Design Futures Lecture: Erik Adigard

Erik Adigard’s body of work includes numerous visual essays for Wired magazine, branding campaigns for IBM, and commissions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennale, the Villette Numérique Biennale in Paris, Muffathalle in Munich and the Toronto Pearson International Airport. Most recently, his installation AirXY appeared at the 2008 Venice Biennale. Among his many awards, he received the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design.

He will be speaking on the history of design, current questions, and future directions for thoughtful design practitioners.

How can 21st century design move beyond simplistic processes to embrace the inherent complexity of things? How can design balance experimentation with urgent demands, and poetics with needed performance? How can design thinking enable new forms of interaction with our environment—an atmosphere that we are evolving from while destroying it?

We may well need a strategy of unmaking. One that by filtering the space that we occupy takes us away from times of impossibilities and back into an “aerotopia” of new opportunities.

The Berkeley Center for New Media Commons is located at 340 Moffitt Library, near the Free Speech Cafe (map).