Design and Silicon Valley

Barry Katz

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Friday, February 22, 2013

A talk examining Silicon Valley as the birthplace of wholly new practices of design will begin at 7 p.m., March 14, in York College's Humanities Center Room 218. Speaker Barry Katz is a Fellow at IDEO, Silicon Valley’s leading design and innovation consultancy, and also at the i.school, University of Tokyo. The event is open to the public free of charge and is part of the College's annual Humanities Lecture, which this year examines innovation through the arts.

Katz was educated at McGill University in Montreal, the London School of Economics, and the University of California. He is Professor of Design at California College of the Arts, and Consulting Professor in the Design Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Stanford University. He specializes in cultural theory and the history of technology, exploring a range of themes in the history and theory of design in his numerous scholarly and popular books.

Katz will explore the manner in which the region’s designers learned to integrate art and technology, European aesthetics, and American engineering. He argues that design is a thoroughly human and humanistic affair.