Victor Ermoli

Dean of the School of Design, SCAD

Victor Ermoli is responsible for the Industrial Design, Design Management, Service Design, Design for Sustainability, Creative Business Leadership, User Experience, Marine, and Kinetic Design programs. He with his faculty team developed and created all the majors in this list at SCAD. In addition, He also created the Fashion Marketing and Management, Luxury and Fashion Management, and Accessory Design programs for the University. He also serves as the Executive Director for the SCAD eLearning department.

With more than 30 years of experience, he has designed a wide range of products from motorized scooters to coffee makers. His innovative window covering system is patented in the United States and Canada. He has also produced and made special effects for TV commercials for prestigious firms like Fiat and P&G. He has been a design consultant for Phillips (Netherlands), Eastman Chemical and Gulfstream Aerospace and other companies under his consultancy CYAN3. With his students, he designed products for Coca-Cola, Kennel-Aire, City of Washington DC, Buck Knifes, Hobart Industries, Fossil, Pentair, and other prestigious companies.

SCAD + Lextant: Partnering to Create a Certification in Upfront Design & User Experience Research

Co-Presenter: Keynote

Track 2

Wed - Sept 22

7:00 pm EDT

In this presentation, Dean Victor Ermoli and Professor Kwela Hermanns of Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) along with Marty Gage and Spencer Murrell from Lextant will share how they collaborated to develop a certification in front-end design and user-experience research. In sharing this story with you, they hope to encourage more collaboration between design educators and design practitioners.

Their goal in the collaboration with Lextant was to ensure that students’ designs are grounded in what people desire; so that as designers, students can create meaningful experiences that have the potential to be successful in the marketplace. Through the certification, students are learning how to systematically approach the first step in the design thinking process: develop empathy. The Lextant approach to this first step centers on defining what people value, in a way that is actionable for design. The certification is supported by a practical guide to front-end design/user experience research, and includes a series of examples and videos devised for specific moments in the curriculum.