
Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
November 24, 2020
S8E7: Maurice Woods
Maurice Woods is a principal designer at Microsoft. He’s also the founder and executive director of Inneract Project, which provides free design education to underrepresented youth.
At Inneract, students learn about problem-solving using paper and pen, but perhaps more importantly they become aware of a set of professions that they never considered:
There are always moments in your life where you have an epiphany, like, “Man, this is crazy. I never heard of this before.” And those epiphanies are all it really takes sometimes to change someone’s life.
Like I think about my experience in design. It wasn’t this long-standing thing that I took over many years. It was like, we found a class, I took a class in design. And the first day I was like, “Wow.” And I was like, “Oh, man, this is kind of interesting.”
And then my whole life changed because of that.
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