Upcoming workshops, events and speaking engagements

I’m very excited to be able to share a few upcoming speaking engagements over the next few months. I’m honored to be be invited to each of these events and I really still can’t quite believe that I’m out there participating at all. 

Chicago Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting 
Presented by the School of the Art Institute’s AIGA chapter
March 14th
SAIC Ballroom, 112 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60602
Core77’s coverage of last year’s event 
Presenting Greater Good Studio and it’s inception 

40+ Rethinking Design Symposium
Hosted by the University of Kentucky College of Design
March 30th
Student Center, University of Kentucky 
Speaking on a panel discussion on real-time data (SAIC’s Cindy Coleman will be presenting her work from Gensler the day before too!) 

Urban Systems Collaborative Workshop
Hosted by the Metropolitan Planning Council
April 19th, 2012
Metropolitan Planning Council
A report from last year’s workshop
Attending workshops on the future of civic data, architecture and design

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI2012
Workshop 24: Food and Interaction Design Workshop
May 6th, 2012
Austin, TX
Co-presenting a paper with Sara Cantor Aye on the cafeteria project we’re teaching at the SAIC

Speaking tour of Seoul, Korea—Dec 19-23, 2011

Now that the Fall 2011 semester has come to a close, I am happy to announce that I will be in Seoul starting next Monday for a week, giving talks speaking about my work as a designer, teacher and artist. I’ll also be visiting the SAIC’s Samsung client team to present the amazing work my students did for them this semester. As you can imagine, I’m crazy excited to visit Korea and Seoul for it’s prominence in design and culture on the world stage.

Below is a press release from the Nam Jun Paik Museum, who will be hosting my talk Dec 20th.

Design for Citizens—how design can be used to foster community in urban environments

George is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He teaches graduate level classes in the Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects department. He is also co-founder and design director at Greater Good Studio, an innovation consultancy that uses design methods to solve social problems.

Greater Good Studio believes in three simple truths:

Research changes design.
Design changes behavior.
Behavior changes the world.

George has been a design consultant (at IDEO), a public servant (at the Chicago Transit Authority), a teacher (at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago), and now an entrepreneur (at Greater Good Studio). He remains wildly optimistic that user-centered research and insight driven design brings awareness and tools, can bring change to even the most entrenched problems of our time. 

George will present projects from his 13 year career as a designer, artist, teacher and citizen: designing city buses, designing components of a smart city and creating a new vision for public school cafeterias. In addition, exclusively for Nam June Paik Art Museum, he will present a photographic study about race and identity called CHROMAsome.

georgeaye.com
greatergoodstudio.com

Keynote presentation on Transportation and Movement

Several months ago, after presenting the Living in a Smart City class with my students at the SAIC, I was honored with an invitation to attend the ICIS Physical and Pervasive Computing conference held in Salt Lake City, UT. Originally, I thought this was going to be a chance to meet a bunch of bad asses in architecture, medicine, public health, transportation, nuclear science and embedded technology and the most work I was going to do was solder of some Arduinos boards.

Well it turns out I was right about the bad asses. This conference is packed with them. But I was wrong about taking it easy as I find out on the flight over that I’m presenting a keynote on Transportation and Movement on Day 1. I guess I should have read the bloody agenda a bit more closely.

So, after much feverish slide building last night, I would like to share my keynote presentation featuring my work on Bus Rapid Transit at the Chicago Transit Authority and the work of my students from the Smart City class.

My thanks to Charlie Catlett at the Argonne National Labs and Doug Pancoast at the Architecture Dept at the SAIC for the opportunity to speak and attend this amazing conference and workshop.