Having just celebrated our third birthday on August 20, the Jacobs Institute is excited to kick off year four with another semester of engaging speakers and other opportunities to visit Jacobs Hall. A lively mix of voices will join us for our Jacobs Design Conversations and Design Field Notes talk series, bringing design perspectives from fields that include wearables, assistive technology, augmented reality, and more. Beyond these talks, we’ll welcome UC Berkeley alumni and parents of current students for a Homecoming open house and the broader community for our winter design showcase.
In the Jacobs Design Conversations series, guests will join us at Jacobs Hall for lunch and dialogue on design innovation. These talks will take place at noon on Fridays.
Camille Utterback, artist and Stanford professor will join us on October 19 for a talk on designing for humans– an artist’s perspective. Utterback has been a pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art for more than two decades. Her work combines innovative technology, elegant design, and surprising situations to reconnect us to our physicality, to each other, and to the world around us. See full event information for this talk.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, will join us on October 26, offering a window onto his efforts to combat technological waste by providing knowledge and resources for device repair. He’ll examine the spread of Right to Repair legislation and outline how design can create products more open to recycling and reuse. See full event information for this talk.
Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google, will join us on November 16, offering a talk on Empowering Creators: Research & Material Design. Churchill received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge, and went on to build HCI research teams in a number of well-known companies, including eBay, Yahoo!, PARC and FXPAL – Fuji Xerox’s Research lab. Her current work at Google focuses on effective designer and developer tooling. See full event information for this talk.
A new year also brings a new season of Design Field Notes, a pop-up series that invites design practitioners to a Jacobs Hall teaching studio to share current projects, practices, and ideas. This semester, Design Field Notes talks will take place at 4pm on Mondays.
Currently scheduled talks include:
• Professor and beauty tech researcher Katia Vega: 9/10
• Microsoft creative technologist Kitty Yeung: 9/17
• Printrbot founder Brook Drumm: 9/24
• Cochlear implant hacker Mike Marzalek: 10/1
• Hardware expert and Root Ventures partner Chrissy Meyer: 10/15
• AR/VR designer and User Experience lead at Google Diane Wang: 10/22
• IDEO designers Chris Hill and Prat Ganapathy: 10/29
• Hewlett Packard research lead Stephanie Chen: 11/5
• Tufts professor and anthropologist of algorithms Nick Seaver: 11/19
• App and transit designer Ian Leighton: 11/26
We will add additional talks as the semester continues, so look out for news of more events! Beyond these talks, mark your calendar for Homecoming on October 19, and for our winter design showcase on December 5 and 6.
Questions? Contact us at jacobsinstitute@berkeley.edu.