Welcome the School of Design's New Head
School of Design
written by
Joe Lyons
On June 1, 2026, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design appointed Jonathan Chapman as its new Head of School. An internationally recognized design theorist and educator, Chapman has been a member of the faculty since 2017, most recently serving as director of Doctoral Studies, where he led the School’s pioneering Ph.D. in Transition Design, a program training designers to confront the most complex social and ecological challenges of our time.
What has been the focus of your research and creative practice?
I've always believed design is one of the most powerful tools we have for leveraging positive change in the world, and for me that's meant helping accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Specifically, I've spent nearly 30 years on two questions. Why do we throw away things that still work, and how do we design products that actually last? I've explored that across five books and through work with organizations from CHANEL and Ford to the U.N. and NASA, moving the idea from boardroom strategy to government policy. Different rooms, same belief, that design can, and must, lead us toward a more sustainable future.
Having previously served as the director of Doctoral Studies, what new aspects of the School are you excited to dive into?
I've been at this School since 2017, teaching across every level, so I've never seen just one corner of it. What I'm excited to dive into now is something I've lived by for years, and I want to bring it to how we think about the whole School. There are three categories of work, and they're all essential. The things you're not going to do, which means deciding which opportunities you are going to say no to. The things you'll do fairly well, the necessary work that has to happen but doesn't require your complete attention. And the one or two things you're going to do better than anyone in the world. Most places get stuck trying to excel at everything, and nothing gets the time and energy it actually needs. What I want to work through with faculty and staff is getting clear about those three categories, owning each one, so we can point ourselves in a real direction. This doesn't mean we become narrow. It means each person here gets to pursue the work that matters most to them, and when all those separate threads move in a similar direction, they braid together into something compelling and transformative.
Tell us about a designer who has had a deep impact on your work.
Buckminster Fuller. I came to him through a brilliant professor of mine, John Wood, while I was doing a Master's in Design Futures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and once I found Fuller I never really left. He spent his career asking how to do more with less, what he called ephemeralization, and he chased that question relentlessly, into maps, vehicles, housing, the geodesic dome, anything he could get his hands on. He believed that principle held at every scale, in a product, a visual system, a spatial structure, all the way up to the planet itself, which he famously called Spaceship Earth, a finite, interdependent vessel we're all riding together, badly in need of better design.
What is a valuable piece of advice you received when you were a student?
I remember being totally burned out and overwhelmed, the way people sometimes get, and a professor took me aside and said, "There's really only one thing you need to know. Do more of what helps, and less of what doesn't." I wanted something more complicated at the time, but it's stayed with me for decades, because underneath it is a simple discipline, pause for a second and actually ask yourself whether what you're about to do helps or makes things worse. It works at the smallest scale, whether to stay up working or just go to bed and get rest. And it works at the scale we actually design at, whether a particular decision actually serves the goals of the project and the future it's trying to open up, or quietly works against them. Different decisions, same pause, the same reflective question asked right before you act.
What's your favorite thing to do in Pittsburgh?
Dinner at Maiku, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Strip District. My family and I must have been over a hundred times by now. I think it's the best pho in the city, but that's almost beside the point. The owners have become something like family to us. We're recent immigrants to the U.S., and we don't have relatives here, so there's a particular kind of warmth in being known somewhere, in walking in and having people genuinely glad to see you.
What's your favorite spot on campus?
The studios, every time. Those rooms see the full emotional range of a person in a year, sometimes inside a single afternoon. Triumph, despair, all of it. They're high-performance, creative environments where work gets shared and talked through in the open, critiqued and reworked in front of everyone, which is still the best way anyone actually gets better. They sit inside Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, so I have this feeling the walls have been marinating in creativity for almost a century. I'm not a superstitious person, but those rooms remember things.
You've written five books. Tell us about your most recent one.
"Meaningful Stuff: Design that Lasts" came out with MIT Press in 2021. It opens with a hard look at how much we waste, sneakers worn once, bikes barely ridden, phones sitting dead in a drawer though nothing about them has actually died. A lot of that is by design, quite literally, products are often engineered to become undesirable or unrepairable well before they stop functioning. My answer to that is a philosophy of better, not more, an experience-heavy, materials-light way of designing that decouples a good life from mindless consumption. What I'd want a reader to walk away with is a sense of agency. We designed our way into throwaway culture, and design is exactly what can lead us back out of it.
What's your elevator pitch for prospective students about the School of Design?
There's nothing more consequential than design. Look around, the room, the device in your hand, the typeface on its screen, the data systems running quietly behind all of it, the satellite network relaying signals 150 kilometers overhead, every bit of it was designed. And it doesn't stop there. The things we design go on to shape how we live, what we expect, what we believe is even possible, and then those experiences shape the next generation of things we design. We shape the world, and the world shapes us back. Design, in this way, is a world-making endeavor, and we take that seriously here. We see design as one of the most critical disciplines of the 21st century, and the School of Design is poised to take on the most complex social and ecological challenges of our time.