Claire Hartten

Claire Hartten is a designer whose work deals with the relationships between food, agriculture, society, and the natural environment. Claire co-founded the Dirt Café, an experimental project that uses social interaction to solve problems creatively. Her most recent Dirt Café project-the Dirt Café “Sitopia” Debate and Salon-occurred during the 2009 UN Climate Control Summit in Copenhagen and New York. Claire is also the co-founder of Hungry New York, an experimental framework that encourages productive relationships between LEED-certified green-building experts and small-scale innovators in the food world. She is currently consulting with green builders to develop a food-based learning and wellbeing environment for a children’s school intended to earn LEED Platinum certification and win the Living Building Challenge. She was an inaugural team member of the groundbreaking RED Unit, an incubator established by the UK government’s Design Council, where she managed its first project on the future of British citizenship. Claire has taught graduate level students at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design and undergraduate integrated design students at Parsons The New School of Design. Claire taught a graduate school workshop for architecture students at Columbia University on urban complexities and food. She collaborated with the BBC to create the Dirt Café “Regeneration” project and has advised the BBC on food and sustainability issues. She also lectures internationally on food and design.

Education 
MA in Design Studies (now MA Applied Imagination), Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, UK
BA in Art History, Swarthmore College

Website
greenrabbits.org

Course
Design for Sustainability and Resilience