Rob Curedale

Rob Curedale was born in Australia and worked as a designer, design manager and design educator in London, Sydney, Canberra, Vevey, Switzerland, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Detroit.

For more than 25 years, Curedale has managed the development of medical, technology and lifestyle products in global markets including Europe, Australia, Asia and North America. During this time, Curedale designed hundreds of products as a consultant and in-house design manager at corporate offices and consultancies. Clients include HP, Philips, GEC, Nokia, Sun, Apple, Canon, Motorola, Honeywell, NEC, Hoover, Packard Bell, Dell, Black & Decker and Harmon Kardon, among others.

Past design school teaching experience includes Art Center Europe; a faculty member at Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Technology Sydney; and as chair of Product Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. In 2004, Rob taught a one-week workshop at Escola De Artes e Design Matosinhos in Oporto Portugal, on designing across world cultures. He also was a visiting designer at Instituto De Artes Visuals, Design e Marketing, Lisbon, Southern Yangtze University, Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and Nanjing Arts Institute in China. He delivered the opening address at the Industrial Design Institute conference in Boston on the development of design and manufacturing in China. In 2005, he was invited to participate as a judge in the annual Australian Design Awards in Sydney, and in April 2005, at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he will manage a workshop at the Industrial Design Institute’s annual regional conference on working with China.

Curedale currently works as an industrial design consultant in Detroit.

Robert DeFelice

Robert DeFelice is president of Robert DeFelice & Associates (RDA), the oldest industrial design and mechanical engineering firm in Greater Boston. The firm has designed more than 300 different products for more than 170 clients since 1973 in most product markets including medical, laboratory and analytical instrumentation, consumer products, industrial equipment, manufacturing systems, telecommunications and transportation.

One of the firm's significant areas of design and engineering has been homeland security products and systems, especially explosives detection systems: trace detection, such as “sniffers,” and particle detection as in X-ray scanners. Clients include GE Security, American Science & Engineering, Thermodetection, Implant Sciences and Vivid Technologies (now L3 Communications).

In addition to the traditional industrial design services of imaginative styling coupled with comfortable ergonomics and user features, RDA has an extensive history of providing rapid mechanical design engineering for packaging, value engineering including cost reduction, part simplification, design for manufacturing and complete solid modeling and 2D (CAD) documentation for manufacturing.

DeFelice holds degrees in both industrial design and mechanical engineering and he has taught both engineering courses and design courses at two colleges in Massachusetts.

Christopher Gilbert

Christopher Gilbert is the industrial design manager for kitchen and bath products at Moen, Inc., North Olmsted, Ohio. He is also the IDSA Northern Ohio Chapter Chair for the Industrial Designers Society of America. Gilbert holds 50 plus design patents and has more than 20 years experience designing medical, consumer, agricultural and business products in the U.S.

Prior to joining Moen, he was a senior project designer of medical diagnostic systems for Chiron Diagnostics, and worked for the design consultancy Henry Dreyfuss Associates in New York. He began his career at Daedalus Design in Pittsburgh, now Daedalus/Excel. An advocate for collaboration between business and academia, he has coordinated several professional projects and run critiques for design students at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Gilbert’s work has been awarded two IDEA awards for design excellence from the Industrial Design Society of America and Business Week. He has been interviewed regarding his work and expertise in the area of universal design. He graduated with a BFA in Industrial Design from Carnegie-Mellon University.