Thursday marks the kickoff of the 2004 David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design, hosted by Stanford's Joint Program in Design, in which the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Art come together to conceive and design products for society's benefit. The lectures, held at 8 p.m. in the Clark Center auditorium, were established in memory of David H. Liu, a Stanford graduate student in design who was murdered in 1994 during a Palo Alto robbery.
"One of the pressures designers constantly face is the pressure to innovate," says lecture series organizer Adam French, one of about 30 graduate students in the Joint Program in Design. "Succeeding at this is very much at the heart of what the Joint Program in Design is all about – not simply playing by the rules, but actually playing with the rules and changing the game. The lecture series aims to showcase people who have been exceptional at game-changing."
French says this year's first speaker, Martin Fisher, founder of ApproTEC-USA Inc., personifies the spirit of the lecture series. After finishing doctoral work at Stanford, Fisher – who is scheduled to give his talk April 8 – used a Fulbright scholarship to co-found ApproTEC to develop new and appropriate technologies in Africa, such as human-powered water pumps that increase a farmer's income as much as tenfold.
Other speakers include wheelchair designer Ralph Hotchkiss on May 6 and Good Vibrations founder and sex toy retailer Joani Blank on May 13.
