CCA welcomes new MDes Chair Josh Silverman

CCA is delighted to welcome Josh Silverman as the new chair of the Master of Design in Interaction Design (MDes) program. Silverman brings both heart and expertise to the position, as well as a love for teaching and an illustrious design strategy career. With more than two decades running his own recognized design business, and consulting for a range of organizations—from large banks and software firms to nonprofits, startups, and NGOs—Silverman knows the power that comes from combining design, storytelling, and structural organization. He’s taught at top institutions across the country, co-chaired the AIGA Centennial, coached design leaders, advised founders, and facilitated workshops all over the world.

“What I love about teaching is that it focuses on and optimizes for the individual, and I can see and measure direct impact,” Silverman says. “There’s an incredibly virtuous cycle where classroom conversations influence real-world projects, and the experience of practice can help augment what’s taught in theory.”

CCA's MDes program is at the epicenter of design and technology. It’s a concentrated one-year program, and our faculty are pioneers in interaction design. They bring perspectives and experiences from business, entrepreneurship, psychology, sociology, product and brand design, climate design, design operations, AI, and much more. We’re poised to investigate the future of interfacing, and our collective moment in history demands this evolution.

We know that design turns constraints into catalysts, and as conditions are evolving by the minute, Silverman reminds his students that, as designers, they are called to “bring a fully human perspective to interactions that are now more consistently digital and to work through our fears with creativity. At the core of this crisis is human need.” We’re designing and educating for an emerging world, and we couldn’t ask for a more equipped or thoughtful leader than Silverman.