Industrial Design
Website: http://www.tmooredesign.com/
Timothy Moore is the 2019 Outstanding Alumni Award winner
Noteworthy campus activity or achievement
Prior to graduation, I was accepted into the University Innovation Fellow Program. As a fellow, I collaborated with four other students to organize the first ever student-led hackathons (Bluestone Hacks), help launch a new makerspace and center for innovation in STEM (JMU X-Labs), design and facilitate pop-up classes, and host a regional meetup that brought students from all across North America to JMU’s campus.
Within SADAH, I was the first student majoring in design to be awarded the College of Visual & Performing Arts Undergraduate Research Grant. My grant research focused on mitigating harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie through the use of rhizofiltration systems. I was also a founding member of JMU’s Industrial Design Society of America chapter. I’m most proud of being in the first class of students to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design.
What are you up to now?
I currently hold positions at three different organizations: The Design Gym in New York City, the University Innovation Fellows Program at Stanford University’s d.school, and umbau school for architecture in Staunton, Va.
I work full-time organizing, crafting and facilitating all public-facing programs as an associate strategist at The Design Gym. This role includes setting the programmatic strategy, managing the budget, booking talent, managing partnerships, and designing the workshops provided for individuals wishing to amplify their skills in design thinking, group facilitation, user research, people-first leadership, change management and work-life design.
Apart from my work at The Design Gym, I’ve co-facilitated the Teaching and Learning Studio at Stanford University’s d.school since 2017. The Teaching and Learning Studio educates professors and college administrators on how to use design thinking to create student-centered learning experiences and solve systemic issues at an administrative level.
I’m also the program director at umbau school for architecture, which is an educational non-profit that functions as both a design studio and school driving positive change in the built environment and education.
How does your art major/minor inform your career? How did it help you get to where you are now?
By majoring in industrial design, I was introduced to a way of thinking and behaving that was very unlike other disciplines I had dabbled in previously. This action-oriented, designers’ mindset I embraced while at JMU, helps me reframe every challenge I face as an opportunity for design intervention. Upon graduating, I had a diverse portfolio of projects that displayed the unique set of soft and hard skills I had developed over the four years. Studying industrial design directly led to the intersection of work I’m still in today, which is design and education.
What is your advice for JMU students knowing what you know now?
In this century, you can’t just graduate and expect the skills you learned will set you up for the rest of your life. You need to take initiative, have agency and figure out how to keep learning. Also, what is essential in life is actually invisible to the human eye.
2019 Alumni Award
As a student, Timothy Moore was an oddball, and I mean that in the most loving way. One of my first recollections of him and his work was his large self-portrait depicting him drooling profusely. I knew at that moment he was the kind of student I wanted in my program. Some of his major accomplishments during his time here in the Industrial Design program include starting a gender inclusive fraternity as a freshman and, of course, co-founding the Harrisonburg Printer’s Museum whose mission was:
To arouse in a profound interest towards abstract thought and a general openness towards new or unfamiliar solutions
Which they accomplished through creating a space for experimentation, music and art installations, exhibitions, and cinematography – largely pivoting around the planned obsolescence of the home office printer.
Additionally, while he completed his Industrial Design degree here at JMU, he began to apply some of the principles used in product design to the planning and execution of learning opportunities for students and community members at the then emerging JMU X-Labs. This type of work was inspired by his ongoing engagement with the University Innovation Fellows Program at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—known informally as the d.school.
Since graduating from JMU with a Bachelor’s of Science in ID, Timothy has become fully immersed in the world of need-finding, behavioral synthesis, and solution exploration, and he has been able to influence academic curriculums and pedagogical shifts nationally and internationally. Notably, he practiced learning experience design at The Hive at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California to help students begin to address the wicked problems facing humanity.
Today, Timothy works to uncover the hidden potential of people and their organizations by designing learning experiences that bring out behaviors of fearlessness, curiosity, and connectedness. Timothy oversees all public-facing programming as an Associate in Public Education Strategy at The Design Gym in New York City and serves on the Teaching and Learning Studio teaching team at Stanford University’s d.school.
Congratulations Tim! We are very proud of who are were, are and will become.
-- Audrey Barnes, Industrial Design Area Coorinator
