The Jacobs Institute is excited to announce our spring season of public events at 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 art, robotics, law, healthcare, and many more. Beyond these talks, we’ll welcome our community for a Cal Day open house and our spring design showcase, celebrating our creative student ecosystem.
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.
Saul Griffith, an inventor and founder of Otherlab, Makani Power, Instructables, and many others, will speak on February 23. Griffith has been awarded numerous awards for invention and engineering, including being named a MacArthur Fellow. Learn more and register for this talk.
Allison Arieff, editorial director of SPUR and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, will join us on March 2. Arieff writes about cities and design for numerous publications; previous roles include serving as Senior Content Lead at IDEO and as a founding editor of Dwell magazine, which won a National Magazine Award while she was editor-in-chief. Registration will open one month prior to the talk; to receive a reminder when registration opens, sign up here. See full event information for this talk.
Alan Eustace, Google’s former Senior Vice President of Knowledge who set skydiving records when he jumped from the stratosphere in 2014, will speak on April 6. His talk will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the design and build process behind StratEx, a scuba-like system for the exploration of the stratosphere. Registration will open one month prior to the talk; to receive a reminder when registration opens, sign up here. See full event information for this talk.
Spring 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 Tuesdays.
Currently scheduled talks include:
•LUNAR technical lead Sara Cinnamon: 1/23
•Artist and roboticist Alexander Reben: 1/30
•Legal Design Lab director Margaret Hagan: 2/6
•Computational craft researcher Jennifer Jacobs: 2/13
•Dynamicland designer Paula Te: 2/27
•Artist Kal Spelletich: 3/13
•Airbnb design director Ethan Eismann: 3/20
•Autodesk UX designer Tiffany Tseng: 4/3
•Design anthropologist Melissa Cefkin: 4/10
•SFMOMA curatorial assistant Robert Kett: 4/17
We may add additional talks as the semester continues, so look out for news of more events! Beyond these talks, mark your calendar for Cal Day and for our spring design showcase.
All events are free and open to the public.
Questions? Contact us at jacobsinstitute@berkeley.edu.