Lisa Ma (she/they)
design thinking facilitator

01. introduction

Lisa Ma is a product designer and sustainability expert with a knack for extracting patterns, encouraging new ways of expression, and creating safe spaces that allow each voice to be heard. As a product designer at RoadRunner Recycling, Lisa facilitates cross-functional ideation workshops to help their team manage waste and recycling streams. She supports the company in leveraging community hauling capabilities to ensure materials are being recovered and not delivered to landfills. Lisa also cares about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and helps plan and facilitate employee events and discussions around topics such as women in the workplace. She also facilitates workshops for youth to spark and channel their creativity in traditional and computational art and has volunteered for an afterschool program promoting creative self-expression and mutual understanding through dance and improv. 

02. experience

Lisa’s design thinking and sustainability experiences have led to exciting engagements with Stanford Splash, Harvard CityStep, and RoadRunner Recycling. She believes design thinking can be a powerful tool to make changes in systems in a world where so much fear and dread is placed on environmental issues. We can use design to create positive change by bringing people into the process to empathize with the problems first then collaborate to solve systemic issues together. 

03. education

• Harvard University, Statistics and Computer Science

04. what sustains lisa

In her free time, Lisa loves to dance like nobody's watching. Having a space where she can freely express herself through movement to music helps her exercise her emotions.

05. favorite tree

Lisa has two favorite trees — one from her past and one from her present. 

The first tree is the London plane (英桐, yíng tóng, in Chinese or more commonly called 法国梧桐, fǎguó wú tóng). This tree reminds her of Shanghai, where she was born and first saw them beautifully line the streets of the city. Like her background, it carries a history of different cultures. Its distinct bark with the patches of green and brown seem to symbolize those layers of stories, hers and others.

The second tree is one that Lisa first encountered only a few years ago after spending some time on the West Coast, to which it is endemic: the Pacific madrone. These trees emanate a curiosity and enthusiasm, their branches always reaching toward the ocean, their leaves staying evergreen, their bark exposing strips of reddish-oranges and greens. She likes to think that she also embodies this energy.