UX Speaker Series: It isn’t Design without Sustainability
Nathan Shedroff, Principal, Tomorrow Worlds

The future requires designers to understand ecological, social, cultural, and financial sustainability in order to design successfully. It’s no longer an option or a “nice-to-have.” Even when our clients and peers don’t include sustainability criteria into project requirements, designers should work to build in these performance criteria and lessen impact regardless. We have a duty not only to our peers but, also, to our communities, our planet, and to our own values. It doesn’t take a separate degree. Just a couple books and projects and, you too, can become a sustainable designer. The principles, frameworks, tools, and strategies are well known (though we always need improved tools). They just have to be put into practice by those who care.

About Nathan Shedroff
Nathan Shedroff was the founder and chair of the ground-breaking Design MBA programs at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program prepares the next-generation of innovation leaders for a world that is profitable, sustainable, ethical, and truly meaningful by uniting the perspectives of systems thinking, design thinking, sustainability, and generative leadership into a holistic strategic framework.
He is a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, is a serial entrepreneur, and researches, speaks and teaches internationally about meaning, strategic innovation, business value, and science fiction interfaces. His many books include: Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action, Make It So, and the new Blindspot.
He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry.

Nathan is on the board of directors for Teague and WE’VE.

This talk is part of the HCDE's annual 10-week seminar series on User Experience (UX), where we welcome industry experts to speak about current issues and research in the field.

Each 40-minute talk will be filmed and will be followed by a Q&A session. Videos of the talks are posted to this web page within one business day of the presentation. Students may register for credit with course HCDE 521. Members of the University of Washington community are welcome to attend.