2024–25 Public Seminar Series: Chris Rudd

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What can design do?

This year’s public seminar series, titled “What can design do?,” asks four invitees to reflect on design’s capacities, potentials, and failures. What are the everyday realities of our practice, and where has it surprised us? What future social roles might design play? And where and why have we seen it fall short? In this deeply uncertain time, we may at least be able to specify something about our practice and its place in the world: What can design do?

Chris Rudd is an award-winning designer, community organizer, and founder of ChiByDesign: a Black-owned, people-of-color-led social and civic design firm. Chris has a deep background in social equity work, systems change, and youth development. Working with communities across Chicago and the U.S., he supports them in designing new anti-racist infrastructures for an equitable future. Chris has been a Clinical Professor of Practice and Lead of Community-led Design at IIT’s Institute of Design and a Civic Innovation fellow at the Stanford Institute of Design.

The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school's MDES program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.

Thursday, October 24
6:30–7:30 pm
Room 1100
Architecture and Design Studios
845 West Harrison Street, Chicago

Free and open to the public.