Dawn Danby

Dawn explores the intersection of design, sustainability and business. Which is a fancy way of saying that she wants the things we make to benefit both people and the world.

An industrial designer by training, she's a boundary-spanner and synthesist who has acted as a cross-disciplinary designer, strategist, art director, project manager, producer and artist.

Dawn holds a design degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (2000), and an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (2007). She apprenticed in green building and policy with the Fisk-Vittori team at CMPBS, and in furniture design with Macek Furniture. She often collaborates with international artist Noel Harding on Windsor, Ontario's Green Corridor initiative, where she helped teach an interdisciplinary course at the University of Windsor. She designed a $3.5M tree-covered, wind-powered pedestrian bridge on the US-Canada border, has developed closed-loop manufacturing strategies for a leading outdoor footwear manufacturer, and helped establish a public art master plan for a major american airport.

Dawn has been a WorldChanging contributor since just after it began, connected by luck, geography and circumstance during the early Viridian heyday. She's a co-author of WorldChanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century, and has spoken at TEDGlobal 2005: Ideas big enough to change the world (Oxford UK), Doors of Perception (Delhi), Subtle Technologies (Toronto), and ICFF (NYC). A Canadian liaison for the o2 Global Sustainable Design Network (Toronto/Ontario), she also occasionally maintains her sustainable/design/portal as a resource site for product designers.

Other hats: secret identity as a medical illustrator for numerous books and journals, specializing in women's health; former and future art-maker and singer.

A Torontonian living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dawn works on sustainable design strategy and marvels at the sunlight. Aylanto, her design consultancy, is named for the the ailanthus altissima, best of the urban ruderal species. Invasive, heatseeking, alley-dwelling and concrete-devouring, they delight in inhabiting and remediating a broken landscape.

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