Sheryl Cababa Speaks April 11 About Systems Thinking

Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy at Substantial and author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers (Rosenfeld 2023), will give the sixth annual Lucas J. Daniel Lecture in Sustainable Systems on Thursday, April 11, at 6pm.

Registration is open now.

Sheryl’s talk, “Designing For A More Equitable World with Systems Thinking,” will happen at the newest building on Illinois Tech’s Mies campus, the Kaplan Institute, which is home to the Institute of Design. In-person attendees will also be the first to receive ID’s 2024 report on the state of design. This event will also be streamed.

Whether design thinking can have actual impact in today’s complex world is a real question, and some design practitioners have become disillusioned with approaches that emphasize products and profit over people. In this talk, Sheryl discusses 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. Sheryl will share stories, approaches and methods that help designers kickstart or expand on their systems thinking practice and will consider the challenges and assumptions that designers have about systems thinking.

Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy at Substantial and author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, drives a human-centered design practice focused on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, frog, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME, and IKEA. She holds a B.A. in journalism and political science from Syracuse University.