Presidential Lecture: Victor Pineda and Kat Holmes on Capabilities and Mismatch

*This event is occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program.*

Victor Pineda, PhD  will be joined in conversation by Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design.  They will look at how inclusive design at any scale, from cities, to technology, creates better user experiences for all end users.

Speakers:
Victor Pineda, PhD, activist; President, World Enabled
Kat Holmes, SVP Product Design and UX at Salesforce, Author of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design

Moderator:
Barry Bergdoll, Hon AIANY, Board President, Center for Architecture

Victor Santiago Pineda, PhD, is the President of World Enabled. He is a recognized leader in inclusive urban development and human rights. Pineda was appointed by US President Barak Obama to the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board and serves as the Co-Chair of the Global Network for Disability Inclusive and Accessible Urban Development. He teaches as an Adjunct Professor in City & Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the theory and practice of inclusive development through urban policy, planning, and design. As the former President of the Global Alliance for Accessible Technology and Environments (GAATES), he helped mobilize a global network of access experts to promote equity-based outcomes in urban resilience through the passage of the New Urban Agenda. Previously he held positions as the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, FulbrightHays Fellow, and Senior Research Fellow at the World Institute on Disability. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation research grant, Jefferson Award, and the AAPD Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award. Pineda holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kat Holmes is Senior VP of Product Experience at Salesforce where she’s driving the future of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Essentials. As the author of the best-selling book Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, Holmes works with multidisciplinary teams to set a foundation for why designing with excluded communities drives better solutions for everyone. Her work has been featured by NPR, BBC, Fast Company, Forbes, The Economist, and many more.
Formerly at Microsoft and Google, she’s led experience design for some of the most influential technologies in the world. She pioneered Microsoft’s transformative executive program for inclusive product innovation. She was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and her award-winning Inclusive toolkit was inducted into the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.
Her work stems from three core values: There’s no such thing as an average human being. People should be in the lead, not just the center, of technology. Work with people you enjoy being around and make something worth making.

Barry Bergdoll, currently President of the Board of Directors of the Center for Architecture, is a historian and curator of modern and contemporary architecture. He is Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985, and served from 2007 to 2014 as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. At MoMA he pioneered a format of interdisciplinary design workshops leading to exhibitions on central issues of contemporary practice of architecture and urban planning. The 2009-10 exhibition “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” addressing issues of sea level rise and climate change, is the model for the RFP that will be relaunched in the wake of this inaugural Presidential Lecture Series.

About the Center for Architecture Presidential Lecture Series:
This summer the Center for Architecture is launching its inaugural Presidential Lecture Series. Spearheaded by Barry Bergdoll, Center for Architecture Board President, the series is tied to an exhibition that will display responses to an RFP on new modes of conceiving inclusive environments, from dwelling to workplace to the public realm. The RFP will be relaunched in early autumn with the exhibition to follow by the end of 2021. The lecture series and the RFP explore design’s role in envisioning new dynamics of living and community.

The series will be organized as multi-disciplinary conversations between an architect and a practitioner from another field, moderated by Bergdoll. The conversations are intended to inform work to be commissioned for the exhibition next fall. The basic hypothesis is that contemporary American culture and society have long been, and are increasingly disconnected—fractured even—with people divided by needs, generations, and beliefs, as well by race and income level. In the face of social isolation, the exhibition will explore how environments that foster cooperation, interaction, and mutual assistance can be an antidote to the intense divisions in American life. Issues of equity, health, aging, and racial disparities are among the vital issues at stake.

Other Lectures in the Series:
Presidential Lecture: Mindy Fullilove and Ron Shiffman on Main Streets, Monday, July 24, 2 PM  
Presidential Lecture: Sarah Wigglesworth and Karen Kubey on Building for Aging, Monday, August 3, 2 PM 
Presidential Lecture: Dagmar Richter and Marc Norman on Cooperative Housing, on Monday, August 10, 2 PM 
Presidential Lecture: Peter Robinson on the Work of BlackSpace, Monday, August 24, 2 PM