Zaid Hussan Lecture: Change by Design

This lecture was recorded on September 10, 2015 in Timken Lecture Hall in the San Francisco Campus of California College of the Arts.

The inaugural master’s cohort in Interaction Design at California College of the Arts is proud to welcome Zaid Hassan, who will give a presentation and Q&A session on the subject of social labs and the role of prototyping and design in large-scale social change.

Hassan — an idealistic thinker and pragmatic educator who stands at the vanguard of a movement to revolutionize the worlds of design, education, and philanthropic activism — will address the following and other topics in an informal talk and exchange:

Key challenges of our time
How the old ways are being improved upon
The promise of design tools in the new economy — the tools of agile thinking — to change the world
The unique contributions that designers bring to the new way of approaching complex challenges
What we should look out for as designers: our blind spots
Hassan is visiting CCA for the first week in September to collaborate with the Interaction Design Program’s first cohort of graduate students in creating a year-long social lab, in partnership with the African-American Arts and Culture Complex.

About Zaid Hassan
Hassan is the cofounder of Reos Partners, a social innovation consultancy that addresses complex, high-stakes issues around the world, helping teams of stakeholders work together on their toughest challenges.

He has more than a decade of experience in developing strategic responses to complex social challenges, including aboriginal issues, climate change, child malnutrition, employment, energy, financial systems, global food systems, and security issues.

Hassan has a background in technology and communications. He left university, where he was studying physics, to join the dot-com boom and set up his own company, Anthropic, that focused on both the delivery of new media and the social implications of technology.

He has extensive startup experience, including serving for two years as chief technology officer for the nonprofit SmartChange. Hassan is strategic advisor to a number of organizations.

He is a guest lecturer at KaosPilot, an innovative business school in Denmark, and an alumnus of the University of Oxford, where from 2009 to 2010 he was an associate fellow of The Institute of Science, Innovation and Society at the Said Business School.

Hassan is the author of The Social Labs Revolution, and he writes for various publications. He is a contributor to the best-selling book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

A native Londoner, Hassan grew up in Bombay, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, and London. He lives in Oxford.

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