The School of Design is proud to announce that Eric Anderson was inducted as an IDSA Fellow at this year's IDSA International Conference in New Orleans.

To announce Eric's Fellow status, the IDSA said the following in their opening remarks:

"Eric Anderson has only been an IDSA member for 13 years yet he’s managed to hold several high offices: Western PA Chapter Chair, Education Committee Chair, Secretary/Treasurer, Vice-President, President and Chair Emeritus, his current position on IDSA’s Board of Directors. We cannot count the number of miles he has traveled the globe meeting practitioners, educators, business leaders, politicians and students. We do know that tireless is an apt way of describing his volunteer stewardship.

Eric is a quiet, gentle man who has represented and led the organization with dignity, strength and clarity of purpose. Consequently, the average designer may never fully realize the commitment Eric has made to our community. Save for one rather significant accomplishment: he kept IDSA in business. 

The moment Eric transitioned from Vice President to President coincided with the global economic downturn, an event significant enough to test the viability of our organization. With IDSA in both fiscal and structural jeopardy, Eric’s leadership produced a major overhaul in accounting practices, a restructuring of IDSA’s national staff to make it more accountable to the design community and a fresh focus on strategic thinking to better utilize digital tools.

Eric has not merely served IDSA these last 13 years. He has also performed exceptionally as an educator at Carnegie-Mellon University. His deep expertise in design visualization has paired with his commitment to socially responsible design to help advance his school’s elite design curriculum. Additionally, Eric has shown leadership in the Pittsburgh area by shepherding design-based K through 12 educational outreach initiatives with the city’s minority communities.

Eric is famous, among other things, for listening with great interest and intent to those he meets so he can work to use the accumulated wisdom for the betterment of IDSA. His aversion to self-promotion would prevent him from making his own case for fellowship in our society. Thankfully, his record speaks definitively on his behalf. 

Eric, we are very proud to welcome you to IDSA’s Academy of Fellows."

We wholeheartedly agree with this characterization of Eric and his contributions to the field of design and design education. 

Congratulations Eric!

http://www.idsa.org/eric-anderson-president

About the IDSA
Founded in 1965, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is one of the world’s oldest, largest, member-driven societies for product design, industrial design, interaction design, human factors, ergonomics, design research, design management, universal design and related design fields. IDSA produces the renowned International Design Excellence Award® (IDEA) competition annually; hosts the International Design Conference and five regional conferences each year; and publishes Innovation, a quarterly journal on design, and designBytes, a weekly e-newsletter highlighting the latest headlines in the design world. IDSA's charitable arm, the Design Foundation, supports the dissemination of undergraduate scholarships annually to further industrial design education. The organization has more than 3,000 members in 27 chapters in the U.S. and internationally. For more information, visithttp://www.idsa.org .

About Fellows
The Board of Directors may confer, by a two-thirds majority vote, a fellowship membership to a member in good standing who has earned the special respect and affection of the membership through distinguished service to the ID profession.