Terry Irwin

Professor & Head, School of Design

Bio

Terry Irwin is the head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and has been teaching at the university level since 1986. Her research is in transition design, a new area of design study, practice and research that argues for societal transition toward more sustainable futures. Irwin, along with Gideon Kossoff and Cameron Tonkinwise, developed transition design and integrated it into programs and curricula at the School of Design in 2014.

Irwin has been a practicing designer for more than 40 years and was one of the founding partners of MetaDesign, an international design firm with offices in Berlin, London, San Francisco and Zurich. She served as the creative director of the San Francisco office from 1992 to 2002 and worked with Fortune 500 clients such as Nike, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Barclay's Bank, Ernst and Young (EY), Nissan, Sony and Berlin's Transport company, BVG. MetaDesign worked on projects in the areas of computer software and interface design, brand identity systems, exhibition and way finding and information design.

In 2003 she moved to Devon, England, to undertake a master’s degree in holistic science at Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies. After completing her studies, she joined the faculty at Schumacher and taught ecological design thinking and design process to students with backgrounds in biology, ecology, physics, sociology and activism. This experience convinced her that large, complex problems can only be solved by transdisciplinary, collaborative teams and that design has a powerful role to play as a catalyst for positive social and environmental change.

In 2007, Irwin moved to Scotland to undertake Ph.D. studies at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design at the University of Dundee. In Dundee, Irwin taught on the master’s and undergraduate programs in design until 2009 when she moved to Pittsburgh to take the post as head of the School of Design at CMU.

Irwin has held faculty positions at Otis Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles (1986-1989), California College of Arts & Crafts, San Francisco (1989-2003), and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2007-2009). She has guest lectured and taught at numerous schools in Europe and North America, including Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles; the University of Washington, Seattle; Arizona State University, Tempe; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; North Carolina State University, Raleigh; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; University of the Arts, London; the Free University of Bolzen-Bolzano, Italy; and the ICIS Centre, Denmark, among others. She holds a master’s degree in design from the Basel School of Design, Switzerland.

From 2010 to 2013, Irwin led a series of faculty retreats and work sessions to redesign curricula at the School of Design to place design for society and the environment at the heart of its program. The school launched all new programs and curricula in fall 2014.

Irwin lives with her husband, Gideon Kossoff, a social ecologist and design theorist, in Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching materials on transition design can be found on her Academia.edu site.