Sharon Joines is an Associate Professor of Industrial Design at NC State University. She is also a researcher and ergonomist, teaching courses in human centered design and ergonomics. Joines' research is focused on quantifying the interaction between individuals, products, and their environment. She has addressed challenges in consumer markets, warehousing and distribution, medical applications, and manufacturing environments ranging from forging to clean rooms. As the director of the Research in Ergonomics and Design (RED) Lab, Joines seeks to provide answers to the concern about the manner in which people interact and react to products and processes....
Teddy Cruz is an architect and 'activist'. He is recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, advancing border immigrant neighborhoods as sites of cultural production, from which he rethinks urban policy, affordable housing and civic infrastructure. His investigation of this geography of conflict has inspired a practice and pedagogy that emerges from the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research, pedagogy and design production. His practice and research convene knowledge from across the fields of architecture and urbanism, environmental and social practice, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, and mediate the interface between top-down institutions (governments, universities, foundations), and bottom-up socio-economic, cultural and environmental intelligence embedded in communities. His project, "Earning From Tijuana" reframes where designers and architects might look for innovation....
Bryan Bell is a current Professor of Architecture at the NC State College of Design. He is also the founder of Design Corps, who's mission is to to provide the benefits of architecture to those traditionally un-served by the profession in order to create a positive change within communities. Design Corps utilizes design advocacy and education to help communities shape their environments and address their social, economic, and environmental challenges. Bell's current focus is on public interest design, which he describes as a needs-driven practice that "puts creative abilities to practical use to improve communities." He has revolutionized public interest design using interdisciplinary and innovative protocols, procedures, and economic models to adapt to the changing nature of clients and economic conditions....
Skillet Gilmore is an artist, musician, former member of the Raleigh-based alternative country band, Whiskeytown, and production design supervisor at INDY Week. He began creating posters and other merchandise for his band, formed in 1994 and disbanded in 2000, which is how he discovered his knack for design. His posters aimed to catch the reader's attention with graphics, text, and hand-crafted artistry that showed off the nature of his music. As the production design supervisor of INDY Week, Gilmore creates covers, illustrations, and other various graphics for the publication. He has noted the flexibility he deals with during the design process, like how a final design is something completely different from the starting point....
Brittain Storck is a professional landscape architect with a background in natural resource-based recreation projects, greenway and trail design, and active community design and planning. She's Alta's regional landscape architecture studio director and the board director of North Carolina Rail Trails. Storck has managed projects across the nation and cultivated an understanding of the complexities associated with design of open spaces. She considers the essence of her work to be connections, which designers must cultivate using "an awareness and consideration of our environment, culture, health, economy, and aesthetic while creating a variety of solutions for the human experience." Through these connections Storck aims to identify a balance between where we live and how we live....
Cecilia Mouat is Assistant Professor and Director of the Graduate Program of Art+Design. Her background includes a PhD in Design, a Master in filmmaking and a professional degree in architecture. She is originally from Chile, where she worked for 25 years as an architect and visual artist. Mouat’s visual work includes experimental and documentary films, photography, digital collage, and acrylic painting. Her research is multidisciplinary and explores design as discourse, from academic communities, to film representations and fashion....
Michael Rock is a graphic designer, professor at Yale School of Art and founding partner and creative director of 2x4. He has written the book Multiple Signatures and recently wrote an article for the New York Times entitled, The Accidental Power of Design. Michael Rock received his BA in Humanities from Union in 1981 before receiving his MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Micheal founded 2x4, a design firm based in New York City. He is currently the director of the Graphic Architecture Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Michael is the recipient of the 1999 Rome Prize in Design, and was awarded the National Design Award in 2006.
In his portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Illinois Institute of Technology, Rock uses thousands of tiny pictograms depicting various student activities to make up the facial features of van der Rohe. This is just one example of how Rock challenged accepted...
Terry Irwin is the Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. She was also one of the founders of the international design firm MetaDesign, which has worked with such brands as Apple, Nike and Nissan. She has been a practicing designer for more than 40 years and has taught courses at numerous places on ecological design thinking and design process to designers and non-designers alike. This experience in particular convinced her that complex issues can only be solved by collaborating with others from many different fields, and that design plays a major role in this collaboration.
Additionally, Irwin teaches the newly launched study of "Transition Design", which she defines as a "speculative, experimental form of design practice and design research dedicated to conceiving long-term models for sustainable lifestyles." Her goal for Transition Design is to teach designers how to design effective solutions for complex problems within social and environmental systems by thinking in terms of the future and sustainability. She emphasizes four...
Sasha Newell is a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at NC State University. He is interested in the contribution that design makes to the field of anthropology and how the integration of the two might provide more channels for practicing anthropologists. Newell's personal research, on collecting and hoarding, looks at the effects of consumer and material culture on what we value and how we behave socially and culturally.
His book, The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire, addresses Newell's interests in the processes of cultural engagement across sociocultural boundaries, the relationship between culture and materiality, and the critique of ideologies of modernity and rational subjectivity as tools of global hierarchization....
