Conference Speaker Bios

 
Since 1998, Valerie Fletcher has been the executive director of the Institute for Human Centered Design, an international education nonprofit based in Boston. The organizational mission is to advance the role of design in expanding opportunity and enhancing experience for people of all ages and abilities. Fletcher’s career has been divided between design and public mental health; she writes and lectures internationally.

 
Andreas Dornbracht joined Aloys F. Dornbracht GmbH & Co. KG in 1985. Since 1991 he has been its director of marketing and sales. He shares the management of the company with his brother Matthias as well as with Ralph Dihlmann. Since 1985 the Dornbracht company has been working with designers, architects, artists, and scientists to develop the bathroom; today it is the international market leader for designer fittings and accessories.

 
John Williams is a faculty member at Columbia University and a senior vice president and the national director of sustainable development for HDR, Inc. Three years ago John set out to work with a team of HDR economists and two Columbia research teams to develop a means of measuring and assigning monetary value to the attributes of “green.” The effort resulted in the creation of the Sustainable Return on Investment (SROI) framework, which quantifies and provides a transparent means of articulating the direct cash as well as non-cash and external costs and benefits for a given product, project, program, or initiative across the triple bottom line. At a time when there is tremendous interest in producing “green” results but a lack of will until a business case can be made, SROI is a solution that has been applied on behalf of nearly $7 billion in investment decisions.

Jürgen Häpp has been principally involved in the Masdar City project, both in the initial competition phase and in the subsequent development of the detailed masterplan, since it was finalized in February 2008. Prior to joining Foster + Partners in January 2007, he worked at a number of architecture firms in Germany between 1992 and 2005. Häpp started his career in 1992 in an architecture firm as a draftsman. Following four years of work experience he studied architecture at the University of Applied Science in Würzburg and graduated in 2004 with distinction. His final-year project on a new urban development in Beijing, China, was marked as outstanding. In July 2008 he relocated to Abu Dhabi to work on the implementation of the masterplan and development strategy as part of a multidisciplinary site-based team.

Russ Wheeler has been the president of Hansgrohe North America since 2006. Previously, he served for six years as the vice president of sales for Your “Other” Warehouse, a master distributor of plumbing products based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In this role, he had responsibility for sales and customer service, overseeing extraordinary sales growth for the organization. From 1992 to2001, Wheeler worked with Georgia-Pacific Corporation and Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath.

Robert Kloos has been the director for visual arts, architecture, and design at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York since 1993. In that capacity he promotes cultural exchange between Holland and the United States. His department has supported hundreds of projects at a wide variety of institutions throughout the country, ranging from small events at local non-profits to large-scale exhibitions at world-renowned museums. In 2009 he spearheaded a plan to donate the New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion (UN Studio/Ben van Berkel) as a permanent gift from The Netherlands to New York to commemorate 400 years of friendship.Last January he started a new blog, dutchartevents.blogspot.com, that features Dutch art and architecture.

Andrej Kupetz is the general manager of the German Design Council (Rat für Formgebung) in Frankfurt am Main. The Council is the supra-national institute for the promotion of design in Germany. Besides international design-promotion activities, the focus of the its work is on future-oriented questions of design in an economic context. Currently it is sponsored by 150 German and foreign companies, which together have more than 1.5 million employees.

Jennifer Leonard is an interdisciplinary project leader at IDEO and the co-editor of Livingclimatechange.com. She has deep experience in research methods, participatory design, and storytelling techniques. She is the co-author of Massive Change (with Bruce Mau), a book about the future of global design, voted one of the top five books of 2004 by Wallpaper* magazine. She also worked for ten years as a writer and radio broadcaster in New York and Toronto. She’s published feature stories in a variety of magazines, including Details, Nylon, Seed, DAMn, Azure, Saturday Night, Form, and Shift.

Dan Wood, AIA, LEED, received his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters degree from Columbia University. Wood is an Adjunct Professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. He has taught at the TU Delft, the Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, where he served as the Trott and Baumer visiting studio professor of design. He has lived in Paris and for many years in the Netherlands before moving to New York in 2002. Wood is originally from Rhode Island.

Grace La is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning and a founding principal of LA DALLMAN Architects. Her commitment to teaching and exemplary practice demonstrates a unique ability to link the profession and the academy. She is an author and the co-editor of Skycar City (Actar, 2007); a founder and three-time editor of Calibrations: the Wisconsin Journal of Studio Architecture; and a recently appointed editor of the national Journal of Architectural Education. La is a four-time Faculty Design Award recipient from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and she was awarded the 2005 UWM Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Mike Tennity joined KI in 1999 as its vice president of design and development. Since then he has directed the development and launch of several major product lines, helping solidify KI’s presence in the non-residential furniture market and furthering its recognition for best-in-class design and engineering. Under Tennity’s direction, KI also has become a pioneer in customization, linking product development to KI’s “Market of One” philosophy, where tailoring individual solutions for each customer’s needs – quickly – is the heart of the challenge.

Yves Béhar is the founder of the San Francisco design studio fuseproject. Béhar is focused on humanistic design and the “giving” element of his profession, with the goal of creating projects that are deeply in-tune with the needs of a sustainable future, connected with human emotions and enable self-expression. In addition to his responsibilities at fuseproject, Yves acts as chairperson of the industrial design program at California College of the Arts (CCA), in San Francisco, and he has taken on creative, business-partner roles at Aliph Jawbone and other client-companies.