sustainability

Is design ready to take its rightful place as an important component of innovation and cultural change? It’s no longer possible to develop successful solutions to cultural or climate problems without integrating people, ideas, and techniques from the Design, Business, and Sustainability domains. But first, we have some reckoning to do with our past...

About the Speaker:
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues. He consults strategically for companies to build more meaningful experiences for their customers. His latest book, Making Meaning, explores how companies can create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. He has 3 new books debuting in 2009: Design is the Problem, about sustainable design; Experience Design 1.1, and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool that helps designers create more meaningful experiences.

How can design thinking inform government policy development leading to a sustainable energy future for Ontario, Canada, and the globe? Bob Logan, sLab Chief Scientist and Physics Prof. Emeritus, University of Toronto, will make a short presentation on this question. Working in breakout groups we will identify systemic approaches to developing future government energy policies. We’ll reconvene to share results and develop a plan for organizing a research group and other kinds of collaborative information sharing. Present at this event will be a number of people from government.

How can we incubate the future of design education and change the world at the same time? Get an inside look and meet some of the key people and projects that have shaped the success of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation.

Both a platform to launch a green business and a design consultancy for world projects, the Incubator offers a unique way to use the power of networks, collaboration and community to get things done. Deb will share the story of Solar Ivy, currently on display at New York's MoMA; a recent project for the Sustainable South Bronx Greenway project; and her latest Design Jam that brought 40 designers, HIV experts and media artists together for UNESCO's “Cultural Logic” project.

About the Speaker:
Debera Johnson is known for stirring the pot and making the unlikely happen. She considers herself a catalyst for change, persistent collaborator and risk taker. To have company along the way she founded and directs the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation, Design in Kind and the Center for Sustainable Design Studies at Pratt. A graduate from Pratt’s Industrial Design program, Deb is a tenured faculty and serves as Pratt’s Academic Director for Sustainability. Deb’s constant is to provide opportunities for talented people to do amazing things and thanks Pratt for giving her the platform to be an entrepreneur in an academic setting. More about Deb and her work is available at http://incubator.pratt.edu and http://csds.pratt.edu

Bryan Boyer is building the Helsinki Design Lab (HDL) initiative to address these questions in Finland and beyond, by fostering strategic design. HDL, nested within Finland’s innovation centre, Sitra, is founded on the belief that a deeper understanding of craft will advance our ability to succeed in meeting these redesign needs.

Recently HDL has been spending time with six leading practitioners, focusing on one project each, and getting to know their work in detail. The teams span social science, public administration, technology, design, and community organizing, but all represent instructive examples of stewardship. In these projects and others like them, HDL sees a movement towards using projects to prototype policy, where strategy and delivery are reciprocal and iterative. They are pragmatic and hopeful. They are often without precedent but still proceeding carefully forward. New practices, new themes, and even new vocabularies are emerging as this community grows.

Registration is free at http://slab2012nov.eventbrite.ca/

About the presenter:

Bryan Boyer is Strategic Design Lead at Sitra. His responsibilities include the HDL Studio Model, the HDL Global event and HDL website. Previously Bryan has worked as an independent architect, software programmer, and technology entrepreneur.  He received his BFA with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design, and his M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is co-author of the HDL book, Recipes for Systemic Change. More information is available at http://helsinkidesignlab.org/ and Bryan Boyer's Blog, http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/people/Bryan_Boyer.

This event is organized in collaboration with SiG.

What can design teach the world of business? And what might business bring to design? With the business world finally focusing on innovation, design has become a new (if ill-understood) priority for managers and leaders. But the real innovation isn't the need for more products and services but to innovate what business, itself, means and how it functions. Nathan Shedroff is a pioneer in interaction and experience design and serial entrepreneur who now focused on how design and sustainability can inform and transform business as we know it.

About the Presenter:

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of California College of Arts’ groundbreaking MBA in Design Strategy. He is one of the pioneers of experience design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and explores the common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful; he also works in the related fields of interaction design and information design. Nathan speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including the update to his 2001 book, Experience Design 1.1. He’s a serial entrepreneur; works in several media; and consults strategically to help companies build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. He lives in San Francisco, where the climate, culture, and industry make it easy to have an esoteric and amorphous title like experience strategist and actually make a living. For more information, please visit his personal website at www.nathan.com

Presented by sLab's Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG). At Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), one group has chosen to explore sustainability from the perspective of business models. SSBMG focuses primarily on the middle and bottom of the pyramid of organizations including start-up, SMB and SME categories. The group includes industry practitioners, faculty and graduate students from OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation program, as well as from York University.