Lab Director: K-12 Lab

Susie Wise was supposed to be in politics. In fact, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania she was all set to head to DC to work as a legislative press aide. But at the last minute she thought better of having her training come from “all those boys in blue blazers.” Instead she figured she’d find her own way. After brief stops in Oregon, Central America, and Boone County, Indiana, she landed in SF.

Her connection to human-centered processes goes back to early work with rape and incest survivors, teaching HIV/AIDS prevention to middle schoolers, and collaborative women’s theater. Her more formal link to design came from starting out as a bug tester for an edutainment software company. Surprised when all the bugs she meticulously documented came back labeled “not a bug; it’s in the design,” she thought “surely something is wrong with this process.” This led her to specialize in story-based software games for kids. She was happily doing that when she met her future boss at a party at her own house and ended up spending the next four and a half years at SFMOMA as the Senior Producer for Interactive Educational Technologies… a long way from Washington, but a great gig.

Susie came to Stanford to do doctoral work in the School of Ed. Having made "educational" software for a good while, it was time to understand how people actually learned. Along the way she has learned about doing research, but her heart has always been in design. Now at the d.school she's instigating ways to incorporate what we know about how people learn, with the way we design spaces and places for learning.