PARTICIPANTS

Cameron Tonkinwise is Associate Professor and Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a background in philosophy and continues to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies and sociologies of technology. Cameron is also chairing the PhD Committee that is currently restructuring the School of Design’s PhD program. He has extensive experience with practice-based design research, having supervised and examined reflective practice and artifact-based research projects and written about the epistemologies particular to this kind of work.

Cameron comes to the School of Design from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City where he was the Associate Dean Sustainability, and before that Co-Chair of the Tishman Environment and Design Center and the Chair of Design Thinking and Sustainability in the School of Design Strategies. Before that Cameron was Director of Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, and executive Director of Change Design, formerly known as the EcoDesign Foundation.

Cameron’s primary area of research is sustainable design. In particular, he focuses on the design of systems that lower societal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership – in other words, systems of shared use.