Don't forget to visit the Liu Lecture blog!

The Stanford Program in Design is fortunate enough to have the honor of hosting a trio of incredible speakers for this Fall's David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design at Stanford.  The lecture series is and has always been free and open to the public, so grab your colleagues, friends, relatives, significant others, neighbors, and anyone else you know and come on down for an evening of fascination and inspiration.  

MAIRA KALMAN
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3RD, 6:00PM in Braun Hall (Bldg. 320) Room 105

Maira Kalman's inspired illustrations have become widely known and loved through the myriad extensions of her storytelling talent. Kalman's work has frequented the covers of the New Yorker, most notably an illustration called New Yorkistan, which depicts the boroughs of New York City with neighborhoods named with their cultural descriptors (e.g. "Central Parkistan" and "Botoxia.") The New York Times has been home to Kalman's illustrated storytelling column including the current "And the Pursuit of Happiness" and the former "Principles of Uncertainty," which has been published in book form. She has authored 12 books for children (or fresh-minded adults) and brought to life a illustrated version of Strunk and White's foundational "Elements of Style."

Beyond the printed page, Maira and her late husband Tibur Kalman have brought their singular perspective to the design of watches, clocks, and accessories under the name M&Co, which are currently distributed by the Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to her continued contribution to print, Maira Kalman teaches graduate Design at the School of Visual Arts and is the cofounder and member of the Rubber Band Society, a group sharing a love for rubber bands.

GENEVIEVE BELL
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH, 6:00PM in Braun Hall (Bldg. 320) Room 105

Named one of the top 50 most creative people in Business (Fast Company,) Genevieve Bell is an Intel Fellow and director of the User Experience Group within the Intel Digital Home Group.

Bell joined Intel in 1998 and has come to lead an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers to drive human-centric product innovation in Intel's consumer electronics business. In this role she is responsible for setting research directions, conducting comparative qualitative and quantitative research globally, leading new product strategy and definition, and championing consumer-centric innovation and thinking across the company.

Prior to joining Intel, Bell was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She has written more than 25 journal articles and book chapters on a range of subjects focused on the intersection of technology and society. Her book, "Telling Techno-Cultural Tales," co-authored with Prof. Paul Dourish, is being published by MIT Press.

Raised in Australia, Bell received her bachelor's degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1990. She received her master's and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Stanford University in 1993 and 1998, respectively.

BEN FRY
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH, 6:00PM in Herrin T175

Ben Fry is director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab, a design laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on understanding complex data.

Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished writing Visualizing Data for O'Reilly.

With Casey Reas of UCLA, he currently develops Processing, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software that won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. The project also received the 2005 Interactive Design prize from the Tokyo Type Director's Club. In 2006, Fry received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the project. Processing was also featured in the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial. In 2007, Reas and Fry published Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists with MIT Press. Processing 1.0 was released in November 2008, and is used by tens of thousands of people every week.

Fry's personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and in the films Minority Report and The Hulk. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM.