31st November 2011: Professor Harold Nelson visited the S.O.D. studio and gave a lecture and had a discussion with the students about their projects. Harold Nelson is one of the important scholars when it comes to systems thinking in design and it was a great pleasure to hear him lecture.
read more about Harold below
Dr. Harold Nelson is a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana. He was the 2009-2010 Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was an affiliated Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington and has recently worked in research for the NSF funded center for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments at the University of Washington, Stanford University and SRI.
He is a past-president and a trustee of the International Society for Systems Science. For over twelve years Dr. Nelson was the head of the Graduate Programs in Whole Systems Design at Antioch University. He is also the co-founding Director and President of the Advanced Design Institute, a not-for-profit. He is the owner of the design consulting firm, Harold Nelson, LLC. A licensed architect in California, Dr. Nelson worked for several years as an assistant regional architect for Region Five of the U.S. Forest Service.
As a consultant, Dr. Nelson has worked with a variety of organizations, including: non-profits and corporations, state and federal agencies, international governments, and the United Nations, and continues to work as an educator, consultant, and researcher in the field of organizational systems design where he brings both design thinking and systems science to the study of organizations and innovation.
Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D. in Social Systems Design, graduating with distinction, from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Master of Architecture degree from U.C. Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Montana State University. Dr. Nelson studied architecture at the Technical University in Helsinki, Finland where in addition he studied ceramic design at the Athenaeum Fine Arts Academy.
In 2004, “The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World; Foundations and Fundamentals of Design Competence”, a book co-authored with Dr. Erik Stolterman, received the Outstanding Book of the Year award from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology