Please join us in welcoming another exciting semester of Design Field Notes speakers. As part of our ongoing course DES INV 95, this speaker series invites a dynamic group of designers, artists, and academics in design-related fields to share their work and practice with our students and public.
Each talk is free and open to all students and members of the public via Zoom. A Zoom account is required for login and access to this series. You can join each of the talks during its scheduled time using this link!
All talks will take place on Zoom Wednesdays, 10 – 11 a.m. PT. Follow @JacobsDesignCal on Instagram for regular updates on the series.
September 4: From University Ideation to Real-World Impact
Lucy Jung, CEO, Charco Neurotech
Lucy Jung, a founder and CEO of Charco Neurotech, is a design engineer focused on projects related to patient care. She studied Innovation Design Engineering MSc/MA (Distinction) at Imperial College London and Royal College of Art, Industrial and Informatic Design BA from Korea University and holds a Certificate of Management Excellence (CME) diploma from Harvard Business School funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng). She gained experience as a Product Designer at Samsung Design Membership and PDD London and as a Marketing Intern at Cheil Worldwide. She is a speaker at the Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS) accelerator programme and Cambridge Network Event for EMBA students and alumni. As a trained Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) assessor, she focuses on a patient-centric approach to develop innovative solutions to improve the quality of life of people with long-term conditions.
September 11: Slicelab’s Journey Navigating the Design and Business World from Architecture to Computational Product Design and Digital Fabrication
Diego Taccioli, Compuational Designer, Slicelab
Diego Taccioli is a Principle and CoFounder at Slicelab. With a background in architecture and additive manufacturing, Diego has worked in various design roles for companies such as OPT Industries, WRNS Studio, KMD Architects, and Autodesk. Currently serving as Adjunct Faculty at Academy of Art University and Johnson & Wales University, Diego’s expertise lies in digital design, fabrication, and integrated product design. Educationally, Diego holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
September 18: Co-Designing with Children
Sara Berkai, Founder, Ambessa Play
Sara Berkai is the founder and CEO of Ambessa Play, a social enterprise creating educational tools with children globally. With a BSc from UCL and an MSc in Child Development from the University of Oxford, Sara has a background in technology, charity, and education. She has received numerous awards from the Conduit, Forbes, UN’s Young ICT Leader and Anitab.Org.
September 25: Design for Experience
Mark Cordell Holmes, Designer & Art Director
Mark Cordell Holmes is a 30-year multi-disciplinary designer and art director from Feature Animation, Gaming and Tech. Having worked for such companies as Pixar Animation Studios (designing on over 10 classic films), Electronic Arts and Maxis (as art director and narrative designer), Google and Facebook (as a Creative Director and Art Director of Doodles and AR experiences), Mark has long been a forward-looking designer working at the intersection of Art, Narrative and Technology. Also a teacher and lecturer of Cinematic Design Thinking: The Art + Craft of Visual-Emotional Storytelling, Mark is excited to share a cross-industry, cross-media, cross-disciplinary viewpoint on creativity and technology.
October 2
Shuxin Cheng, Director of Innovation Design, School of Design CAFA
Shuxin Cheng (Olivia) is the Co-founder of SCRY, a pioneering fashion tech brand launched in 2020, and Director of Innovation Design at the School of Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. SCRY has earned recognition with awards like the Forbes China 2024 Top 20 Innovative Brands, Red Dot Awards 2023 for Innovative Products and Fashion Lifestyle & Accessories, and Wallpaper Design Awards 2023 for Best Sustainability Initiative. SCRY has also collaborated with leading fashion labels featured at Paris, New York and Milan Fashion Weeks. With a transdisciplinary background in communication, design, and engineering, Olivia studied at the Royal College of Art, Imperial College London, and Tsinghua University, driving innovation through integrated expertise.
October 16
Joseph Becker, Associate Curator of Architecture + Design, SFMOMA
Joseph Becker is the Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where his recent exhibitions include Art of Noise (2024), Marshall Brown Projects: Dequindre Civic Academy (2023), Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Strips of Stripes (2023), and Tauba Auerbach: S v Z (2022). His recent publications include Tauba Auerbach: S v Z (SFMOMA/D.A.P., 2020), and The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism (Prestel/DelMonico, 2018), and contributions to Lebbeus Woods: Exquisite Experiments, Early Years (Wiley, 2024), and Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022).
October 23
Corinne Okada Takara, Artist & STEAM educator, Okada Design/Nest Makerspace
Corinne Okada Takara (pronouns: she/her) is a Honolulu based artist/STEAM educator who creates playful technology and biology integrated art projects. Her public collaborative work explores the use of modern day artifacts to preserve cultural heritage and memory, and honors the colliding and merging stories that arise in rapidly shifting communities. Corinne specializes in visual art, biomaterial design, and art collaborations that invite dreaming of abundant sustainable futures, and empowering more people to see themselves as shapers of that vision. She is co-founder of BioJam and works out of her Nest Makerspace.
October 30: Spatial Computing for Your Space Not Your Face
Violet Whitney & William Martin, Co-founders, Spatial Pixel
Spatial Pixel is building a new kind of spatial computing – one for your space, not for your face. We are Violet Whitney and William Martin, both design researchers, technologists, and professors working out of Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY.
As a research and design studio, our mission is “to empower people with digital and spatial agency.” To us, this means giving everyone more control over our relationships with technology, turning our attentions away from screens, and enhancing our real-world, tangible experiences.
And we’re doing this by teaching computers to “speak human” with artificial intelligence and spatial computing. Think mixed reality without the glasses.
November 13
Maya Chen, Product Designer, Cisco Meraki
Maya is passionate about empowering and uniting communities through her creative work. A designer of human connections, Maya is particularly drawn to the mechanics behind the forces that bring people together. In practice, Maya’s skills occupy a sunny corner where storytelling, user-centered design, critical making, and human cognition meet and intertwine.
Her greatest creative challenge today is opening her design vocabulary and toolkit to the technical world of computer networking. As a product designer on Cisco Meraki’s UX team, she contributes to products that fortify wireless networks across the world — connecting millions of people to the Internet and to each other.
Maya lives, works, and occasionally frolics in San Francisco. She attended UC Berkeley, where she holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science and a Master of Design degree.
November 20: Knitting across Scales: Sensate Textiles for Interactive Media and Environments
Dr. Irmandy Wicaksono, MIT Media Lab
Irmandy Wicaksono is a transdisciplinary engineer, artist, and designer at the MIT Media Lab. He received his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT. He weaves electronic devices into soft materials and the fabric of everyday life for various applications ranging from physiological sensing, biomechanics, human-computer interaction, space exploration, architecture, to the interactive arts. He is also passionate in exploring the synergy and interplay between art, science, design, and engineering, as well as the intersection between research and manufacturing.