Chicago Designers Featured at Conference May 6

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University will showcase the talents and varied professions of Chicago's design community Tuesday, May 6, at the institute's second annual seminar, "Design:Chicago."

The event is an opportunity for design experts from the Chicago area to gather and discuss the increasing prominence of design in this region.

Design:Chicago will be held from 4 to 6:45 p.m. in the McCormick Tribune Auditorium, James Allen Center, 2169 Campus Drive, on Northwestern's Evanston campus. The seminar is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

The program will feature a panel discussion and four individual presentations with design professionals from Northwestern, Bruce Mau Design, Herbst LaZar Bell, IDEO, Jerome Caruso Design, Motorola, Inc., the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The panel discussion, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., will focus on the broad subject of design, with panelists discussing questions they have on design. Kicking off the presentations at 5:45 p.m., Patrick M. McCarthy, M.D., Heller-Sacks Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, will present one of the projects from the new Medical Innovation course, which teaches students how innovation goes from the lab to the patient.

Other presenters include Walter Herbst from Northwestern and Herbst LaZar Bell talking about "real-world" design issues and correlating those to teachings in Northwestern's Master of Product Development program; Don Norman, Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Senior Professor in Design at Northwestern and noted author of numerous books on design; and Bruce Mau, creative director of Bruce Mau Design, Inc., whose exhibition, "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design," was featured at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006.

The cross-school Segal Design Institute fosters curricular development and research in design across all schools at Northwestern and is dedicated to the study of human-centered design, in context. The institute was established in 2007 with a gift from Gordon and Carole Segal, co-founders of Crate and Barrel.

For more information on Design:Chicago and to register, go to http://designchicago.northwestern.edu.