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MASD Visiting Faculty

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MASD Visiting Faculty
In addition to core faculty and staff, MA in Social Design students learn from visiting faculty from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

View past and present MASD visiting faculty bios below.

MASD Visiting Faculty

George Aye

George co-founded Greater Good Studio to increase the impact of his user-centered design practice. He started his career as a design consultant at IDEO Chicago working across sectors from consumer electronics to healthcare. He then became the Lead Designer for the Chicago Transit Authority designing a prototype bus for the City of Chicago. He is now a tenure-track professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He remains wildly optimistic that we can solve the most entrenched problems of our time, together for the greater good.

Sarah Brooks

Sarah Brooks is a service designer, researcher, strategist, facilitator, educator, writer and advocate for social change. Sarah has worked has touched lives globally over the past 20 years through the U.S. Federal Government, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid social enterprises. Sarah has designed products and services that help Veterans access the benefits they’ve earned, to support fair and just supply chains in the developing world, engage participation in the global sharing economy, access media that seeks to create a more informed civil society and regularly convenes designers around themes of social innovation and regenerative design. Her approach is grounded in human-centered design, living systems dynamics and humanistic psychology. Following two and a half years of public service as a 2014-2015 White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, and Chief Design Officer at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, she is currently Director of Design & Government at IBM. Sarah lives in Washington D.C.

Ramsey Ford

Ramsey Ford is an award-winning product designer, a design professor, a maker and an entrepreneur. His design background gave him a unique perspective for helping people solve complex problems. His passion for social justice inspired his thesis on what designers could learn from community organizing. He received both his undergraduate degree in industrial design and Master of Design from the University of Cincinnati. Those experiences – combined with a knack for facilitating creative process and a passion for social justice – were the start of Design Impact’s founding idea of embedded design – deeply engaging design as a change process in organizations and communities. Ramsey continues to advance the conversation on inclusive design through workshops and speaking engagements such as the Public Interest Design Institute, IDSA International, and Unite for Sight Global Health and Innovation Conference. An avid writer, Ramsey regularly shares his perspective on social design through outlets like Design Observer, FastCompany, Innovations and Product Design Hub. His work has also been published in the Public Interest Design Practice Guidebook and Leap Dialogues.

Myra Margolin

Myra Margolin is a community psychologist specializing in community-based media production. She has worked in a wide range of settings helping people create media about their lives and communities. She recently led photography workshops for women in rural South India and has previously worked in Brazil and Rwanda. In the US, Myra works primarily with young people, including incarcerated youth. At MASD, Myra teaches key community psychology concepts—including theories of empowerment and social change—to enable the students to develop effective, well-conceptualized projects that truly promote social justice. Her films have been shown on PBS and at film festivals throughout the U.S. Myra is currently completing her doctoral studies, received an MA in Community Psychology from the University of Illinois and holds a BFA in film and video production from New York University.

Cecili Thompson Williams

Cecili Thompson Williams is Director of Beyond the Bomb and the Founder & Chief Strategist at We Divine Water, where she helps change-making clients maximize their results through strategy, communications, & marketing services for missions that are too important to fail. Cecili has over a decade and a half of experience leading mission-driven campaigns with organizations including Amnesty International USA, RESULTS Educational Fund, and the National Partnership for Women & Families. A strong believer in continually building power and capacity, Cecili has trained thousands of campaigners on how to maximize their impact within their organizations and in the world at large.

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