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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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.