Announcing the Fall 2021 Lecture Series
We are delighted to announce our Visiting Lecture Series lineup for the Fall 2021 season. (See all of our department guest lecturers here.) Read more below about Raja Schaar, Debbie Chachra, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Lina Srivastava below!
Raja Schaar
Raja Schaar, IDSA (she/her) is Director and Assistant Professor of the Product Design Program at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. She co-chairs IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council and was the past Education Director for the organization. Raja is an industrial designer with an extensive background in museum exhibit design and healthcare design. She studies the ethical implications of design and technology through her research and her teaching through the lenses of science fiction, speculative design, and social entrepreneurship. Her current projects address biases maternal health through wearable technology and participatory design; community-based co-design for engaging black girls and underrepresented minorities in STEM/STEAM through design, technology, and dance; and biologically-inspired design, sustainability, and climate justice.
Debbie Chachra
Debbie Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston, MA, where she was one of the earliest faculty members. She is currently writing a book about infrastructural systems, provisionally titled Public Utility (Riverhead Books, 2023) and supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Dr. Chachra also speaks, writes, and consults widely on undergraduate engineering education, with an emphasis on equity and inclusion; she received an NSF CAREER award for research in this field. Prior to joining Olin College, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering at the University of Toronto.
Cameron Tonkinwise
Cameron is the Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where he is also Research Director of the Social Design Research Centre. When previously at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design as the Director of Doctoral Studies, Cameron developed with Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff, Transition Design—a collection of processes and tools for helping designers contribute to social system change toward more equitably sustainable futures. Cameron teaches Service Design and is currently researching in the context of financial services, systems of supported decision making and prevention of scams and financial abuse.
Lina Srivastava
Lina Srivastava is a strategist who catalyzes and amplifies social impact, social movements, and systems change by combining advocacy, technology, culture, art, and storytelling. She creates narrative-based social change initiatives with NGOs, global institutions, and independent media creators, combining field experience and direct service with skills in media and audience engagement, expertise in human-centered and community-centered design, and a focus on community leadership. She is the founder of the Center for Transformational Change, a new social enterprise to cultivate community-led power shift for just futures. She previously founded CIEL | Creative Impact and Experience Lab, an innovation studio working at the intersection of human rights, international development, and narrative strategies.