For this year’s Commencement Lecture, Dyson School of Design Engineering is excited to welcome John Maeda – one of the most influential voices at the intersection of design and technology – who will give a talk titled “Design and Engineering Are the Same Job Now” . Programme 18.30 – Arrivals and registration 19.00 – Welcome Address 19.10 – Commencement Lecture 19.55 – Q&A Session 20.15 – Drinks Reception About the Talk Design and Engineering Are the Same Job Now For most of the last century, someone drew the thing and someone else made it work. That division of labor produced much of the world around us. But the era of the creative genius up front and the engineers in the back is coming to an end. I’ve spent thirty years working on both sides of that divide, first writing about simplicity when designing software was still a novelty, then arguing that designers would need to learn how to speak machine for a computational age. Now the machine speaks our language. It can design almost anything we ask for, and increasingly do the engineering required to make it real. That changes what is valuable about both disciplines. There has never been a better time to be a design engineer, and never a worse time to practice design or engineering as if they were still separate jobs. This talk explores what happens when that boundary disappears, and what the next generation of design engineering might become. Speaker’s Biography John Maeda – American technologist. Product experience leader across consumer and enterprise. Early catalyst for generative art and computational design for commercial applications across Web2 and Web3. First recipient of White House’s National Design Award for algorithmically-generated visualizations informed by data + AI. Noted book author, online influencer, and investor in diverse startups. Formerly chief technology officer of Everbridge, Sonos board of directors, Wieden+Kennedy board of directors, Kleiner Perkins partner, MIT Media Lab data visualizatio

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