Announcing New Faculty for Fall 2021!
We are thrilled to welcome six amazing new faculty to Products of Design for the Fall 2021 semester! Meet them below!
Vincent Brathwaite
Vincent Brathwaite is the Design Leadership Forum Director at InVision. A Caribbean American multi-disciplinary design leader, educator, speaker, and husband to Magalie Lachoua. He’s a visionary with a keen ability for assessing an idea’s potential and bringing its possibilities to life. His passion is to build bridges between cultures and unite people by their common thread. For the past two decades, he has worked to transform communities through disruptive design thinking methodologies. A few of his previous clients include Red Bull, IBM, Caruso Affiliated, Tides Foundation, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Morehouse College, the US Dept. of Energy Georgia, and various companies in the social impact space.
Julie O’Brien
Julie O’Brien is a behavioral scientist and the Head of Behavioral Science + Coaching at US Bank, Julie holds a PhD in Social Psychology, created the behavioral research function at Opower, led the health initiative at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, and most recently led Applied Behavioral Science at WW International. She’s spent her career designing and testing scalable solutions that close the gap between what people want to do and what they actually do; bridging the academic world and the product world. She believes that basic research has enormous value to product and service design and that everyone can learn to think like a behavioral scientist. Julie has designed products, started two nonprofits, and studied the full range of human behavior from energy efficiency to racial discrimination to diabetes self-management.
Kakee Scott
Kakee Scott is a design researcher and scholar with a focus on studies of sustainability, consumption, everyday practices and systemic change. She has previously taught within the Strategic Design and Management and Environmental Studies programs at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, and organized the Strategic Design and Management program for the Parsons Paris campus. In her doctoral dissertation, she developed a proposition for ‘designerly economics,’ intersecting co-creative design approaches with explorations of alternative economic practice. In earlier work, Kakee produced many sustainability-oriented events, programs and projects with organizations like o2NYC, o2Netherlands, the EU Living Lab project, a collaborative practice called Rift, Slow Food USA, and J. Ottman Consulting.
Alexia Cohen
Alexia is a Venezuelan-Belgian-American designer, currently working at argodesign in New York City. After graduating from MFA Products of Design, Alexia worked as a freelance design consultant, co-leading the design and production of The Human Account project exhibition for Dalberg Design and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During her graduate studies, she was a TEK-TILE Fellow at the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator where she collaborated with 14 designers and engineers to develop textiles with embedded electronics. Alexia’s thesis DARE + DEFY: A Woman’s Place in the Great Outdoors explores a women’s role in the outdoors, yielding a suite of design offerings that are meant to honor, amplify and celebrate women’s position within this space, ultimately arguing for a more inclusive and diverse outdoors sphere.