FRICTION : UCDA 2027 SUMMIT

Every summer, UCDA hosts their design education summit at a different university in a different city. Next year’s summit will be be in Philly at Tyler School of Art & Architecture, and the theme is FRICTION.

FRICTION is a response to the uncertainty in our world. The best response to that instability is not polish. It is friction. The best design has always come from struggle. Friction is where learning happens, where material pushes back, where assumptions get tested, where something real gets made. Philadelphia knows this. It is a city built on resistance, on stubborness, on the refusal to be polished into something it's not, where big ideas got argued into existence and grit has always mattered more than gloss.

IDENTITY

In a design world where we are so reliant on technology, and with the rise of AI, I wanted the logo to reflect the humaness in design. Behind every design is someone who had a thought, and got their hands dirty with sketches and iterations before they got to one final, polished design.