design thinking

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....