UIC Design faculty featured in NewCity Design 50

Richard Florida may not have predicted the rise of the curatorial class, yet its members are legion and its influence vast. This installment of Newcity’s annual Design 50 issue salutes this cohort, which includes retailers and organizers, critics and collectors, deans of schools and heads of foundations, cultural workers of all stripes, and others who present and promote design in Chicago. Though design is, definitionally, a cultural product, the act of design itself can feel alienating. If, in other words, to consume design is a social act, to produce it is a radically lonely one. The curatorial class serves an essential function in the design ecosystem. It creates the basic pathways through which designers connect with one another—making, in aggregate, what we might call a “scene”—as well as the pathways that disseminate the work of designers to an audience of end-users. Especially in Chicago, where, unlike the coasts, design can still feel marginal, the people featured in these pages keep the creative industry humming. Let us raise our voices in a paean to these otherwise unsung heroes.  (F. Philip Barash)

Making the 2015 list from the UIC School of Design are:

Marcia Lausen, Director and Professor, School of Design

Peter Pfanner, Executive Director, UIC Innovation Center

Stephen Melamed, Associate Director, UIC Interdiscipllinary Product Development Program

Zoe Ryan, Chair, Architecture and Design Departments, Art Institute of Chicgo (Adjunct Faculty)

And from the UIC School of Architecture:

Bob Somol, Director and Professor, School of Architecture

Iker Gil, Director, MAS Studio and Editor-in-Chief, MAS Context (Adjunct Faculty) 

Photography by Joe Mazza for NewCity