Research + Tech Talks: Dr. John Nash, U. of Kentucky
Channel: NAF
Date: 2021-03-02

Marc Lesser, NAF VP of Research + Tech is joined by Dr. John Nash.

Dr. Nash a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in California, Utah, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Texas and Iowa before settling in Kentucky in 2011. The pathway through those states included traditional academic training and an academic career he turned on its head when he resigned the day after he was awarded tenure at University of Texas at El Paso to join a startup lab at Stanford called the Stanford Learning Lab.  Never one to stop learning, his world view was re-schooled and re-tooled at Stanford when he was exposed to design thinking from those who would later found the dSchool. From there he took a departure from higher ed altogether to run the Silicon Valley arm of a Stockholm, Sweden-based consultancy he co-founded. He returned to the academy when he was hired as associate professor at Iowa State University in Educational Leadership with joint appointment in Human Computer Interaction. Today, at the University of Kentucky John conducts research on human centered design as a means of creating educational innovations. John’s passionate about lifting the voice of the voiceless so as to honor their experience and wisdom in designing solutions to long standing social challenges.
Books Referred to in the Interview

    Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice : community-led practices to build the worlds we need. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://design-justice.pubpub.org

·         Covert, A. (2014). How to make sense of any mess: Information architecture for everybody. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

·         Nash, J. B. (2019). Design thinking in schools: A leader’s guide to collaborating for improvement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

 Websites of Interest

    Design Justice Network
    Why Designers Should Never Go to a Meeting Without a Prototype (Boyle’s Law)