Each year our annual Design Lecture Series brings transdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners from around the world to campus, believing that the power of design addresses some of today's most pressing challenges. Our speakers come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines including design, business, the nonprofit sector, education, science, and more.
This year’s schedule includes:
- 10/10/22 - Jason Yuan, Human Interface Designer
- 10/25/22 - Robert Brunner, Founder & Partner, Ammunition
- 10/31/22 - Cas Holman, Founder, Heroes Will Rise
- 11/07/22 - Fred Bould, Design Director & Principal Partner, Bould Design
- 11/14/22 - Jaclyn Saik, Product Designer, Asana
- 02/08/23 - Pedro del Corro, Senior Designer, Dropbox
- 03/20/23 - Joseph Han & Sanuk Kim, Creative Director & Design Director, Collins
- 03/27/23 - Talia Cotton, Designer & Coder, Pentagram
- TBD - Ezio Manzini, Design Academic, Author & Founder of DESIS Network
This year, under the supervision of Assistant Teaching Professor Brett Yasko, a team of students oversaw the curation, promotion and execution of the Design Lecture Series. The team was comprised of Seniors Chelsea Liu and Grace Li, as well as Juniors Tara Banatwala and Ricky Chen.
“I’m excited about this year’s lineup,” said Yasko. “We have a wide range of practices and years of experience. One of my favorite parts of being on the committee is seeing who the students want to bring rather than me and/or the faculty deciding. And there are always a handful of speakers who I’m not at all familiar with. So I feel like I’m getting an education as well as good insight into what type of work appeals to our students.”
“Putting together the speakers list was time-consuming but fun,” said Liu. “We wanted to invite speakers with work that would really inspire students, and resonate with people across all the different disciplines.”
Polling their fellow students turned out to be a tremendous asset for the team as they put together this year’s lineup.
“This definitely made our job easier, because we were able to get a sense of what kinds of speakers or topics people were hungry to hear about,” said Li. “The tough part was making sure we had a balanced lineup representing designers working in fields relevant to each of our three tracks (Communications, Products, & Environments).”
Hearing from a wide array of designers, working in multiple different fields in the spectrum of design, can be an invaluable tool for students as they go through the journey of their education.
“Hearing from designers working in the field is important because it helps us contextualize our practice - whether that's by finding a long-term career goal to start working towards, or by realizing how a seemingly jumbled skill-set or interests might actually be the perfect fit for a particular kind of role in the industry,” said Li.
“I think it’s really important for me as a student to hear from designers working in the field because it supplements what we learn in the classroom,” added Liu. “It’s really interesting to learn about the processes of these designers because it can be wildly different from what we’re taught.
“I personally hope that the speakers can inspire students to do something they haven’t tried before, open up a new perspective on design, or shed some insight on how things work in the industry,” continued Liu.
“I hope that this speaker series leaves people inspired to explore something they always wanted to try or that they didn't know about before,” said Li. “As students we're often quick to internalize the perspectives of our professors, but I think it's important to sometimes challenge those notions of what design can look like and give people permission to form their own perspective.”
Unless otherwise noted, all editions of the Design Lecture Series this year will take place at 5pm EST in room A11 of Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall.