Latham Lecture Series

With a deep respect for humanity, speakers in the Latham Series address contemporary and cutting-edge topics in design.

ID’s 2022–23 Latham Fellow Jarrett Fuller shared the latest chapter of design in Season 2 of the With Intent podcast. Through in-depth conversations with ID faculty, the episodes shed light on this current moment of design.

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Design is both a noun and a verb, a process and a product, an action and a result. It shapes how we live at the micro and macro scales from the typography on the phones in our pockets to streets we drive on to the systems that provide services to us on a daily basis.

—Jarrett Fuller

Why Are We Making This?

ID Associate Professor Ruth Schmidt moderates a conversation with corporate design leaders and academics about what gets made, for whom, and why.

Latham panelists Morgan Ames, author of The Charisma Machine; Tope Sadiku, Global Head of Digital Employee Experience for the Kraft Heinz Company; and Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, will discuss how designed solutions are conceived and greenlit—financially, conceptually, and tactically—and how this affects the roles we play as producers and consumers.

For Whom Are We Making It?

The novel coronavirus has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities around the country—affecting employment, mental health, and education, and highlighting how these systems were not designed with, or for, us all.

ID Instructor Chris Rudd moderates a conversation with Latham panelists Dr. Rita Nguyen, Assistant Health Officer and Chronic Disease Physician Specialist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF, and a founder of the Pacific Free Clinic; Jon Veal, Co-Founder and Creative Director of alt_; and Richard Wallace, Founder and Executive Director of Equity and Transformation (EAT).

Why Does This Organization Exist?

How can an organization prioritizing sustainability and equity thrive?

Experts on purpose-driven innovation Michela Magas (innovation advisor to the European Commission and the G7 leaders, creator of the Industry Commons, and Member of President von der Leyen’s High Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus), and Thomas Malnight ( Faculty Director of the Business Transformation Initiative (BTI) at the Institute for Management Development), talk with Charles L. Owen Professor of Design and Action Labs Director Carlos Teixeira.

What Should We Make?

To navigate paths to ethical, responsible, and just futures requires long-term critical and creative thinking. To close the 2021 Latham Series, design experts Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future; Kenneth Bailey, co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention; and Mushon Zer-Aviv, co-founder of Shual.com and senior faculty at the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design joined Laura Forlano, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design and Director of Illinois Tech’s Critical Futures Lab to consider the intersections and tensions between corporate visions and activist dreams for futures that counter oppression.

Form Follows Data

ID invited 2020 Latham fellow Adrien Segal, data sculptor and adjunct professor of design at California College of the Arts, to lecture on the theme of data and design.

About Richard Latham

Richard Latham (1920–1991) was an influential figure in design planning and strategic design who studied design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the early 1940s. He served as director of design in Raymond Loewy’s Chicago office, later founding Latham Tyler Jensen Inc. and Richard S. Latham & Associates Inc., where he specialized in product planning, pioneering an important new area for industrial designers.

Latham was interested in using design to make a strategic impact on business and believed that the principles of design should be the core of business planning. Committed to this philosophy, he worked only with visionaries who had a deep respect for users, and who understood that sustaining their organizations depended upon this respect.

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Is all this design necessary or literally are all these things necessary? . . . Had [we] not pursued the planning philosophy I probably wouldn't be asking myself these kind of questions, but rather concentrating on the next client and all the next things that we should design, whether the world needs them or not.

—Richard Latham

Latham Fellows connect to Latham’s philosophy and are selected because of their ability to challenge the boundaries of design and transfer knowledge about design and its value. Fellows give a lecture hosted by ID and share their emerging ideas with the ID community and the wider public by publishing freely available papers, articles, or other presentations.

Morgan Ames
Smiljana Antonijević (Amongst Digital Humanists)
Kenneth Bailey
Antionette Carroll
Fernando de Mello Franco
Aymar Jean Christian (Open TV)
Carl DiSalvo (Adversarial Design)
Paul Dourish (The Stuff of Bits)
Hamid Ekbia (Heteromation)
Robert Fabricant
Karl Fogel
Rob Girling
Marina Gorbis
Andrea Guzman
Chris Le Dantec (Designing Publics)
Michela Magas
Thomas Malnight
Rita Nguyen
Nassim Parvin
Dawn Nafus (Self-Tracking and Quantified)
Winifred Poster (Invisible Labor)
Daniela Rosner (Critical Fabulations)
Marques Rhyne
Tope Sadiku
Andrew Schrock (Civic Tech)
Evan Sharp
Adrien Segal
Knut Synstad
Skip Walter
Molly Wright Steenson (Architectural Intelligence)
Jon Veal
Richard Wallace
Mushon Zer-Aviv