Design as Futures Therapy: Holding Space for Grief, Joy, and Hope in Times of Deep Uncertainty
Raja Schaar is associate director and associate professor of product design at Drexel University. She earned her BFA in Industrial Design from Georgia Tech (2001) and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003).
An award-winning educator, industrial designer, museum exhibition designer, creative technologist, and STEAM education researcher, Raja is passionate about using design to address social inequities at the intersections of design ethics, environmental justice, and education. She is the recipient of the 2024 IDSA Education Award and was recently recognized as one of the 2026 “Curious 100” by the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity.
Raja began teaching at Georgia Tech in 2004 and joined Drexel’s faculty in 2016, where she co-founded Black Girls STEAMing through Dance—a community-based research program incorporating transdisciplinary embodied learning in dance, design, and code for youth in West Philadelphia. Her research and teaching span STEAM education, design ethics, circular design, climate futures, and social entrepreneurship.
Beyond academia, Raja co-founded the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and previously served as IDSA’s Education Director. She lectures and facilitates workshops internationally, serves on design advisory boards and awards juries, and champions design’s power to create positive change while ensuring equitable participation in shaping our collective future.
The UIC School of Design public seminar series(opens in new window) serves as a research platform for the school’s MDes program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.
* Free and open to the public.
