Deb Chachra: Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems

Deb Chachra, author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (2023), and Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, presents the seventh annual Lucas J. Daniel Lecture in Sustainable Systems at the Institute of Design.

Deb Chachra’s talk, “Just, Creative, and Cooperative: Our Shared Infrastructural Future,” will consider how our infrastructural networks, including electricity, water and sewage, telecommunications, and transportation, shape and enable our lives as we know them. The networks that we benefit from today are the physical embodiment of the values of those who came before us. Today, with new possibilities of renewable energy generation at scale, we have the opportunity to transform these systems – and our built environment – to be reliable and sustainable, resilient and equitable.

This event will happen at the home of the Insitute of Design, on the Illinois Tech Mies campus in Bronzeville.

This event will be streamed but not recorded.

A Q&A with ID faculty member Jessica Meharry will follow the talk.

About Deb Chachra
Deb Chachra is currently Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston, Massachusetts, where she was among the earliest faculty members. She works primarily at the intersection of technology and culture: she writes, thinks, speaks, builds, consults, collaborates, and facilitates globally, with a focus on infrastructure and the built environment, design, equity and inclusion, and education (particularly engineering education). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, and Nature. She appeared on Vox’s “FuturePerfect 2024” list of activists and thinkers working to build a more positive future, and her TED talk on infrastructure can be found online.

Faculty Organizers
Jessica Meharry is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Design, where she teaches courses in the politics of design, critical contexts of design, and the philosophical context of design research. She develops justice-oriented design methodologies for professional practice. Her book, Working With Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships (Bloomsbury, September 2024) is a practical guide to working on real-life briefs in the design studio.

About the Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems
The focus of ID’s annual event in memory of ID alum Lucas J. Daniel (1974–2017) is to drive discourse in sustainability and systems design, areas Lucas was passionate about. Lucas was a 2005 Institute of Design (ID) graduate who spent 11 years at Chicago design and innovation consultancy gravitytank. There he applied holistic, systems-level thinking to food innovation. Learn more about the series.