Professor Terry Irwin

IAS Transitions Festival

Transition Design Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Terry Irwin is a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of its Transition Design Institute. From 2009 until 2019 Terry was the Head of School where she led a 2-1/2 year process with the faculty to redesign curricula at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels to embed “design for society and the environment” at the heart of curricula.

Terry has served on the faculty of Otis Parsons, Los Angeles, California of the Arts, San Francisco and the University of Dundee, Scotland. She was one of the founding partners of MetaDesign, an international design firm with offices in San Francisco, Berlin, London and Zurich and was Creative Director of the San Francisco office from 1992 until 2001. She directed client projects for Apple Computer, Nissan Motors, Hewlett Packard, Barclay’s Bank, Sony Entertainment and The St. Louis Museum of Art, among others. She completed her MFA in Design at the Basel School of Design, Switzerland and an MSc in Holistic Science from Schumacher College/Plymouth University, UK.

She sits on the advisory board for design and architecture at the Technical University of Monterrey Mexico. Her research focuses on Transition Design, a transiciplinary area of study, practice and research that she co-founded with Gideon Kossoff and Cameron Tonkinwise. Transition Design is concerned with seeding and catalysing societal transitions toward more sustainable, equitable and desirable long-term futures.