Kevin Henry
Kevin is an industrial designer, educator, curator, and writer. He is the founding faculty member of the product design concentration at Columbia College Chicago where he coordinated the program for the first ten years. Kevin began his own studies in studio arts before pursing an M.F.A. in time-based media from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. After that he apprenticed as a furniture maker and designer to support himself as an performance artist. The experience of designing objects with immediately perceivable value led him back for a second M.F.A. in industrial design at The University of Illinois-Chicago. He continues to work between the margins of eeeeee
design, activism and art- most recently co-curating (along with his wife and collaborator Anne-Dorothee Boehme and independent curator Lindsay Bosch) the exhibition: Pass It On: Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture which was held at the A+D gallery of Columbia College Chicago from March 1st- April 14th 2007. In November 2007 he participated in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art's Creative Re-use panel during the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Kevin is an active presenter at design conferences (IDSA/ICSID), innovation conferences (NCIIA), as well as the College Art Association (CAA). Topics over the past ten years have ranged from technology integration, sustainability, ethnographic photography, design theory, and do-it-yourself practice/culture. His current project is an essay on the digital snapshot in the age of Flickr and the 'third screen.' This essay follows up on an earlier one (Parallel Universes: Making Do and Getting By + Thoughtsless Acts: mapping the quotidian from two perspectives) which compared the photographs of British artist Richard Wentworth with those of design researcher Jane Fulton Suri. In both sets of images the makers use photography to capture the interesting and varied ways in which humans interact with their environment to change, improve, or otherwise alter their surroundings.
Kevin writes for the industrial design supersite core77 on a variety of topics and is currently working on creating web documentation of the exhibition: Pass It On: Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture. He is vice-chair of the "Design for the Majority" professional section of the IDSA (Industrial Design Society of America) which advocates for greater design participation for the other 5 billion people in the developing worlds who rarely benefit directly from design. Creative re-use is an overall part of his philosophy of active consumption/creation versus passive consumerism. He is particularly interested in the ways in which consumption patterns deadened many consumers into believing the only options they possess are only those they can afford.
Mailing Address
Kevin Henry, IDSA.
Department of Art and Design: Product Design
Columbia College Chicago
600 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60605
USA
Email: khenry@colum.edu
Telephone: (312) 344 7381
Web site
www.colum.edu/Academics/Art_and_Design/product_design/People/Faculty/index.php
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