Flour, Salt, Water is the theme of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 2021 Master of Design (MDes) public seminar series. The series grapples with the reactionary paradigm shift in social norms due to a global pandemic. Domestic spaces have become increasingly modular, shifting between creative studio, library, community space, and the kitchen. Bread making has become a unique cultural signifier of life in quarantine and an analogy for structures of consumption. How do we produce? What do we consume? How has the pandemic had an impact on this? Join our table to discuss the matter of sustenance from the perspective of designers.
Procedural and minimalist, “Flour, Salt, Water” asks us to engage in a process of creation that is both culturally specific and universally understood. Introspective domestic space has made us question our modes of consumption. Using “bread making” as a design framework, the series will consider racial equity, climate change, and alternative facts grounded in design discourse.
The UIC Design graduate cohort will host four seminars; each will welcome a prolific designer to our table to speak about the simple yet complex question of sustenance. By providing a place for discourse, exploration, and community, we hope to create the conditions for stepping outside of our interior spaces together. We hope to gain a greater understanding of the complex structures that influence our daily life while positioning design as a catalyst for change.
The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school’s MDES program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.
The first evening in the 2021 public seminar series will be Thursday, March 18 from 6–7:30pm and will feature Ti Chang. Please visit our website for streaming information.
Ti Chang is an industrial designer / entrepreneur / activist passionate about designing products for women. She is the co-founder and VP of Design of CRAVE, a San Francisco-based company specializing in pleasure products that look as good as they feel. Ti’s first design at CRAVE debuted through a crowd-funding project to become the world’s first crowdfunded sex toy. Since then, Ti has continued to lead the concept and design for the company’s full line of products, including its celebrated sex jewelry. She is credited with mainstreaming the category of sex jewelry with the introduction of the Vesper vibrator necklace in 2014.
Prior to CRAVE, Ti bootstrapped her first company INCOQNITO in 2008, a line of intimate accessories that double as fashionable jewelry which was acquired by CRAVE in 2010. Earlier, Ti held positions with major consumer brands, including Trek Bicycle and Goody Products, where she helped pave the way for women by serving as the first female industrial designer at both Trek and Goody. During her time at Goody, Ti was named inventor on multiple patents and designed the “Ouchless” hairbrush collection, a prolific product for nearly a decade.
Ti is the chair of the Women in Design section of the Industrial Designers Society of America, where she supports the community of industrial designers and women in design. She is also on the advisory board for San Francisco Design Week, Reimagine, and CRAVE Foundation for Women. Ti holds a MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art in London and a BS in Industrial Design from Georgia Institute of Technology. Ti will visit UIC to discuss modes of consumption and processes of creation that are both culturally specific and universally understood.
Lecture streaming information can be found on our website.