Compostmodern 2013

Adam Werbach is the co-founder of the sharing start-up yerdle (www.yerdle.com). A lifelong organizer, at age 23 Werbach was elected the youngest-ever President of the Sierra Club. He went on to create the media and strategy company Act Now, which he sold to the Publicis Groupe, becoming the Chief Sustainability Officer for Saatchi & Saatchi.

Twice elected to the International Board of Greenpeace, Werbach is a frequent commentator on sustainable business, serves as the sustainability correspondent for The Atlantic.com.

He spent ten years creating a feature film on the rise of Indie Rock, entitled This Is Noise Pop! Rolling Stone Magazine called it one of the 7 best music documentaries of 2011. It has only been shown once. He tweets at @adamwerbach

A cheerleader of possibility, Alex Gilliam is the founder of Public Workshop, an organization that redefines the way youth and communities participate as citizens and leaders in the design of their neighborhoods and cities.

Alex fundamentally believes that great design, empowerment, innovation, and having fun are not mutually exclusive. He creates inspiring curricula, transformative youth design leadership programs, innovative participatory community design tools, engaging events and thoughtful strategies that help people rethink possibility.

Alex has worked with numerous organizations, museums, universities, architecture firms and city agencies including the Charter High School For Architecture and Design in Philadelphia, Rural Studio, Hester Street Collaborative, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, University of Pennsylvania and University of Texas among others. His work has been featured on NPR’s Studio 360 and in magazines such as Metropolis, ID and the Architect’s Newspaper as well as showcased on various company websites including Fast Company, BMW Guggenheim Lab|Log, Kaboom!, Core 77, Yahoo and NBC’s TODAY.

Cheryl Dahle is the Founder and Executive Director of Future of Fish, a business incubator that supports early stage companies to “co-entrepreneur” supply chain solutions that help the seafood industry respond creatively and responsibly to the threat of fish extinction. Prior to her work with fisheries, Cheryl was a director at Ashoka, where she distilled knowledge from the network of 2,500 fellows to provide strategic insight to foundations and corporations. Cheryl spent over a decade writing about social entrepreneurship and business for publications including The New York Times, CIO, and Fast Company, where she also founded the Social Capitalist award competition. Before her work with non-profits, she was part of an incubation and start-up team for an online environmental magazine, for which she helped secure $12 million in venture funding.

David McConville is a media artist who designs immersive visualization environments to provide new perspectives on humanity’s home in the cosmos. He is President of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (www.bfi.org), a non-profit organization facilitating convergences across design, art, science, and technology to identify and cultivate whole systems strategies for addressing complex global challenges. He is also co-founder of the Elumenati design and engineering firm (www.elumenati.com) and Creative Director of the Worldviews Network (www.worldviews.net), a collaboration of artists, scientists, and educators using storytelling and visualization to facilitate dialogues about community resilience in science centers across the United States.

Eve Blossom is the Founder of Lulan Artisans and we’ve. Eve's twenty-five years' experience in design, early-stage technology firms, international business, nonprofit and social ventures led her to founding Lulan Artisans and then we’ve. After earning her master's degree in Architecture from Tulane University,
she practiced at Gensler in Los Angeles. She then spent two years in Vietnam restoring French villas for such clients as Price Waterhouse and Chase Manhattan.

It was during Blossom's time in Vietnam that she found the roots of her calling. Traveling throughout Southeast Asia, she became passionate about local
hand-woven textiles. She recognized that the superb talents of the master weavers combined with a social venture model could create a strong economic
engine to fuel systemic social change.

Ezio Manzini has been working for more than two decades in the field of design for sustainability, with a special focus on social innovation. On this topic he started, and currently coordinates, DESIS: an international network promoting, world wide, design schools as agents of social change towards sustainability.

Throughout his professional life Ezio Manzini has been professor of design at the Politecnico di Milano. Parallel to this, he collaborated with several international universities. Currently, he is Honorary Guest Professor at the Tongji University, in Shanghai, at the Jiangnan University, in Wuxi, at the COPPE-UFRJ, in Rio de Janeiro. The most recent awards granted to Manzini are the Sir Misha Black Medal, in UK, and the Honorary Doctorate at the Aalto University, in Finland, the both in 2012.

Howard J. Brown, co-author of “Naked Value: Six Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition," combines more than 30 years of experience as a workshop facilitator, business leader, and speaker with fresh ideas and examples of cutting-edge innovations.

Howard has founded several business ventures to help companies align good business and environmental practices and create more value. Most recently, he co-founded dMASS Inc., which identifies resource-related risks and opportunities for businesses and investors and tracks ground-breaking business and technology innovations that do "better with less."

For more than 20 years as CEO of Resource Planning & Management Systems (RPM), Inc., in New Haven, Connecticut, Howard worked with major corporations to establish or enhance their environmental practices and performance.

Howard was also a founder of The World Game Institute and taught at Yale University and at Wesleyan University. He was a student and colleague of R. Buckminster Fuller and is an authority on the social and economic implications of Fuller’s work.

Jeff is an artist, teacher, and social entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Reos Partners, a global social innovation consultancy that addresses complex, high-stakes challenges around the world. Jeff has helped lead Reos since 2007 and has worked in Colombia on collective prosperity, in Australia on child protection, in the Netherlands on sustainability and climate protection, in the United States on transforming violence, and other projects.

Jeff is also a co-founder of Magenta, a media and training company focused on culture change in the United States. Magenta launched in 2013.

Ten years ago, John created an immersive and experimental program called Project M that is designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers, and filmmakers by proving that their work can have a positive and significant impact. In 2010, John collaborated with Alex Bogusky and Rob Schuham to form COMMON, a brand that supports, connects and celebrates those designing a new era of socially minded enterprise. Most recently, John has partnered with long-time collaborator Greg Galle to launch FUTURE, a rapid innovation firm that creates positive change by unlocking ingenuity in organizations and individuals.

In his career, John has won more than 250 design awards, is an AIGA Fellow, has been featured in the ID 50, and teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art staged a solo exhibition in 2000.

For thirty years, John Thackara has traveled the world looking for stories about practical steps taken by communities to realize a sustainable future. He is the author of a widely read column at designobserver.com and the best-selling book In the Bubble: Designing In A Complex World. As director of doorsofperception.com, John also organizes conferences, workshops and festivals that bring social innovators together to share their experiences. John is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art in London, a Fellow of The Young Foundation, and a member of the Design Commission of the UK Parliament.

Julie Kim is a Senior Producer at Hot Studio, an experience design company based in San Francisco and New York. At Hot, Julie works with leaders at Fortune 500's, start-ups, and social sector clients to find the right design and technology solutions for a wide variety of challenges. She is active in shaping Hot's social innovation practice and is passionate about applying design methods to improve healthcare, education, and local issues. Prior to Hot, Julie worked as the Public Engagement Director at SPUR, where she involved the design community in cross-sector collaboration. A self-proclaimed "recovering architect," Julie holds a master's degree from UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design and a bachelor's degree from Brown University.

Julie's career evolved from engineering billions of bacteria as a research scientist to attracting millions of media hits for community-powered organizations. Her inspiration emerged from studying viral communication in the lab, practicing permaculture in a yurt, creating cross-sector networks, and ten years developing media strategy during the dawn of the social era.

She holds degrees in microbiology and sustainable business management and applies nature's design strategies as a certified Biomimicry Specialist. Julie co-founded the Bay Area Biomimicry Network, advises bio-curious startups, and builds collaboration software for thriving communities as Chief Community Officer at Hylo.

Madeleine Lansky, MD practices psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the SF Bay Area, with a special emphasis on organizational consultation that addresses the
unconscious dynamics which prevent the creation of meaningful change.

She works with government agencies, businesses, artists, families, schools and hospitals to actualize their visions for resilient ecological, economic and social systems. Madeleine thinks of composting not only in the literal sense, but also as a metaphoric process in which difficulties are digested and reworked into resolutions. She contributed to work in Haiti on ecological sanitation, and developed a course at Occupy SF called "Composting Anger." She loves design, the arts, and nature.

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program prepares the next-generation of innovation leaders for a world that is profitable, sustainable, ethical, and truly meaningful. He is a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, speaks and teaches internationally, and is an accomplished entrepreneur. His many books include: Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action, and the new Make It So. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. Nathan sits on the board of directors for Teague and the AIGA.

Dr. Paul Polak is the Founder and CEO of Windhorse International, a for-profit social venture with the mission of leading a revolution in how companies design, price, market and distribute products to benefit the 2.6 billion customers who live on less than $2 a day.

He has also founded D-Rev: Design Revolution, a design incubator for technologies that serve poor customers; and International Development Enterprises, which has brought nearly 20 million of the world’s poorest out of poverty by making radically affordable technology available through local entrepreneurs and markets.

Dr. Paul Polak is the author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, which has become a renowned resource for practical solutions to global poverty.

Terry Irwin is Head of the School of Design. She is interested in design for sustainability, and her research explores how living systems principles can inform traditional design process.

Irwin sees design as playing an important role in the transition to a sustainable society. Her areas of research interest focus on worldview as the basis for design for sustainability, and examines the aspects of an ecological worldview for designers. It also explores the Goethean method as a qualitative way of knowing that can inform traditional design process. She has been teaching sustainable design, holistic science, typography, systems and communication design, drawing, corporate identity and branding, and information and interaction design at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She has lectured widely on various important design topics, and is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA), on whose national board of directors she served from 2001 – 2004.

Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker and founder of The Webby Awards. Her acclaimed feature documentary, Connected, hailed by The New York Times as “Examining Everything From the Big Bang to Twitter,” was selected by The US State Department to screen at embassies around the world in their 2012 American Film Showcase. Her films and work have received 50 awards and distinctions including Tribeca Film Festival’s “Disruptive Innovation Award." She is currently working on a new film series, “Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change,” which uses a new participatory filmmaking style she is calling Cloud Filmmaking.

Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. Her drawings appear in publications like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Print Magazine. Her documentary series Meanwhile uses the tools of illustration, social work and ethnographic research to tell the stories of communities through drawings and the subject's own words. An anthology of these stores is being published by Chronicle Books in 2014. She's illustrated two other forthcoming books: Lost Cat, A True Story of Love, Desperation & GPS Technology, by Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Wine, by Richard Betts (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).

She has degrees in fine art/advertising and social work from Art Center College of Design and Columbia University. When they let her, she likes to talk with students at Art Center College of Design, and she is an artist in residence at Intersection for the Arts.