Designer Annette Diefenthaler of San Francisco, California, has been appointed to the board of the iF Design Foundation in Hannover, Germany, with effect from 1 June 2021.
As senior portfolio director at IDEO, a design firm, Diefenthaler is passionate about applying human-centered design to systemic challenges in education. Her work focuses on the design of schools and educational experiences. She designs innovative school models and develops new education systems for entire countries. At IDEO.org, a nonprofit design agency, she leads the Powerful Families, Powerful Communities NJproject, which focuses on transforming public youth services in the U.S.
Thanks to her globe-spanning activities, including Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and most recently New York City, Diefenthaler, who is originally from the Allgäu region of Bavaria (Germany), brings an international perspective to her design work.
Annette Diefenthaler has an extensive list of publications to her name. For the iF Design Foundation’s recently published Whitebook entitled “Designing Design Education”, she wrote an insightful essay on design and the U.S. education system. She is also co-author of IDEO’s “Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators".
Christoph Böninger, Chairman of the iF Design Foundation, comments on the new addition to the Foundation’s board: “We look forward to seeing what international expertise and perspectives Annette Diefenthaler brings to the board. In addition to her profound understanding of design and outstanding network, she adds extensive know-how in design education, a field we will be focusing on in the years ahead. She is an enrichment for the team on our board and we would like to extend a very warm welcome to her!
At the same time, we would like to thank our founding board member Susanne Schmidhuber, who resigned from her post on 1 August, for all the trust and inspiration we experienced in our collaboration!"
