Dr. Dori Tunstall

Profile

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, researcher, academic leader, writer, and educator. 

She is Dean, Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada and the first black Dean of a Faculty of Design. She has taught and lectured all over the globe. Dr. Tunstall studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr College and obtained her Ph.D from Stanford University. She has led user experience and strategy at Chicago-based E Lab, as well as working as an experience planner for Arc Worldwide, which handled the integrated services for Leo Burnett. She has also held the positions of Associate Director, City Design Center, University of Illinois at Chicago and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology, School of Art + Design, University of Illinois at Chicago.

From 2005–2006 she also served as the Managing Director of Design for Democracy, an ongoing AIGA program that applies design tools and thinking to “increase civic participation by making interactions between the U.S. government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy. In 2008 Tunstall organized the U.S. National Design Policy Summit and Initiative focused on creating an actionable agenda of U.S. Design policy for economic competitiveness and democratic governance. In 2009 Tunstall became Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching, Faculty of Design, and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology, Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. In 2010 Tunstall founded the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative focused on the use of tangible and intangible cultural heritage to drive irreversible changes in peoples’ attitudes, behaviors, and/or values that directly benefit communities under social and environmental distress.