Associate Professor, University of Houston
George K. Chow is currently an Industrial Design Associate Professor at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston. Prior to joining UH, George was an Adjunct Faculty member at Columbus College of Art and Design and an Industrial Design Lecturer at Ohio State University. George has worked professionally as an Industrial Designer since 1999, developing products for companies such as KitchenAid, Whirlpool, Hoover, SmartDisk, LG Electronics, Samsung, Midmark, Charbroil, Crown Equipment, Delta Faucet, and Evenflo.
George currently holds 11 design patents for products including a fork-lift truck, vacuum cleaner, and various medical products. He has also received several Design awards for the products that he helped to develop, including IDEA Gold, IDEA Silver, Red Dot: Best of the Best, iF Product Design, Chicago Athenaeum Good Design and Medical Design Excellence Awards. George received his BFA in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA in Design Research and Development from Ohio State University.
George has been teaching Industrial Design at a collegiate level since 2008 and has won several teaching awards, including an Adjunct Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (Columbus College of Art and Design), Outstanding Graduate Associate Teaching Award (Ohio State University), Excellence in Teaching (University of Houston), and the 2021 IDSA Young Educator Award. When not teaching or designing, George enjoys traveling, learning about different cultures, photography, playing board games, drumming, cooking, making homemade ice cream, fishing, and most of all, spending quality time with his family and friends.
Statement of Candidacy (2023-2024 term)
IDSA has been a supportive community throughout my journey as a designer, first as a student, and now as a professional and educator. I have met many talented and inspiring people from all different backgrounds by participating in IDSA conferences and events whenever possible. I believe in the vision and mission of IDSA and would like to help with continuing its legacy and growing it further.
I am currently serving as the 2021-2022 IDSA South District Chapter Representative (DCR) and helped to establish the new IDSA Houston Chapter in Fall of 2021. Since the birth of the new chapter, we’ve seen a great increase in membership and participation from our students and professionals in the Houston area. We’ve held mixer events, online talks open to all IDSA chapters across the nation, and we have collaborated with IDSA Austin and Dallas chapters on multiple events, including portfolio review sessions and Studio Tours in each respective city. We have fostered and built many connections between design professionals and students through these events and hope to continue to do so. During my time as South DCR, we have added two more IDSA professional chapters to the Southern District including Raleigh-Durham, NC and we’re excited to see our chapters continue to grow and flourish. I’ve connected with and have been supporting all the Southern District chapter officers in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, and Raleigh-Durham, and hope to continue to encourage each chapter to grow and potentially establish new chapters where it makes sense to.
We are also currently planning a hybrid in-person/online Southern District Conference that would bring all the Southern District chapters together to foster connections, collaborations, sharing of knowledge, and build community across the Southern District.
On a national level, I have been encouraging our chapters to host online events and/or collaborative events that are available to multiple or all IDSA chapters across the nation, so we can contribute to the body of knowledge and support the national IDSA community.
If selected as the South District Chapter Representative, I would do my best to continue the growth of local chapters, facilitate interactions and connections between chapters, and build community amongst the District as a whole and the wider, national IDSA community. I am honored to currently serve in this capacity as South DCR and I would be honored to continue to do so in the next years ahead.
Keys to Successful Studio Projects
Looking for an impactful project for your studio class? Design educators often look for projects that are impactful, meaningful, motivational, engaging, relatively low cost, fit within the time frame, and produce results that are testable and are publishable/patentable. There is no shortage of problems in the world to solve; however, as this case study reveals, the key to a successful studio project may not be focusing on a problem to solve, but rather starts by finding the right person to help and to be helped by that person.
IDSA is delighted to honor George Chow, IDSA, assistant professor of industrial design at the University of Houston, with a 2021 IDSA Young Educator Award. Chow is highly regarded for making several key improvements across the College of Architecture and Design and for always going above and beyond for his students.
Since Chow joined the University of Houston faculty in 2016, he has focused on making the student design experience smooth and meaningful. One such initiative was to spearhead providing students with floating Solidworks and Keyshot licenses. This increased their productivity and the quality of their work, while also allowing for a seamless transition during the COVID-19 lockdown, since students already had the tools they needed to work remotely.
Chow has written papers on industrial design education and sustainability, presented at conferences, and developed a sustainability class, which was offered for the first time in spring 2020. Over the past year, he has threaded sustainability through all his studio projects, encouraged students to reuse materials, and advised on student-run green initiatives.
“From the first day of his teaching at the University of Houston, he has presented his passion for education and spent additional hours to mentor students,” writes EuonSook Kwon, PhD, IDSA, who hired Chow and is the current chair of the School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech. “He is an engaged and excellent teacher based on the number of students’ design awards, the samples of student work, and highly favorable course evaluations.”
As IDSA’s current South District Chapter Representative, Chow tirelessly volunteers his time to promote students’ work and coordinate events that build connections between students and professionals across IDSA’s South District and nationally.
“George is a force of positive change,” writes Anne-Elisabeth Baker, S/IDSA, a rising senior in the University of Houston ID program. She was taking one of Chow’s studio courses when the pandemic hit last year. During that time, she says, “George made himself entirely available to us and spent so many unrecognized hours on one-on-one sessions with each of us to make sure we had a strong foundation. His motto is, ‘No designer left behind.’”
