The College of Design is pleased to announce that Eames Institute Chief Curator Llisa Demetrios, Eames Institute Executive Director John Cary, and National Humanities Medalist and bestselling author Krista Tippett will be featured speakers for the opening dialogue of this year’s KDI Burst on Thursday, March 23.
Each spring, the KDI Burst encourages radically participatory engagement with diverse creative perspectives, through a colloquium and workshop featuring guest designers. This year, KDI collaborators are inspired by the methodologies of Charles and Ray Eames and the ongoing work of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. Through conversations and hands-on learning, participants will consider the designers’ prototypes, outcomes, and optimistic vision, which remains as powerful as ever.
Referring to Eames Office explorations of scale, famously exemplified by the film, Powers of 10, and the College of Design’s overarching aim to generate solutions for the common good, the KDI Burst will focus on “Empathy at Scale” to explore relating, connecting, and mutual understanding as essential capabilities of designers and designing.
With journalist Krista Tippett, Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity principals Llisa Demetrios and John Cary will consider empathic principles at every scale of human experience and beyond. The conversation will range from the scale of human experience to those much smaller and larger, aiming to inform conscientious designing in the here and now. The conversation will also touch on how designers can shift from thinking about designed objects and spaces in terms of individual users and discrete objects, to thinking about systems. Invoking the Eames mantra to create “the best for the most for the least,” they will consider what it means to bring empathetic principles to understanding supply chains and both social and environmental impacts of materials extraction, manufacturing, disposal, and more.
The KDI Burst is free and open to the public.
Photo credit: Nicholas Calcott, © Eames Institute.
Programs like this are funded and made possible by generous donations to the College of Design.
About the Kusske Design Initiative
A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design honors the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ’78). The Kusske Design Initiative (KDI) honors his legacy through widely inclusive events and collaborations among a growing community of broadminded designers. Chris’s emphases on interdisciplinary dialogue, co-creativity, and respect for the natural world inspire solutions for planetary-scale issues. By combining values of ecological stewardship with the disciplinary spectrum that forms the college’s DNA, KDI programs and inquiries have transformative potential for the products we use and the environments we inhabit.
About the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity
The Eames Institute is a non-profit public charity that aims to equip everyone with the lessons of Ray and Charles Eames—the groundbreaking designers who helped shape the 20th century. They are stewards of the Eames Ranch, the former home of Charles’s daughter Lucia Eames, as well as the Eames Collection, the world’s most comprehensive and unique collection of Eames designs and related ephemera in the world. Through programs like Kazam! Magazine, they aim to show how the trailblazing duo’s optimistic vision remains as powerful as ever.
The University of Minnesota’s College of Design is pleased to announce that fashion designer and urban gardening advocate Ron Finley will be the featured speaker for this year’s Kusske Lecture & Dialogue on Thursday, December 1.
The University of Minnesota’s College of Design is pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Owen Gehry, CC, FAIA, will be the inaugural speaker for the new Kusske Lecture & Dialogue Series on Tuesday, November 16.
A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design will honor the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ‘78).
