Abstract:

As industrial design continues to embrace digital manufacturing, we are in constant danger of losing the culturally indicative crafts that express individual cultures. As global wealth inequality grows, can we create low tech, parametric tools to bring products to global market? Does the spread of generative design in products have to mean a drop in artisanal jobs that support entire towns and regions? Can we blur the line between designer and maker by working collaboratively? In this talk we look at ways that new design tools can go to emerging and potential markets to create opportunity without losing jobs, skills, and traditions. 

This topic can connect design to production by looking upstream, encourages socially sustainable practice. This can allow us to design for production near the material source taking advantage of embodied skills instead of homogenizing design.

Speaker Bio:

Lisa Marks is an industrial designer whose work combines craft and algorithmic design. She uses technological adaptations of traditional techniques to promote sustainable methods of production that help endangered craft communities. Her work has been presented at design weeks in New York, Milan, and Bangkok and has recently won the 2019 International Grand Prix Lexus Design Award. Lisa holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design and Is currently an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Schedule of Brown Bag Speakers Fall 2019