Peter Lawrence is Chairman and founder of Corporate Design Foundation, whose mission is to improve the quality of life and the effectiveness of organizations through good design. The Foundation works with business schools to conduct research, develop teaching material and introduce design into the curriculum, and also publishes The Journal of Business and Design. In 2001, Peter received the Teknion Humanitarian Achievement Award in recognition of the Foundation's continuing advocacy of the design profession. He was Director of the Design Management Institute from 1977–1985, consulted at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has taught design-related courses at many universities across the globe including the London Business School.

Lorraine Wild is a designer and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts since 1985 (she was the director of the Program in Graphic Design from 1985 to 1991). She served as a project tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands from 1991 until 1998. One of the founding partners of the Los Angles design firm ReVerb since the early nineties, in 1996 Wild established her own design practice to focus on collaborations with architects, curators and publishers in this country and abroad. Recent projects include the design of exhibition catalogues for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Trust and the UCLA Hammer Museum. Her work has been published in Emigre, Eye, ID Magazine, Print, Design Quarterly, Studio Voice and in the anthologies The Graphic Edge, Typography Now and Typography Now: Two. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals and books, including Emigre, ID Magazine, Print, Graphic Design in America, Cranbrook Design; The New Discourse, Lift & Seperate, Looking Closer, Looking Closer 2, Looking CLoser 4 and The Edge of the Millennium.

Rick Valicenti is the founder and design director of Thirst/3ST, a communication design firm devoted to art, function and real human presence. Rick was recently awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Medal in 2006 for his sustained contribution to design excellence and development of the profession. This medal is the highest honor in the graphic design profession. Rick is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) and in 2004 was awarded the AIGA Chicago Chapter Fellow. His works are included in the permanent collection of The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the 2006 Triennial, Design Life Now. His clients include the leaders of the Chicago design and cultural community. Rick Valicenti provides inspiration to his colleagues and mentorship to a generation of students. For the past two decades, Rick has lent his time and energies to college and high school students in the form of workshops, and personal critiques on the design industry. A 356-page monograph on the Thirst work was published by the Monacelli Press in 2004 titled Emotion as Promotion.

Gordon has been a design consultant for 34 years, and has worked with many international corporations in Europe, Asia and the US. He is presently a design consultant for Lenovo and Changhong in China. He was also a former VP for the Art Center Kyoto program and Chairman of Product Design for the Innovative Design Lab of Samsung (IDS) in Seoul, Korea. His book on Eliot Noyes, Curator of Corporate Character, was published in 2006 by Phaidon Press, London.

Award-winning designer Bill Moggridge is a founder of IDEO, one of the most successful design firms in the world and one of the first to integrate the design of software and hardware into the practice of industrial design. He has been Visiting Professor in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, Lecturer in Design at the London Business School, member of the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, and is currently Consulting Associate Professor in the Joint Program in Design at Stanford University. His career has had three phases; first as designer, then as a manager of design, and now as a communicator, working as a writer, graphic designer and video maker. His fascination with design, and with what people want from everyday things, has given him a broad view of the information revolution.

The work of Shelley Evenson focuses on tapping into the needs of constituents, defining the best opportunities to respond to those needs, quickly prototyping the response, and iteratively reshaping it based on feedback. Her current interests include design languages and strategies, design prototyping, organizational interfaces, service design, and what lies beyond user-centered design. Evenson was co-founder of seeSpace and Chief Experience Strategist for Scient. With over 25 years experience in multidisciplinary consulting practices, she has worked with clients such as Apple Computer, Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Kodak, Texas Instruments, Williamsburg Institute and Xerox on a wide variety of design and development projects.

David Gresham, an international leader in design innovation, joined the College in April as director of graduate studies. Gresham, the co-founder and until recently Head of Marketing and Sales for Lucesco Lighting in New York City, has over 30 years of industrial design experience. He was head of design at Steelcase Corporation, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As Senior Consultant/Vice President at Fitch Inc., Gresham’s clients included Eastman Kodak, Hitachi, Xerox, AT&T, Digital, Mitsubishi, NCR, Thermos, Harman International and Iomega. Gresham brings to CCS unparalleled experience in establishing design innovation within an organization, as well as a worldwide network of design experts. His iconic design work, starting in 1984 as a co-founder of Design Logic in Chicago, has been highly influential in design circles worldwide. Gresham has been recognized by his peers throughout his career for continuing to expand the boundaries of product design. Many of his products are housed in museum collections and have been published in The New York Times, Metropolis, Interior Design, Business Week, ID Magazine, and Architectural Record. Gresham has served as a guest lecturer at leading art and design colleges including the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and also held the Nierenberg Chair of Design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Gresham earned a MFA in Design from Cranbrook and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Welcome to the College for Creative Studies MFA Program.

Watch profiles of our MFA advisors and hear their thoughts on the world of design at the moment.

Learn more about the programs and curriculum.

Apply now for 2008/09.