Teaching Team

Like all designers, Liz is curious about many things. She loves discovering how and why people work the way they do. By learning about people, she feels she can create more meaningful products, services, organizations, and work practices. She can often be found observing people's behavior, talking to people about what they do and then prototyping on the fly to see how people react to environmental changes. She draws caricatures of people to highlight their needs, rearranges physical spaces to understand spatial behavior, and poses frameworks for how and why people do what they do.

Many people think innovation work requires financial resources and space, Liz believes it takes the right attitude. For five hundred years, Liz (and her ancestors) has been innovating in ways to improve their and other's lives. Fundamentally, she believes that people are capable of improving their lives when they have the confidence to do so. She believes that design offers this confidence. Liz's goal is to understand and create the personal and organizational conditions and processes to support innovation.

Liz believes that the greatest value of her education at Dartmouth and Stanford, was not the degrees, but the outstanding people who have inspired her and supported her curiosity. After teaching at the d.school for 4 years, Liz set out to build Northwestern's Segal Institute of Design.

At home, Liz is inspired by her daughter who is unaware of barriers and her husband who engages with the world with grace. She is uninspired by people who say "it's better than it was, so why pursue change," stereotyping, and inertia.