Keynote Speaker Shashi Caan

Shashi Caan FoIFI, FRSA, FCIDI, Hon FASID, Hon FBID, Hon FDIA

Shashi Caan is a distinguished thought leader for architectural design internationally.

As a practitioner, design futurist, educator and author, her dedication to furthering human betterment through and by design is reflected in her 25+ year design career. She is the founding partner of her US/UK based, innovatively structured firm, THE COLLECTIVE, and Shashi Caan is the Founder and President of GloW-DESIGN (Globally We Design), an international thought leadership platform, through which her ReDesignEd Educators Forum facilitated the Universal Design Education Charter in 2018 and The Johannesburg Declaration in 2019.

At the world level, she is one of only three two-term Presidents of the distinguished International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI, 2009-2014). In 2017, she was appointed IFI CEO.

Formerly she held executive and leadership positions with three renowned NYC based architecture firms, including SOM, where she served as Design Director and Associate Partner. Simultaneously, she has served as Chair of the Interiors at Parsons New School of Design and taught at several universities internationally.

She is the 2004 US Designer of the Year and recipient of the 2012 Golden Seat Architectural Master Award of China. In 2013, she was appointed the JDP Design Ambassador to Japan. With her leadership at IFI and gaining input from 88 countries, she founded the IFI Interiors Declaration (2011). She is a Fellow of IFI and Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) and has been awarded honorary Fellowships in the UK, Australia and the U.S. In 2010, she was conferred an honorary doctorate from NYSID in New York. She is the author of the seminal book, Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment (2011), which has been translated in multiple languages.

A sought-after public speaker, Shashi participates in design juries, panel discussions, workshops and lectures around the world. Over the last decade she has written some forty articles, essays and critiques, published both in the US and internationally.