Ken Wood, who designed the first Apple notebook computer, the PowerBook 100 and other pivotal Apple products, is speaking on campus Thursday.
He received the BusinessWeek/IDSA Design of the Decade Award for the Apple PowerBook 100 as well as a second Design of the Decade award for the Acuson Sequoia Ultrasound System, which led the ultrasound industry for a decade. Wood has received more than 25 design awards and more than 50 patents for his work.
“The act of design goes beyond creating the appearance and function to encompass the experience,” says Wood. “It is this elevated role of design that gives rise to our most cherished products. Charismatic products that are endearing, engaging and we simply do not want to live without.”
The Executive Creative Director at LUNAR Design in San Francisco, Wood is primarily involved in leading large-scale programs and managing the industrial design group to help ensure design quality.
LUNAR was established in 1984 and for the last 10 years, it has consistently been among the top five award-winning industrial design firms, according to BusinessWeek magazine. Wood has been directly responsible for managing the nearly 20 year working relationship with Hewlett-Packard’s Home Products Division, maker of the market-leading Pavilion line of personal computers. Since 1998 HP has sold over 60 million consumer PCs that the HP/LUNAR team has designed, more than any other computer maker.
“Ken Wood, and Lunar Design, represents the leading-edge of North American industrial design” says EVDS professor Graham Livesey. “They consistently demonstrate that design excellence is vital to producing high quality and successful products."
The Design Matters lecture series, a thought provoking lecture series hosted by the environmental design faculty (EVDS), brings to Calgary a range of important people to explore issues in architecture, urban design, product design, and landscape ecology.
This month’s Design Matters lecture will be held at the event centre at the downtown campus Thursday, March 15 from 7-8:30 p.m.
Admission is $5, students are free.
For the full article by Jessica Wallace in Utoday, click here.