Spring 2019: Design & the Green New Deal

Design and the Green New Deal 
Monday April 22, 2019, 6:00-8:00pm
AIGA SF 

Celebrate Earth Day with AIGA SF by learning more about the Green New Deal and how designers might engage with its policies and ideas.

Join Dawn Danby, co-founder of SphericalGopika Setlur, founder of elefint and Jennifer Wells from 350 Bay Area to discuss how designers can engage with the Green New Deal and bring sustainability to the forefront of design practice.

Dawn Danby is an ecological designer and strategist whose work traverses scales, from green chemistry to urban design. She is co-founder of Spherical, a strategic design and integrative research studio mapping and supporting projects regenerating Earth’s living systems. She previously led Autodesk’s sustainable design initiatives, focusing on the development and use of advanced technology for managing the ecological and human impact of design and engineering decisions. She has also directed design research programs across materials, manufacturing and the built environment. Dawn co-authored the bestselling Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, and was recognized by Fast Company as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. More recently, she was an urban-futurist-in-residence at Concordia University (Montréal), and a Fellow of the Mozilla-supported XRStudio.

Gopika Setlur is a designer, educator and founder of elefint  a women and monitory run branding and design studio founded in 2010. As Creative Director at elefint, she uses design as a problem-solving tool and focuses on challenges related to education, civic engagement, women’s health, and financial opportunity. Her clients include the ACLU, Black Girls Code, Ocean Conservancy and Clinton Global Initiative. 

Jennifer Wells is an author, professor and speaker in San Francisco, California.  Her last article built on her 2014 book Complexity and Sustainability (Routledge), describing complex thought as an overall paradigm or worldview shift, profoundly helpful for advancing green design, just transition and systems change.  Current writing projects include work on rhetoric and framings for climate policy, and essays on advancing social imaginaries for transition.    In recent years Wells has given keynote talks and seminars in China, Cuba, France and Italy on complex thought, the Anthropocene, and just transition, and spoke at the COP 21 in Paris.  She is an active volunteer with 350 Bay Area.

This event is organized and moderated by Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Associate Professor of Design and Chair of the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.  She teaches courses on Systems Thinking for Sustainable Design, Design Activism Community Engaged Learning and others. She is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design.