The Designer’s Salon is a series of conversations between product designers, user experience designers, and visual designers about their design philosophy and career paths. Bard Graduate Center’s focus on the history of design forms the intellectual backdrop of this series, which invites practitioners to speak on how the field is expanding and changing. The first talk explores how digital product design informs many visible and invisible aspects of daily life from how we interact with objects at home, to how we communicate with each other.
On Wednesday, May 23, Rob Giampietro and Jonathan Lee will discuss their work at Google on material design, Google Assistant, and Google research and machine intelligence, exploring how their career trajectories took them from traditional graphic design to working on cutting edge technology at one of the world’s largest tech companies. The conversation will be moderated by Rachel Abrams, head of strategic design at Arup NY.
Rob Giampietro is Director of Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 2015–18 he was Creative Lead at Google in New York, managing projects that included four SPAN Design & Technology Conferences, the launch and relaunch of the Google Design website, an overhaul of the Google Fonts directory including new typeface commissions, a brand-focused expansion of the Material Design system, a visual update for Google’s do-it-yourself AI kits in Target Stores, and contributions to the People + AI Research outreach efforts at Google. He is Senior Critic at RISD’s MFA Graphic Design program, and has been Executive Board Member and Vice President of AIGA/NY. From 2010–15, he was Principal at Project Projects, whose work was recognized with the National Design Award in Communication Design in 2015. Rob is the recipient of a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellowship and the 2014–15 Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.
Jonathan Lee is the Creative Director for brand and future vision projects at Google and is currently working on Google’s personal digital assistant product, Google Assistant. Past work at Google includes a company-wide web redesign, ‘Kennedy’ (2012); Google’s official UI design language, Material Design (2014); Google Design, an external community outreach (2014); and Google’s identity rebrand (2015). Lee serves as President of AIGA New York, and splits his time between Brooklyn and San Francisco.
Rachel Abrams is Associate Principal at Arup, the global consultancy for the built environment. A design strategist, creative place-maker, visual storyteller, writer and educator, she came to Arup to lead its strategic design team in New York having founded and run Turnstone Consulting, a policy-aiding design strategy studio in New York, for over a decade. At Turnstone, her strategic commercial and municipal projects included the identity strategy for the renovated Queens Museum, supporting digital branding and transformation for the New York Times, the MTA, Taxi and Limousine Commission, Oculus and others. She served as Special Advisor to Walk NYC, to design New York City’s citywide wayfinding system, co-founded the AIGA New York’s Design/Relief initiative, and is a former fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space. She teaches in the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, and her writing on the social impact of design and emerging technologies has appeared in over 25 publications. Rachel is a graduate of Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art, UK.
