This course provides an overview of ethical issues to consider when sourcing and specifying products and services.  Learn about associations that help design professionals navigate the ethical conduct of suppliers, as well as examples of manufacturers who are leading efforts that protect the environment and their employees.  This course also takes a look at the value of intellectual and creative "property" and how designers can protect that value.

Stacy van Genderen
Duracryl Global Flooring
 

Stacy van Genderen and her husband Bas are committed to creating a better world by bringing Duracryl’s Carbon Negative floor covering products to the market in the U.S..  Stacy is passionate about helping their clients learn what something as simple as flooring can do for the carbon footprint of their companies.

Stacy truly believes that as humans we are individuals in every fiber of our being as are the elements used in the building and design industry. Wise choices are essential to bringing these “fibers” to healthy fruition. She believes in the sustainability of both a healthy world that we can leave to the generations that come after us as well as raising little humans with the same sustainable mindset.

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Jonsara Ruth is a designer, artist and Design Director at Healthy Materials Lab. She is Founding Director of the progressive MFA Interior Design program at Parsons School of Design. Charged with provoking change in the field, she lead AFTERTASTE, an annual symposium drawing from expansive and speculative perspectives from a wide spectrum of disciplines to bring new definition to the field of interiors. In her teaching, she draws from practices at both their cutting edges and their ancestral roots to inform design approaches. Her ideas about designing interior environments focus on exploring and understanding human experience. As a designer she is committed to using materials and processes that maximize worker, end-user and planetary health. Currently Jonsara leads Salty Labs, a collaborative design studio founded in sustainable thinking and testing experimental methodologies. Recently, Jonsara helped initiate a mission-based, for-profit company as director of design at Q Collection + Q Collection Junior. There she enlisted American manufacturers to combine historical quality craftsmanship with materials and manufacturing processes that eliminate risks to human health and the environment. Previously she was the first lead designer for the Martha Stewart Signature Furniture Collection. In earlier years, she apprenticed with several influential artists and designers. Her work is seen in hundreds of retail venues, thousands of homes, exhibited in galleries and museums, featured in publications internationally, and has received multiple awards. Jonsara is a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, received a Masters of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design.