Talk 20 in San Francisco Turns 10
For ten years we’ve been opening the doors of our San Francisco office to host Talk 20, a PechaKucha style event featuring speakers representing a range of disciplines from industrial designers to chocolatiers. We host this event to bring together creative, passionate people from the Bay Area and uncover the unexpected. We began Talk 20 to allow ourselves space to step back and consider our work as architects in a broader context of talented, creative, design-minded people. It’s one of our favorite events every year and leaves us feeling energized and inspired. This year we celebrated ten years of Talk 20; we’ve hosted over 75 speakers and every one of them enriches our community. Thank you for joining us for this special event and we hope to see you for the next one.
A very special thank you to our 2019 speakers who so generously shared themselves and their time with us.
Inspiration Behind the Designs
Tina Frey, Industrial Design
As founder and creative director of her 12-year old company, tfdesigns, Tina Frey is an industrial designer who creates functional homewares, furniture, and jewelry in resin. Tina began her adult life as a biology and chemistry student, earned a business degree and worked in finance for many years, and now enjoys her lifelong passion for design through hand-producing her beautiful collections.
Small Signs of Relief
Eric Heiman, Graphic Design
Eric is a former architect-in-training who helped build a model for a Bohlin Cywinski Jackson project back in the early 1990s. He is also the co-founder and principal of the celebrated design agency Volume Inc, teaches at the California College of the Arts, and is still looking for a little peace and quiet to clear his head.
Eat Cho Food
Kristina Cho, Food Blogger
Kristina is a chef, recipe developer, and food blogger behind the website EatChoFood. She shares sunny and creative recipes every week inspired by her Chinese heritage, Midwestern roots, and adventures in California. Before working in food, she worked in Architecture and Interior Design and has learned to strike a balance between design and the kitchen.
Type Photography
Belle Carroll, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
Belle is an architecture student at Rice University, in Houston, TX interning with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. She started taking pictures at the age of five and hasn’t stopped since. The way she deals with representation in design stems directly from how she learned to observe her surroundings: through a lens. In her studies, parallel to her passion of photography, she has explored the implications of terminology in architecture; the word “Type” has been the most consequential to her.
Art / Objects / Furniture
Yvonne Mouser, Furniture Design
Yvonne explores the intersections of art and industry through the design and crafting of everyday objects. Her work ranges from utilitarian to conceptual and between the familiar and the unexpected as one-of-a-kind objects, limited editions, produced collections, sculptures and experiences. She is particularly interested in the meaning objects bring to experience, the stories they tell and the processes they can reveal. Based in Oakland, Yvonne works independently, with clients, and various collaborators on material and idea driven projects.
Architects behind the Opioid Epidemic
Nicky Mehtani, MD, Public Health
Nicky is a physician working at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, where she is training in Addiction & HIV Medicine as an inaugural REACH Fellow (Recognizing & Eliminating disparities in Addiction through Culturally-informed Healthcare). She is passionate about studying and uncovering the root causes of the opioid epidemic — often through direct conversation with her patients — and using this knowledge to advocate for change in how in our society approaches the growing public health crisis.
landscape painter gives a presentation to strangers
Jean Nagai, Landscape Painter
Instagram: @jean_nagai
Jean is an artist and muralist from Seattle, WA and currently living in California with a degree from Evergreen State College. He loves the shapes of mountains, the smell of pine trees and enjoys the colors of the sunset. By engaging in a meditative process by which the sum of many individual dots accumulate to form a larger synergic whole, Jean’s work both creates and explores a spiritual microcosm and macrocosm that shifts between the physical, digital and political landscape.
Fear Less. Build More.
Emily Pilloton, Design and Youth
Girls Garage
Emily is a designer, builder, educator, and founder of the nonprofit Project H Design and Girls Garage. Using architecture and design as a vehicle, her work seeks to change the authorship of our built environment and cultivate power in underestimated communities, specifically young girls, undocumented youth, and communities of color. Emily holds degrees in architecture, is a lecturer in the architecture department at UC Berkeley, has authored three books, and has spoken at TED, on The Colbert Show, and The White House.
