A native Brazilian, Carlos Teixeira has spent the bulk of his 20 year career as a designer, consultant and professor in Chicago and New York.

Teixeira holds the Charles L. Owen Professor in Design endowed chair at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology for his contributions to the field of design as an educator and leading systems designer. There, his work with graduate students and as lead of the PhD program has resulted in awards from Fast Company and Core77 and over a dozen academic journal publications.

 
 

“Through hands-on and open-ended project-based activities, students can experience the challenge and excitement of being a team member, project leader, or entrepreneur to promote social justice, create wealth, and improve standards of living. My teaching objective through these types of courses, workshops, studios, clinics, and laboratories is to prepare graduate and undergraduate students to be intellectually and technically empowered to play a leadership role in innovation-driven economies.”

-Carlo Teixeira

Carlos’ belief that positive change is brought about collectively is present in his approach to teaching. Seeing the studio as a playground, Carlos facilitates collaboration and hands-on experiences to foster new ideas and build community amongst students, teachers, and experts. 

Intricately curated examples of his teaching ethos with multidisciplinary collaborators in the field are DREAM:IN and the Strategy World Tour.

 
  • The DREAM:IN initiative sought to combine the dreams of citizens with the thoughts and actions of leaders across a range of sectors. Starting with the 2011 DREAM:IN project in India with Future Group, then replicated in Brazil in 2012 and China in 2013, the project created a dynamic database of dreams gathered in cities, towns and villages across the country. These dreams were categorized, analyzed and shared with business leaders, educators, social entrepreneurs, policymakers and designers to devise transformative and inclusive future scenarios. DREAM:IN will be explored across communities moving forward.

    Looking to Realize Dreams in India With New Business Models by Bruce Nussbaum in Fast Company

    Design Strategies Dialogue featuring Sonia Manchanda, João Tezza Neto, and Lou Yongqi, moderated by Carlos Teixeira and Bruce Nussbaum, as printed in the Journal of Design Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2013; Meet the New Dream Merchants by Sarah Jacobs for the Economic Times December 03, 2011

    Partners: Future Group, Pontoficia Universidade Catolica - Rio de Janeiro, Tongji University

  • Maximizing experience and reflection, The Strategy World Tour was a series of novel, immersive journeys into the near future. Over multi-day excursions to cities around the world, participants visited creative leaders shepherding emerging models to address complexity across the for-profit and public sectors. The role of design was facilitator and synthesizer of the collective exploration, to amplify and extend what could be learned from real-world examples of positive change.

    Strategy Reader available here.

    Partners: INSITUM (now Fjord at Accenture), Natura, ITAU, Nubank, Autodesk, Adaptive Path (now Capital One), MAKE Magazine, Civilla, Shinola, Detroit SOUP, Godrej, Quicksand, Gold Peak Industries, Hong Kong Design Centre, Seeed Studio, Hacked Matter, gravitytank (now Salesforce)

“… I flew to Bangalore to attend the first DREAM:IN conference… I’ve been to hundreds of design conferences, but nothing like this. This is different.”

Bruce Nussbaum, journalist, author, and Professor of Design at Parsons, The New School of Design