Keynote Speaker - Shashi Caan

Shashi Caan, distinguished thought leader for architectural design internationally
Monday, June 8 at 11:00am

Leading with Color: Shaping the Built Environment

Color is everywhere. In design education and practice, it is almost nowhere. The practice of design sets out to be synonymous with quality of life and well-being, a creative act that is integral to shaping the sustainable development of a community. Breaking down the foundational components of design, we find: Light, Color and Form. These three essentials can be combined differently to influence human and societal behaviors inclusive of aspirational, practical and perceptual outcomes. 

Traditionally, form is the design starting point. To lead with color is to explore its potential as the first and most vital of the design ingredients. Leading with Color: Shaping the Built Environment seeks to explore the implications of this pivotal shift in the designer’s toolkit and the resultant implications for the built environment. If we recognize the importance of color in the design practice - its ubiquity and global diversity - an opportunity exists to create unique regional and global environments, identities and forms. When this method is combined with other global opportunities (such as design’s pervasiveness  across the world), we can shape the built environment by leveraging an urgent concern for color, while combining the art, science, and craft of design toward new ways of creating form.

Bio

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.