Dr. Terry Irwin

Biography

Terry Irwin is a Professor and the Design Director at the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. From 2009 to 2019, he served as the Head of the School of Design, leading a multi-year process to place 'design, society, and environment' at the heart of the programs' curricula. Irwin is a co-originator of Transition Design, a transdisciplinary approach aimed at addressing the complex, wicked problems facing 21st-century societies. He has been teaching design at the university level since 1986 and has held faculty positions at Otis Parsons College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California College of Arts in San Francisco, and the University of Dundee in Scotland. With over 50 years of experience as a practicing designer, he was a founding partner of MetaDesign, an international design firm with offices in Berlin, London, San Francisco, and Zurich, where he served as Creative Director for the San Francisco office from 1992 to 2002, working with Fortune 500 clients such as Nike, Apple Computer, and Hewlett-Packard. Irwin holds an MFA in design from Basel Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule, Switzerland, and an MSc in Holistic Science from Schumacher College/Plymouth University in England. He completed five years of doctoral research at the University of Dundee, Scotland. In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Design from Emily Carr University, Canada, and in 2021, received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Arts, London, in September 2023. Terry lives in Pittsburgh with his husband and collaborator, Gideon Kossoff.

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