MDes Alumni Design Fellows

The Master of Design (MDes) Alumni Design Fellows are graduates of the MDes program who spend dedicated time as volunteers for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. The Fellows lead activities based on their areas of interest and expertise, participate in critiques in MDes courses and end of semester showcases, attend community events, and support MDes courses and recruitment and admissions efforts.  MDes students and instructors for the program are encouraged to directly contact MDes Alumni Design Fellows for advice and collaboration (see contact info below).

2023 MDes Alumni Design Fellows are:

 

Benal Johnson

Benal Johnson is multidisciplinary designer and human swiss army knife with an interest in R&D. She combines emerging technology with her expertise in industrial design, design strategy, and creative technology to make the future a reality.

Get in touch with Benal via calendly.

 

Georgios Grigoriadis

Georgios Grigoriadis is a Designer and an Architect (of things), working with emerging technologies, future making and fabrication. He uses digital, physical tools and machines to design and build spaces, objects, experiences, worlds, words and tell stories about them.

He holds a Master of Design (MDes) from UC Berkeley and a Diploma (Master & Bachelor) of Architecture and Architecture Engineering from the School of Architecture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. There, he was a researcher at the Innovative Environments research cluster working on several European research projects,  and academic related activities in the School of Architecture. George is the co-founder of the space design practice GHOST office (no place specific, 2019) and one of the founding members of the creative collective xyzzy (Thessaloniki, 2015-2018). He has been a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece since 2019. He is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a Lecturer at Berkeley MDes and a Design Technologist at Butlr Technologies.

Get in touch with Georgios by email (ggrigoriadis@berkeley.edu) or book a meeting with him during his office hours.

 

Jan Veicht

Jan is Head of Design at Schoolab, a global innovation company dedicated to designing a brighter future around impact and sustainability. 

He works at the intersection between education, entrepreneurship, and corporate innovation. As an industrial designer, he has worked in the luxury consumer goods industry for many years, designing accessories and lifestyle products for European and American fashion houses. He received his BA in Industrial Design from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, graduated from the Berkeley Masters of Design in Emerging Technologies, and teaches Design & Innovation in the Berkeley Changemaker program at Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Get in touch with Jan via email to schedule an office hour via jan.veicht@berkeley.edu.

 

Roland Saekow

Roland Saekow is a Product Designer with 12 years of experience developing consumer hardware and educational software systems. He recently graduated from the Berkeley Master of Design program where he developed a system to monitor the health of bats with thermal imaging for mitigating epidemics. He has launched two companies including BearExtender which produced long range Wi-Fi equipment. His second company, Nimble Spaces, developed modular outdoor dining systems with the help of Berkeley SkyDeck and the UC Big Ideas program. Outside of work, Roland participates in the robot fighting TV show BattleBots as part of team Free Shipping.

Get in touch with Roland by emailing him at  or booking a session on ADPList.