Educator | Academy of Art University
Agota Jonas is an instructor at the Academy of Art University, where she teaches life-centered design thinking in industrial design classes. She is passionate about finding regeneration and nature-based solutions for our design challenges. In 2018, she returned to grad school to study Biomimicry. She believes that we can learn from species around us as they show us true intelligence and how to “create conditions conducive to life” (the core teaching of biomimicry).
She is working on bringing biomimicry’s life’s principles to the classroom and the design curriculum; one of her latest projects is creating a workbook for brainstorming using life’s principles.
Previously, Agota worked at frogdesign and designafairs (a Siemens-owned design studio) and received prestigious design awards. Today, she lives in Southern California with her family. In her spare time, she volunteers at Laguna Ocean Foundation so she can learn about sea creatures and study their behaviors and the functions that they do. She is a member of Sharing Nature’s Genius, a pioneer community creating nature lesson reports that translate biological strategies for designers.
