Ellen Lupton
Guest Designer
Profile
Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.
How do people respond to the designed environment? When we look at a poster, a website, or a road sign, our brains process information to help us use and understand information. Designers can employ these theories to amaze, delight, and manipulate the eye and mind. From the laws of perception to concepts of narrative, behavior, and how to tell a joke, theories of thinking and communication shed light on how design works. Illustrated with fun and surprising examples of design, Ellen Lupton’s lecture got us thinking about how we see. She drew on current projects and research, including her exhibitions “Beautiful Users” and “How Posters Work” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Her exhibition Beautiful Users and Process Lab are open through spring 2015. Past exhibitions include Graphic Design: Now in Production, co-organized by Cooper-Hewitt and the Walker Art Center, and the National Design Triennial series. Lupton also serves as director of the Graphic Design MFA Program at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore, where she has authored numerous books on design processes, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, and Graphic Design: The New Basics. Recent books include Type on Screen (2014). Coming soon: How Posters Work (May, 2015).”