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 Thursdays, 10 – 11 a.m. PT.
Subscribe to Design Field Notes Google calendar here.
January 26: Make Stuff, Not Assumptions
Benjamin Pawle / Co-founder, Nord Projects
Ben is a product and interaction designer. He co-founded Nord Projects – a design invention studio in east London – where he spends his time crafting new products, prototypes and speculative perspectives on the future of computing and AI.
February 2: My Designer-Founder Dilemmas
Ming Kong / Founder and CEO, TG0
Ming is the CEO of TG0, the inventor of a touch and pressure sensing technology using everyday polymer materials. TG0 operates via a product development and licensing model, thus serving as a ‘full solutions broker’, generating revenue for product development, then either license the technology directly to the brand or arrange for a supplier to manufacture under license. TG0’s customers include global leaders in automotive, gaming, fitness and CE industries. In 2021, TG0 was recognized as one of the Deloitte UK’s Fast50 fast growing tech companies ranking top 35 overall and No. 1 in hardware. Ming graduated from Royal College of Art and practiced design in consultancy and corporate environment briefly before founding TG0.
February 8:
Anna Wodjecka / Associate Professor at Royal College of Art; Innovation Design Engineer in Commercial-Academic Research at Florida Tech
Anna Wojdecka is an Innovation Design Engineer specializing in human factors and human system integration within healthcare and medical contexts. With interdisciplinary expertise in Design, Engineering and Disruptive Technology, Anna works across different sectors, with the focus on Healthcare Design and Human Spaceflight. Her current work with NASA includes design of future medical systems for future human spaceflight. An alumnus of the Royal College of Art, Imperial College London, the International Space University and the Singularity University Global Solutions Program, NASA Ames Research Centre, Anna advocates the power of collaboration between experts from diverse backgrounds. Alongside commercial practice, Anna works in commercial-academic research and is a tenured Associate Professor for MRes/MSc Healthcare and Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.
February 16: Bio-Inspired Innovation
Jun Kamei / CEO at AMPHICO
Jun Kamei is the founder and CEO of AMPHICO, an award winning material innovation company based in London. He is the inventor of AMPHIGILL, a novel type of artificial gill technology designed to reduce dramatically the size of air tanks in diving devices by directly capturing oxygen from water. Before founding AMPHICO, Jun worked as a researcher at the DLX Design Lab in Japan, a collaboration between the Royal College of Art and the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo. In this role, Jun led multiple science and design projects, including Omni, a low-cost and open-source platform for gathering and analyzing critical oceanographic data.
CANCELLED / TO BE RESCHEDULED: February 23: Automotive UI/UX Design
Iris Koser / Sr. UX Designer, BMW
Iris is a Sr. UX Designer at BMW with 14 years of international work experience in the automotive industry. Expert in concept development, innovation, strategy topics, UI/UX design, design research, and automotive HMI development. Directly contributed to many production and pre-production projects as well as strategic topics for BMW and Audi. Interdisciplinary design background in industrial design, UI/UX design, design research, strategy & usability. Worked as a freelance designer, moderator, project manager, guest lecturer at Stanford University, head of jury of the international inventor‘s fair IENA, lead youth workshops, and was a nominee for the German Design Award.
March 2
Susanna Hertrich / Artist
Susanna Hertrich is an internationally renowned German artist working in Berlin and Basel at the intersection of art and (design)research. She received her education in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, concluding with an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. She has collaborated with international research labs, including the Meta Perception Group at the University of Tokyo, the Design Research Lab at the UdK in Berlin, TASML Tsinghua University Art & Science Laboratory in Beijing, and the Critical Media Lab at the HGK FHNW in Basel (CH). Next to her artistic practice, she heads the MA in Experimental Design at the Academy of Art & Design HGK FHNW in Basel (CH).
March 16: AUTOMEDIA: For a grassroots media design revolution!
Igor Galligo / Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley, Founder of Noödesign.org, Founder of Automedias.org
Igor Galligo is a French researcher in philosophy, media science, and design, who worked for several years with Bernard Stiegler at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. In 2018, he founded NOÖDESIGN.ORG, a think tank working on the relationship between digital devices and cognitive operations from the paradigm of general organology. In 2022, he founded AUTOMEDIAS.ORG, a platform that brings together researchers, software engineers, and political media activists to design a new information production model, based on a contributory design process.
March 23: What if the idea is the easy part?
Govind Balakrishnan / Co-CEO, Curio
Govind co-founded Curio – an audio journalism app that partners with premium publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Curio has been featured at the Apple Keynote and has raised over $17M.
April 6: We Just Want to Make
Che-Wei Wang & Taylor Levy / Founders / CW&T
Che-Wei Wang [pron. sey-wey] is an artist, designer & architect with expertise in computational and generative design, fabrication technologies, electronics, CNC machining, and metal manufacturing. The results range from architecture & sculpture to interactive installations & mobile apps. He is the winner of the 2003 SOM fellowship and the Young Alumni Achievement Award from Pratt Institute. Che-Wei has taught courses on design, time, creative computing, and inflatables, at various institutions. He is an alumnus of MIT Media Lab, ITP at NYU, and Pratt Institute.
Taylor Levy [pron. tey-ler] is an artist & designer with a penchant for taking things apart, understanding how they work, and then putting them back together in a way that exposes their inner workings.The results take on a variety of forms from low-tech electronic sculpture to high-tech software & other executions. She has work on view at The Leonardo Museum of Science and Technology and was a resident at Fabrica Interactive in Treviso, Italy. She is an alumna of MIT Media Lab, ITP at NYU, and Vassar College.
April 13: Everything is Alive
Ian Chillag / Writer and Producer
Ian Chillag is a writer and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the creator of the award-winning Radiotopia podcast “Everything is Alive.” Previously he co-created and hosted the NPR podcast “How To Do Everything” and produced the NPR programs “Fresh Air” and “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” He works across all media, and his work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, A Public Space, Pop-Up Magazine, and more.
April 20: Prototype or Perish
Arthur Carabott / Senior UX Engineer, Output Inc.
Arthur Carabott designs music software at Output, a music tech company that makes products used on everything from Beyoncé and James Blake to Game of Thrones. In his role as a Senior UX Engineer, his job is to design the product’s behavior through iterative prototyping. Previously he worked on interactive installations for the Olympics, Yuri Suzuki, and Warp Records; he studied Global Innovation Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.\