The Wilson School of Design presents, "Design Futures" Speaker Series at KPU. Launched in January 2016, our guest speakers are design innovators, researchers and practitioners who share the School's vision of a collaborative and interdisciplinary future for the field of design. These industry experts present an engaging lecture, open to KPU students and faculty as well as to the industry and community.
They also offer an in-depth, interactive workshop(s), often available to all KPU Design students.
We believe design is the global medium that shares resources and seeks new connections to develop sustainable solutions. We look forward to continuing to bring the insights of acclaimed local, national and international guests to our design community.
Earning a Seat at the Table: If anyone can learn Sketch or Photoshop, what's a designer good for, anyway?
| Speaker: | Diogenes Brito – Digital Product Designer, Engineer |
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| Date: | March 16, 2017 |
| Time: | 6:30pm – 8:00pm |
| Location: | KPU Richmond Melville Centre for Dialogue 8771 Lansdowne Road Richmond, BC |
| Tickets: |  |
Diogenes Brito is a digital product designer and engineer from New York, now based in San Francisco. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Stanford University, and has worked at Google, LinkedIn, and Squarespace before joining Slack as a Product Designer in 2014.
Brito was recently featured as one of The Most Creative People in Business 2016 by “Fast Company”.
Conceptual Clothing: Exploring the intersection between fashion, design, and technology.
| Speaker: | Mark Nazemi – researcher and interactive designer |
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| Date: | January 19th, 2016 |
| Time: | 6:30pm – 8:00pm |
| Location: | KPU Richmond Campus, Melville Centre for Dialogue 8771 Lansdowne Road, Richmond, BC |
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The lecture explores the theoretical approaches undertaken by designers, researchers, and companies for developing conceptual and commercial products that are in the domain of interactive fashion and wearables. Concepts related to soft circuit design, embedded technologies, kinetics and textile and material technologies are also presented that show how fashion, science, design, and technology can be infused together to push the boundaries of fashionable technologies.
Speaker Bio
Mark Nazemi is a researcher and interactive designer from Vancouver, Canada. He is currently completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts & Technology. His PhD research in pain management using immersive audio and biofeedback has been published at international conferences such as Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 8th Congress of the European Pain Federation, Siggraph Asia, Audio Mostly, Artech and media such as CBC radio, BC Business, and American News Report. He is also a co-founder of Intentions Lab, a start-up that focuses on developing wearable tech and interactive technologies for various sectors including health and fashion. Mark has been teaching wearable technologies and interactive media for the past 5 years at Simon Fraser University.
Fashion-Tech Futures by Valerie Lamontagne: How aesthetics and science will change your future wardrobe!
| Speaker: | Valérie LaMontagne |
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| Date: | November 15th, 2016 |
| Time: | 6:30pm – 8:00pm |
| Location: | KPU Richmond Campus, Melville Centre for Dialogue 8771 Lansdowne Road, Richmond, BC |
| Tickets: | Attendance is FREE, however tickets must be reserved: kpudesignspeakerseries.eventbrite.com |
Fashion-Tech Futures will explore how the convergence of technology, and current material innovations are shaping new forms, aesthetics, and uses for fashion and body-centric design. Looking through a series of examples and recent industry developments, the presentation will seek to question the role of design and innovation in future fashion practices.
Speaker Bio
Valérie LaMontagne is a Montréal artist-designer, curator, and PhD scholar researching "Performative Wearables: Bodies, Fashion and Technology" at Concordia University where she teaches in the Department of Design & Computation Arts. She is the owner & designer at 3lectromode, a wearable electronics atelier. Her designs have been shown internationally, notably at the recent "Telstra Perth Fashion Festival," Perth, Australia (2016); and "Utopian Bodies: Fashion Looks Forward," Liljevalchs Museum, Stockholm, Sweden (2016). She has also curated design and media arts exhibitions and events such "The Future of Fashion is Now," Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2014); and "TechnoSensual," Museums Quartier, Vienna (2012).
Designing Day One - Securing a Haven for Truly Creative Collaboration
| Speaker: | Bruce Corson – Principal, Studio for Pre-Expert Creativity |
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| Date: | February 18, 2016 |
| Time: | 6:30pm – 8:00pm |
| Location: | KPU Richmond Campus, Melville Centre for Dialogue 8771 Lansdowne Road, Richmond, BC |
| Tickets: | Attendance is FREE, however tickets must be reserved |
Creative solutions depend on thoughtful creatively-identified problems. Our most critical responsibility as designers is naming the right problem. Most design collaborations, however, actively resist creative problem-naming - a result of the participants assuming pre-determined roles and seeking familiar discipline-based solutions.
A much more productive collaborative strategy has all participants sharing responsibility for discovering the most effectively-named problems possible. The central challenge to contemporary design education and practice is how best to promote the exploratory sensibilities necessary for this form of collaboration.
Through a broad range of examples, Bruce will discuss how he has addressed this challenge in his own teaching and design practice, the core objective of which has been encouraging collaborations in which creative problem-naming and creative problem-solving are inseparable.
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Bruce Corson – Principal, Studio for Pre-Expert Creativity
Bruce Corson has maintained a cross-disciplinary design and consulting practice for 35 years. He has won national architectural design awards for accessible housing and energy efficient public buildings. His Lamoreaux Landing Wine Cellars project was cited by the New York State Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 59 Notable Projects of the 20th Century. He is a licensed architect in California and has been a licensed building contractor.
He has taught engineering concepts in high schools, professional education courses for the American Institute of Architects and NASA, environmental studies and architectural energy design at University of California-Berkeley and both architectural design and cross-disciplinary collaborative design at Cornell University. His current work concerns pre-expert strategies for fostering collaborative creativity in educational and organizational environments.
User Experience Design: Process, Random Sketches and the Value of Framing
The world of interactive and connected experiences is an exciting place to be. Things that years ago seemed to belong exclusively in the realm of science fiction feel everyday more like the next holiday season’s best selling gadget or the up-and-coming cloud service.
Jorge Furuya will share his thoughts on how the designer’s process itself is a tool that is constantly being tuned and how deeply the experience of designing products relates and enriches the experience that the final product will enable for the user.
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Jorge Furuya – User Experience Designer, Google
Jorge is a user experience/interaction designer with a background on industrial design and ethnographic inspired research. During the last 7 years he has been working in the mobile communications/computing industry both at Sony Mobile, HTC and currently in the Android team at Google.
His current role is to lead the design efforts on the android platform both for imaging and for the input methods framework on android, including the design of the standard android IME and the redesign of the language & input settings and support for HW accessories. Jorge also designed HW accessories under the Nexus initiative.
Most recently he works for the Android Auto initiative.