Atlanta Global Studies Center (AGSC) Tuesday Collaboratorium: UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) & Design

Feb 25, 2020 | 9-10:30 am
AGSC, 781 Marietta St. NW; Habersham 115

Co-sponsored by Serve-Learn-Sustain

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development proposes a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Given their role in the socioeconomic development, it has been advocated that the designer’s social responsibility has shifted from sustainable design to social design. Meanwhile, design thinking, as a new lens to study and engage with global issues and societal transitions, has been adopted more broadly beyond commercial fields and design disciplines. In this Collaboratorium, Dr. Wei Wang, Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial Design, will introduce the World Design Organization (WDO) that advocates for Design for a Better World, promoting and sharing knowledge of industrial design-driven innovation that enhances the economic, social, cultural, and environmental quality of life. Dr Wang will focus on WDO initiatives to achieve United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

We invite faculty and students who are interested in learning about the way the design world engages with the SDGs. We aim to have a conversation about how we can engage more designers and design students in the Greater Atlanta region to study global challenges across cultures and how we can better use design thinking and method to achieve SDGs by initiating regional and the global partnerships and community engagements.

Wei Wang

As an assistant professor in School of Industrial Design, Wei Wang brings industrial experience and cultural diversity to the industrial design program at Georgia Institute of Technology. In the fusion of user-experience, human-computer interaction, and interactive products, his research interest is on the interactive technology and smart product design in applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality, and how they interact with different communities.
Before joining the Georgia Tech faculty, Wei led the Human-Centered Research at Media Lab (Shenzhen), Hunan University, and was a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University of London on Media and Art Technology. He also worked in the Nokia Research Center from 2008 to 2012 in Beijing and Shenzhen. As a design lead, Wang contributed to emerging devices, new user interfaces, and product strategy in growth markets.
He has been granted more than 17 US/EU/CN patents in gesture interaction and mobile service. These patents have been applied in consumer products by Nokia and Microsoft (some of them are still quite active in industries, cited by Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Google etc.). Due to the successful technology transfer from his team’s ethnographic research and patent inventor, he received a Nokia Annual Achievement award in 2010.
Wang is a member of IDSA and ACM SIGCHI, and received his Ph.D. in design in 2008.

Some of Dr. Wang’s recent relevant work include:

1. Wei Wang, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Jennifer Sheridan. (2019) “On the Role of In-situ Making and Evaluation in Designing Across Cultures”. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts. Taylor & Francis. DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2019.1580296.
2. Nick Bryan-Kinns, Wei Wang, Tie Ji. (2018) “Exploring Interactivity and Co-Creation in Rural China”. Interacting with Computers. 30 (4). p 273 – 292. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/iwc/iwy010.
3. Wei Wang, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Tie Ji. (2016) “Using Community Engagement to Drive Co-creation in Rural China”. International Journal of Design. 10(1). p 37-52.
4. 2015 New Channel Video Case: https://vimeo.com/148213340
5. 2014 New Channel Video Ce: https://vimeo.com/123339954