AIGA Louisville Design Week 2017 Passport + Keynote Speaker Ellen Lupton

AIGA Louisville is proud to host its third annual Louisville Design Week! Design Week brings together designers and other creative professionals for a five consecutive days of lectures, workshops and meet-ups, dedicated to celebrating and inspiring great design.

A $10 AIGA Louisville Design Week Passport is required to register for Design Week events. Once the Passport is purchased, you will receive a special code that you will need to sign up for Design Week events through Eventbrite. With the exception of the Ellen Lupton events — Lunch & Learn at Sullivan, and Keynote address at the Speed — the Passport gives you free admission to all other Design Week events (remember, you’ll need to register for individual events separately). The Passport also gives you a $5 discount on tickets for the Lupton events.

AIGA Louisville, along with our event partners: the Speed Art Museum, the Power Agency, and the Hite Art Institute, are very excited to be hosting our keynote speaker, author, curator and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Ellen Lupton. Her talk, “Design for the Senses,” will be at the Speed Art Museum on Thursday, August 10th. 6 pm reception, sponsored by Power (appetizers by Wiltshire and cash bar), 7 pm Keynote address.


Lupton’s keynote talk will be Storytelling and Design for the Senses.
Design tells stories that touch people’s minds and bodies. Storytelling helps designers reach people in emotionally fulfilling ways. Designers in today’s cross-disciplinary, multimedia world create objects, images, and brands that activate all the senses. Designers can employ ideas about narrative, behavior, perception, and humor to amaze, delight, and orient the eye and mind. How do vision and language interact with taste and smell? How does a song taste? How can designers engage the senses to create richer and more inclusive experiences? This presentation draws on Lupton’s ongoing research on design, storytelling, and multisensory experience.


Tickets for Ellen's Thursday evening Keynote event at the Speed Art Museum available on this page. Registration for her Lunch & Learn talk must be purchased separately.



DESIGN WEEK PASSPORT (Passport only. Does not include admission to Keynote event.)

$10 for everyone (no separate pricing for members or students)


DESIGN WEEK PASSPORT + KEYNOTE EVENT (Includes both passport and admission to Keynote event.)

$25 Students, $35 AIGA & Speed Members, $40 Non-Members


KEYNOTE ONLY (Admission to the Keynote event. Does NOT include Design Week Passport access.)

$20 Students, $30 AIGA & Speed Members, $35 Non-Members


No refunds issued under any circumstances.


About Keynote Speaker Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).

Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is used by students, designers, and educators worldwide. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a geeral audience. D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art. The Lupton twins’ latest book is Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (St Martin’s Griffin, 2009).

Other books include Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008) and Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006).

Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S.

Ellen Lupton has contributed to various publications, including PrintEyeI.D., and Metropolis. She has published essays and illustrations in The New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen.

Other exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include the National Design Triennial series (2000, 2003, 2006, 2010), Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005 (2006), Solos: New Design from Israel (2006), and Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), all at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

When & Where
Thu, Aug 10, 2017 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
The Speed Art Museum
2035 South 3rd Street
Louisville, KY 40208