Allan Chochinov
Core 77

Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. He is editor in chief of Core77.com, Coroflot.com, and Designdirectory.com, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture. He teaches in the graduate departments of Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Prior to Core77, his work in product design focused on the medicala and diagnostic fields, as well as on consumer products and workplace systems. (Projects included work for Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson, Federal Express, Kodak, A.C. Nielsen, Oral-B, Crunch Fitness and others.) He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, The Art Directors Club and The One Club.

Scott Henderson
Studio Scott Henderson + MINT

Scott Henderson is an American designer who heads the New York based design studio Scott Henderson Inc. and is also Principal and Co-Founder of MINT where he designs, manufacturers and distributes home accessory objects to over 350 retailers and museums throughout the world including The Museum of Modern Art and Design Within Reach.

Scott is known for his ability to transform the mundane.  He believes that if something makes you smile it becomes easier to use.  With over 50 patents in the U.S. and Europe for projects as diverse as housewares and home accessories to consumer medical products, electronics, even aircraft- his work has been widely recognized in exhibitions, awards programs and in the press.
For instance, his designs have recently been included in the New York Times Magazine’s feature on the 20th century’s best designs.  His work has been included in I.D. Magazine’s Annual Design Review eight times, twice in Metropolitan Home’s special issue, The Design 100, it has received four GOLD and two SILVER awards from the BusinessWeek-IDSA Industrial Design Excellence Awards, two GOLD Medical Design Excellence Awards, multiple CES Awards and multiple Good Design Awards.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum has exhibited Henderson’s work repeatedly, including six of Henderson’s products in their National Design Triennial– “Inside Design Now”.  He is a sought-after presenter both nationally and internationally and was a keynote speaker at three 2007 IDSA Conferences in Atlanta, Chicago and Providence, RI.  He was also a keynote presenter at the recent Japan Society’s symposium entitled “Universal Design, Design for all People”.  He has been a guest on the Sunday morning network news show, Business Week–Money Talks, and was featured in The Corporate Design Foundation’s documentary entitled The Business Edge, sponsored in part by the National Endowment of the Arts and Fast Company Magazine.

He has also published many articles on the importance of design in periodicals such as Innovation, the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designer’s Society of America, as well as in the Design Management Institute’s Design Management Journal. He has served as Chairman of the Industrial Designer’s Society of America National Conference.
For Scott, design is not a discussion of form versus function; it’s about thinking and the quality of the big idea.

Her research has been supported by the Graduate Kinne Travelling Fellowship from Columbia University, the Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant from the American Institute of Architects New York
Chapter, and a fellowship from The MacDowell Colony. She is an NCARB-certified registered architect in the state of New York and a LEED Accredited Professional. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from University of Minnesota and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University.

Victoria Milne
New York City Department of DESIGN + CONSTRUCTION / Director

Victoria Milne is creative director of a graphic design studio and public art program in the City of New York’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC).  Her group’s designs include building murals, invitations for Mayor Bloomberg, construction signs and internet content for DDC and other Mayoral agencies.  Before directing the office of creative services, she worked with the commissioner of DDC to develop the design and construction excellence program, through which the City is improving new projects in the built environment.  She also runs a side project, 6¢ Design, which develops product designs for the home.

Previous to working for public sector she was a design critic and curator, serving as editor in chief of Glass magazine, and contributing editor for Dwell magazine in San Francisco, and Blueprint magazine in London, while writing for many other publications.  Her exhibitions included “The Pull of Beauty” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1993.  She has a masters degree in industrial design and an undergraduate from Vassar College, and brings the spirit of her hometown, Portland, Oregon with her everywhere she goes.

Susan S. Szenasy
Metropolis / Chief Editor

In 1986 Susan S. Szenasy was named chief editor of Metropolis, the New YorkCity-based magazine of architecture, culture, and design. During her 17 years as Editor-in-Chief, the magazine has gained international recognition and has won numerous awards. Susan’s training in design journalism was on the job. Beginning with Interiors magazine, she rose from a junior position of editorial assistant to senior editor; then she was named chief editor of Residential Interiors, the short-lived offspring of Interiors. Susan is the author of several books on design, including The Home and Light. She holds an MA degree in Modern European History from Rutgers University and teaches design history and design ethics at New York’s Parsons School of Design. She is a frequent lecturer and panel moderator on broad-ranging design topics, and the guiding light behind Metropolis’s Conferences (which she also facilitates), including Wonderbrands, Wonderbrands West, Net@Work,Business UnUsual, Teaching Green and Design Entrepreneurs. She is the co-founder of R.Dot (Rebuild Downtown Our Town), a coalition of New Yorkers who came together after the 9/11 tragedies to contribute their expertise to building the 21st century metropolis at the site of the former World Trade Center.

Moderator:
William Menking
The Architect’s Newspaper

William Menking, is the founder and editor of The Architect’s Newspapers and is Professor, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and on the International Advisory Board of the Architectural Humanities Research Association. He has organized, curated and created catalogues for exhibitions on architecture for venues in the U.S. and Europe including; Archigram: Experimental Architecture 1961-1974, Superstudio Life Without Object’s and FRAC Orleans: Experimental Architecture 1964-2000. He has co-authored an essay Total Living Unit: Joe Colombo and Architecture for the exhibition catalogue on Colombo for the Milan Triennale and organized a symposium on the architecture and video of Ant Farm. I am currently preparing an exhibition The Art and Architecture of the Counter Culture on the utopian community experiments of the 1960’s and 1970’s with Professor Alessandra Ponte with whom he delivered a public lecture on the subject at The National Clubs as part of their “Engaging the City’ series.

He curated and organized exhibition Forever Modern: Fifty Years of Record Houses and Shrinking Cities at The Pratt Manhattan gallery. The Archigram Family Tree that created for the entrance wall of the London Design Museum’s Archigram exhibition appeared in Yale Perspecta 37 Famous in 2005. His essay The Installation Architecture of Ant Farm appeared in Yale’s Constructs journal in 2006. He is currently preparing an exhibition Counter Cultures on the utopian community experiments of the 1960’s, editing a book on the British American architect Michael Webb, preparing a new published version of the original Archigrams and editing papers from the symposium City Legacies for an anthology of the journal The Pratt Planning Papers (later The Street and then City Limits) in 2006. He organized and directed the ‘New Practices’ series of lectures and exhibition at the AIA’s New York Center for Architecture.