Design is my cabinet of curiosity. Has been since childhood. I blame my parents, both professional designers The mid-century modern house I grew up in was a shelter magazine dream. But at some point, I wondered why their dedication was so singular Curiosity became a stubborn obsession, a Holy Grail to propel my career. In the late 1990s, when I was working as a design journalist, I helped form "The Paris Project," an informal think tank bent on spreading the gospel of good design locally. We hatched "Intersection," a symposium held in partnership with AIGA and Moore College of Art+ Design. It featured big thinkers - inside and outside traditional design fields - like the Franklin lnstitute's head astronomer, the founder of TED,and Campbell Soup's Global VP. They understood design as an organizing force and a lens for examining the environment, politics, business, healthcare, leisure... essentially everything

Serendipitously, in 2000, I became director of The Design Center at Philadelphia University (now Jefferson) with the vision to create a museum dedicated to design exploration and education. The world was catching on to design and design thinking, too. In 2003, Newsweek's cover proclaimed "Design Gets Real." A year later, Stanford founded the d.school whose mission is to help people unlock their creative abilities and apply them to the world.

2004 is when the perfect storm struck in Philadelphia. Over coffee with Jamer Hunt then Director of the Graduate Program in Industrial Design at the University of the Arts, and writer Joseph Dennis Kelly, we got to talking about the freshly-minted London Design Festival. This multi-day, citywide event representing all design fields was a lightning rod; the Paris Project and Intersection combined.

In Philadelphia, we saw a burgeoning design scene of firms, galleries, shops, and institutions, plus seven higher education programs offering design majors: from fashion to graphics, architecture to urban planning, multimedia to interior design. It was more than most cities, yet there was no collaboration. That failure created an opportunity to launch a flare, DesignPhiladelphia, celebrating this region's creatives, and placing their work in a broad context and conversation. We aimed to educate the public on the nature of design; how design affects us daily; why it matters.

Philadelphia University headquartered the first six festivals starting in 2005. Two took place under the Uarts flag And in 2014, the festival became AlA's signature event when I became director of the Center for Architecture. The promise was, and is, to break down divisional silos separating the design disciplines,recognize the economic impact of the creative community,and influence the future of Design understanding and education. Capital "D" acknowledges that Design is powerful, critical, unavoidable, and fundamental.

While my tenure as DesignPhiladelphia's Director ran its course in 2015, my mantra endures: Design is as simple as a paper clip, as complex as an urban plan or a solar system, as political as a nation's flag Design is the single thread that runs through everything.