About the Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems

Deb Chachra considers how our infrastructural networks, including electricity, water and sewage, telecommunications, and transportation, shape and enable our lives as we know them. The networks that we benefit from today are the physical embodiment of the values of those who came before us. Today, with new possibilities of renewable energy generation at scale, we have the opportunity to transform these systems—and our built environment—to be reliable and sustainable, resilient and equitable.

On April 11, 2024, Sheryl Cababa discussed how there is still a spark of value in some of the tenets of design thinking, but to make it really shine, and to design for a more just and equitable world, systems thinking needs to be at the center of the designer’s practice. Read the transcript of her talk.

LinYee Yuan, Mats Lederhausen, and other experts share perspectives on the future of our food systems for our fifth annual Lucas J. Daniel Series in Sustainable Systems.

How can we address the inequities and structural racism that exist in the food system and in communities of color?

In this talk, Erika Allen, co-founder and CEO of the Urban Growers Collective, discusses urban agriculture, food waste, circular economies, and community participatory research.

In this third annual lecture, ID invited cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, to discuss this complex systems design and sustainability challenges.

In conversation with ID faculty Weslynne Ashton and Carlos Teixeira and Illinois Tech professor Mohammad Shahidehpour, director of the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation, Bakke reveals the social aspects of infrastructure and technological management, Chicago’s own relationship with ‘the grid’ and microgrids (including Illinois Tech’s own microgrid), and design’s critical and urgent role in reimagining this deeply important civic infrastructure.

In this second annual lecture, Jenny Carney, LEED AP O+M, Vice-President, Sustainability, Energy, and Climate Change at WSP, Inc. spoke on “Energy Ecosystems: Reflections on Energy Management in the Natural World, and Chicago’s Clean Energy Transition.”