Palo Alto middle schoolers. She also served as the Director of REDlab, which conducts research on the intersection of design thinking and learning and received a National Science Foundation grant to pursue this effort. Maureen’s research has been published in Design Studies, The International Journal of Art & Design Education, The Journal of Research in STEM Education, The Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research, and BASE Innovation Journal. Her time away from work is spent enjoying her husband and three sons, daughter-in-law and daughters-in-law to be and being on and in the water.
Maureen loves all the aspects of her work — teaching, creating, and developing new business opportunities — and can’t imagine doing anything else because each day is a new opportunity to be curious and, like Harriet, be delighted by possibility.
