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09/22/2025 5:30 pm —
11/03/2025 6:30 pm
Jacobs Hall, UC Berkeley
RSVP to Attend
Hosted by UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, Design Field Notes is a lecture series where we invite the public to the UC Berkeley campus for conversations with makers, designers and artists who are contributing to shaping the future through design.
Our Design Field Notes host is Pierluigi Dalla Rosa, a designer and educator with over a decade of experience in designing with emerging technologies, on and beyond screens.
Giving Form to Future States / September 22
Afshin is the founder of Card79, a design studio dedicated to exploring future forms and emerging technologies. With a background spanning mechanical engineering and product design, Afshin builds products that operate in both digital and physical domains, from robotics to neurotechnology.
Afshin has collaborated with leaders at Neuralink and MIT’s Media Lab, refined his craft at acclaimed studios like Barber Osgerby and Terence Conran, and partnered with industry leaders including Amazon, Lululemon, and Ford to launch transformative products and businesses. Prior to founding Card79, Afshin was part of the design teams at IDEO and Whipsaw in the Bay Area.
Is Technology The New Nature? / September 29
Monika is an Interaction Designer who works across the disciplines of science, ethics and futures. Her research focuses on how living systems and the natural world can help us to establish new perspectives on the future of technology and ecosystems.
Through her design work, Monika engages at the intersection of emerging technologies, digital media and the natural environment, creating sensory rich, interactive spaces. Her passion is to build immersive experiences; mixed reality worlds that blend the digital and physical, working with a speculative mindset and experimenting with design approaches. In her latest work she’s been exploring how design, art and science, in particular the field of biotechnology, can create immersive spaces for the creation of new futures.
Making Memory / October 6
Jussi is a Professor and former Creative Director at ART+COM Studios, a pioneering media arts collective renowned for creating innovative spatial experiences that bridge the digital and physical realms. With expertise spanning interaction design, digital materiality, and media arts, Jussi crafts experiences where technology becomes an elegant extension of human expression. Whilst still working closely with ART+COM he is now pursuing new creative ventures in the West Coast.
Jussi has commanded global recognition through his groundbreaking work in exhibition design and media installations, refined his practice through teaching at prestigious institutions including Berlin University of the Arts and Royal College of Art in London, and collaborated with leading cultural institutions and brands worldwide to create transformative spatial narratives. His interdisciplinary approach seamlessly weaves together visual design, physical computing, and algorithmic thinking to forge new territories in experience design.
Can Reality be Intelligent? / October 20
Dr. Ivan Poupyrev is an award-winning inventor, scientist and designer working at the forefront of interaction design. Ivan blends digital and physical realities in everyday objects, devices, and the living environment, fusing human and artificial intelligence.
Currently the CEO and co-founder of Archetype AI, he is pioneering a new form of artificial intelligence, Physical AI, that will empower everyone with an unprecedented understanding of the physical world around them. To deliver on that mission, Archetype AI is building a multimodal AI foundation model, called Newton, that fuses real-time sensor data with natural language to allow people to ask open-ended questions about the world around them – and take informed action to make it better.
Considered one of the foremost interaction designers globally by Fast Company and recognized by prestigious awards such as the National Design Awards, Cannes Lion Grand Prix, and others, Ivan has spearheaded the creation and implementation of groundbreaking technologies facilitating seamless integration of digital and physical interactivity into the fabric of everyday life. His illustrious career spans collaborations with industry giants such as Sony, Disney Imagineering, and Google, where he spearheaded groundbreaking initiatives such as interactive textiles and miniature radars to enable various devices to intuitively respond to human gestures and movements, inventions that he delivered in multiple products on the market. With Archetype AI, he is on a mission to use the power of artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems – empowering people and organizations with an understanding of the physical environment that wasn’t previously possible.
Portals of Place: Communities, Ruins, and Bamboo / October 27
Julia is a social and community oriented designer, bamboo and watercolor installation artist, and indie publisher out of Oakland, California.
Julia has lived various lives co-founding humanitarian AI companies, living in communes and experimental cities, and building bamboo and earth structures for festivals and land-based projects around the world. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design; founder of Making Tangible Studio; Community Architect for The Tech We Want; and was previously on Omidyar Network’s Exploration and Future Sensing team. Her practice explores threads of community infrastructure and collective flourishing, responsible innovation, ancestry and hopeful futures, sustainability and relationship with the more-than-human world.
President / Principal Designer of NewDealDesign LLC / November 3
San Francisco based technology designer behind some of the most innovative and lasting products created over the last two decades.
Gadi is leader of the award-winning NewDealDesign, a full-stack strategic technology design agency building commercial & consumer brands, systems, products, and experiences, Gadi directs a multidisciplinary team of strategists, designers and engineers, assigned to solve complex problems for both the world’s top brands and upstart disruptors like Microsoft, Google, Fitbit, Serve robotics, Avive, and more.
Gadi and his team have won over 100 design awards, including the United States National Design Award. Gadi was selected by Surface Magazine as one of their ‘Power 100’, listed by Fast Company on their ‘1000 Most Creative People’ list, while NewDealDesign was selected by Fast Company Magazine as the Most Innovative Design firm of 2016.
🔗 Please RSVP! Speaker lineup and details here: https://luma.com/DesignFieldNotes?k=c&period=past