top of page
Angela Luna: Democratizing Sustainable Fashion
What is the role of the designer in the modern age of reuse, resale, and recycling? With sustainable fashion and responsible consumption landing far beyond so many people's budgets, there's often no choice but to shop from environmentally and ethically harmful brands. Angela Luna, Founder and Creative Director of ADIFF, invites us to consider alternative methods of fashion consumption that won't destroy the planet or our wallets.
Anisa Tavangar: Telling Visual Stories Through a Lens of Justice
Through art and the insights of those who create it, beauty can thoughtfully weave together hidden narratives. When appreciated in its fullness, beauty can stir appreciation, invite curiosity, and inspire conversation. Join Anisa Tavangar of For Freedoms in an exploration of the following questions: What story are we telling? How can art (and the voices of artists) become a catalyst for justice and beauty? How can we be more visionary and less reactionary?
Daniel Toole: Nature and Materials
Can architecture create a deeper connection to nature? Using examples from his studio's quickly growing portfolio of urban projects and private residences, architect Daniel Toole will guide you through his design process that focuses on the interplay of light, site, and materials to create unique places for living and contemplation.
Dot Lung: How to Survive a Pandemic, War and the Instagram Algorithm
How to rebuild your social media from scratch. Learn social media survival skills to overcome pandemics, war and algorithmic changes. Dot will share her social media strategy that generated multiple 6-figures during the Covid-19 lockdown!
Maya Bird-Murphy: Making Design Accessible, One Student at a Time
Join architect and changemaker Maya Bird-Murphy as she discusses her journey through the field of architecture and explores the lack of racial diversity and equity that inevitably led to the creation of Chicago Mobile Makers. Learn how to lean into change, offer hope and dream up new solutions that will inspire future generations.
Robb Mills: Documentary Sound Design: Where Subtlety Meets Significance
Robb Mills dives into his role as Sound Designer on the Oscar-nominated documentary Hunger Ward, an unflinching spotlight on the weaponization of food in Yemen's tragically overlooked and ongoing civil war. Learn about his intensely collaborative process with the filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald to subtly recreate and augment the sound in many scenes, returning them to their original emotional depth without fictionalizing or overreaching the intended narrative.
Skye Moret: Engaging Design for an Unstable World
Can design shift our planet's socio-ecological interactions of the future in a positive and sustainable direction? Through data-driven design, design systems thinking, and collaborative decision-making, we have the potential to shift---and ideally advance---dynamic stewardship of our world. Using examples from her kaleidoscopic career path, designer, scientist and adventurer Skye Morét will explore how design can inform, shape and encourage the critical rethinking of our blue planet experience at the intersection of climate, environment, and social justice.
2021
Martin Venesky: Crossing Disciplines and Back Again
In 2014 Venezky exhibited his photographic work for the first time. Although photography had played a role in his design work for years, this was the first time it was presented for its own sake, without any client or external project brief. From that point on he has been slowly steering his work in that direction, with unexpected results. Venezky will discuss this transformation and how the two disciplines of design and photography strengthen, challenge and enhance each other in his recent work.
Jessica Bellamy: Creative Impact: Equity in Information and Experience Design
Learn about Jessica’s experiences as a creative operating at the intersection of community organizing, information design, research, and experience design. In this session, she will walk participants through impact design case studies and offer a foundation in data equity. Jessica will also share her six principles of Conscious and Responsible design, and the tools necessary to be successful in the social change sector.
Joel Pilger: Our Crisis of Unhelpfulness
Design is supposed to make things easier. Why are designers making things harder? Design promises solutions to a world of questions in search of answers. But what if the designers are invisible? Meet Our Crisis of Unhelpfulness, where clients with real challenges struggle every day to find, understand, and collaborate with creators who are all sadly floating in a sea of sameness. In this talk, RevThink consultant Joel Pilger will reveal the root causes of the crisis, as well as the discovery that has helped hundreds of creative firms around the world overcome it.
Liz Jackson: Engaging in Disability as a Creative Practice
Designers are increasingly referring to disability in terms of accessibility. But accessibility is only one part of disability; it’s the need. And it is being taught at the exclusion of disability history, disability culture, and disability theory. Liz discusses the impact of engaging in disability, not as a problem to be solved, but rather as a discipline and a creative practice. This presentation teaches designers how to design WITH, rather than for disability.
Deann Van Buren: Peace By Design
Peace by Design looks at the work of Designing Justices Designing Spaces (DJDS), along with research that explores how design in the public realm can support healing from interpersonal and transgenerational harms.
Peter Burr: Pattern Language
This is an interview that followed the exhibition of 'Pattern Language' by Peter Burr. 'Pattern Language’ is a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander to quantify the aliveness of certain human ambitions through an index of structural patterns. Some advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people can use it to successfully solve very large, complex design problems. In this piece, Alexander’s design theories are applied towards the construction of a generative video game labyrinth resulting in a rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light. The whole environment is infused with a procedural vitality brought forth through cellular automata and crowd simulation algorithms.
Tré Seals: Being Vocal
Tré was only two years out of college with a passion for branding, and all of a sudden, he got bored. “I was tired of the process of searching for inspiration only to realize that everything looks the same,” he says. “I started wondering if I had chosen the wrong career path. Once I discovered that the design industry is over 80% white and the majority male, everything made sense. When an industry is dominated by a singular experience, a singular perspective, this creates a lack of diversity in people, experiences, ideas, voices, and most importantly, creations. So in short, I started, and continue to expand upon, Vocal Type Co. for the (less than) 20% who feel that they don’t have a voice, and continue to be underrepresented, in the design industry.” His talk will cover the founding of Vocal Type Co., the importance of diversity in design, and a look at his process.
Debbie Millman: Why We Brand, Why We Buy
Why We Brand, Why We Buy is an entertaining sociological, scientific and anthropological overview of why humans buy and brand things.