Sandy Speicher
About
Sandy Speicher is an Associate Partner at the global design and innovation firm IDEO. She leads IDEO’s Education practice, which looks to people’s unmet needs, desires, and aspirations to inspire new solutions for a wide variety of challenges—from the ways that people are learning to the ways that systems are operating.
Working with organizations across the public, private, and social sectors, Sandy is constantly exploring ways that we can design more effective and inspiring systems. She and her teams have helped to create a scalable, affordable school model in Peru, strategies to improve schools for the poor in India, digital learning platforms that meet the needs of today’s students, and approaches to increasing teaching effectiveness in the US. Recently, she collaborated with Carnegie Corporation to launch 100k in 10, which President Clinton has referred to as a new model for social change.
She is passionate about design as a process to empower everyone – including students, parents and teachers – to improve the world around them. To this end, Sandy has partnered with Riverside School in India to create the Design for Change Contest, which engages students around the globe in creating new solutions for social challenges in their communities, and Design Thinking for Educators, a free downloadable toolkit that empowers teachers to be change agents in their schools.
While much of Sandy’s work at IDEO focuses on education, she has also launched design solutions in health care, social innovation, and organizational change. Outside IDEO, she serves as a strategic adviser to the K-12 Lab at the Stanford d.school and the Learning, Design, and Technology program in Stanford’s School of Education. She is also on the board of the IQ Collective, a non-profit which helps connect global resources to schools serving the poor in India.
Prior to joining IDEO, Sandy taught visual communications at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent six years teaching design thinking to fifth-graders at a public school in San Francisco. She launched her design career at MetaDesign, where she developed visual systems that brought clarity to complexity. Her work included brand development, way-finding graphics, and interactive platforms. Read more about her career journey here.
Sandy holds an MA in Education from Stanford University and a BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University. She loves to travel and learn by immersing herself in other cultures. She also takes pride in her fairly robust, yet still enigmatic, collection of Mona Lisa kitsch.