Leadership Team: Publishing, Research, Fundraising

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.

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. When designing phonics games for third graders got old she went to work at SFMOMA, spending the next four and a half years at 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 Education. Having made "educational" software for a good while, it was time to understand how people actually learned. Along the way she has learned a lot about doing research, but her heart has always been in design. At the d.school she was first the founding director of the K-12 Lab, leading the team that developed the Nueva School's Innovation Lab and other school partnerships. Now she is part of the leadership team dedicated to building our publishing engine and other ventures.