Update on Strategic Planning
As we begin the spring semester, I wanted to provide a brief update regarding the university’s strategic planning process. I’m pleased to share that Lara Penin, Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, has agreed to serve alongside me as Co-Chair of the Strategic Planning Process. Given her extensive work across service design, design and social innovation, civic design, and participatory methods, among other areas, Lara will be a dynamic partner in leading out this important work and I am excited to collaborate with her. You can read more about Lara’s background below. We are both very much looking forward to jump-starting The New School’s strategic planning process this semester and will provide another update soon with more specific plans and ways in which the community can engage and participate in this work.
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Lara de Sousa Penin is an Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, where she served as director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program from 2015 to 2019. A full-time faculty in the School of Design Strategies since joining The New School in 2008, she has taught in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA, the Integrated Design BFA, and the Strategic Design and Management BBA programs, teaching studios, intensives, and elective courses involving service design for public interest, systems thinking, and participatory methods, as well as advising master degree theses. Lara is also a co-lead and core faculty member of the new Graduate Minor in Civic Service Design.
Lara is co-founder of the Parsons DESIS Lab, an action research laboratory that works at the intersection of strategic design, management, and social theory, applying interdisciplinary expertise in problem setting and problem solving to sustainable practices and social innovation. In her work, she seeks to explore the agency of service design to effect positive social change while bridging the gap between the innovation of design pedagogy and practice to equip designers to play a more transformative role, involving both civil society and the public sector. Lara is the author of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible (Bloomsbury, 2018), an introductory textbook on service design, and editor of The Disobedience of Design: Gui Bonsiepe (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Lara currently serves as co-chair of the University Faculty Senate and previously served as a member of the School Leadership Council at the School of Design Strategies. She has a PhD in Design from the Milan Polytechnic University in Italy and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.