Maureen Carroll
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 thinking in both educational and corporate settings. Maureen is a lecturer in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where she co-teaches Educating Young STEM Thinkers – a course that integrates design thinking and STEM and gives Stanford students the opportunity to mentor East Palo Alto middle schoolers. She is also the director of REDlab, which conducts research on the intersection of design thinking and learning. REDlab received a National Science Foundation grant to pursue this effort. This year, as a d.school lecturer, Maureen will be co-teaching Creativity & Innovation and working with the d.school fellows program. She also leads the quarterly K12Lab Network introductory design thinking workshops. Her time away from work is spent enjoying her husband and three sons, and being on and in the water.
Maureen loves all the aspects of her work- teaching, creating, 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.
