Dawn Danby^US

Dawn Danby is co-founder, co-creative director and CEO of Spherical (spherical.studio), an integrative research and strategic design studio working to regenerate the health and integrity of Earth's living systems. Spherical is currently developing mapping, visualization, and co-design tools for exploring and creating living infrastructure across nested scales. She has conducted ecological design research programs spanning materials, product design, manufacturing, landscape and the built environment. After studying industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, she researched circular economies and local food systems through an MBA at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Danby co-authored Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, an attempt to catalogue tools for building a better future. She spent ten years leading Autodesk’s sustainable design initiatives, advancing the development of digital tools for reducing the ecological and human impacts of design and engineering. With Spherical, she has been an urban-futurist-in-residence at Concordia University, a fellow of the Mozilla-supported XRStudio, and a curator at Gray Area. Danby grew up in a Canadian settler community on the Easternmost edge of the Great Lakes Basin. She now lives with her family in the territory of Huchiun, a.k.a. the Lower Bottoms of West Oakland California, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people.