Gray Garmon: Playing with Creativity

How can a board game teach the fundamentals of design and creativity? Gray Garmon, founding director of UT Austin's Center for Integrated Design joins us to explore how creativity becomes a powerful tool for solving everyday problems, and how his collaborative approach is democratizing design education.

Gray Garmon is a designer, educator, and public scholar whose work empowers people to use design as a method and mindset for shaping a better future. He serves as Associate Professor of Practice in Design and Founding Director of the Center for Integrated Design at The University of Texas at Austin, where, since 2018, he has built one of the largest undergraduate design programs in the country, making design education accessible to students across all disciplines.

Garmon co-founded TWOxTWO, a design consultancy that helps organizations build creative capacity while advancing strategic goals. His client work spans major corporations like Southwest Airlines and Lockheed Martin to social impact organizations, including the Aga Khan Foundation, where his human-centered design toolkit for the Schools2030 initiative earned a Fast Company Innovation by Design Award in 2021. The toolkit now supports educators across 1,000 schools in 10 countries working to improve learning outcomes. 

A former Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana and recipient of the AIA Henry Adams Medal from the University of Pennsylvania, Garmon brings a unique perspective--along with a tribal tattoo--that bridges international development, design education, and systems change. His teaching emphasizes five core mindsets: Collaboration, Empathy, Synthesis, Prototyping, and Storytelling, positioning design as "a fundamental human ability that belongs in every discipline." 

Recent work includes developing "Co-Designing Peace," a framework for using design to build a more peaceful world (featured in his TEDxUT Austin talk),and collaborating on DreamUp an innovative board game that makes design thinking accessible through playful collaboration.Garmon holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from UT Austin and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Social Impact Fellow.