William Bullock is professor of industrial design and director of the Product Interaction Research Laboratory (PIRL) and the Design for Energy and Environment (DEE Lab) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). PIRL and DEE Lab link education and design research in the classroom where advanced students from engineering, design and marketing collaborate to conduct product development studies for industry.
As an affiliate faculty with the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), Bullock's current research focuses on design for the environment and development of sustainable product designs. At ISTC he is helping build the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) a consortium dedicated to the development and implementation of more sustainable systems for designing, producing and remanufacturing and recycling electronic devices. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in product design and development for more than three decades and developed the first course at the university on sustainable product design.
He collaborated with engineering colleagues to develop a new course on the topic of electronic waste and organized the annual international electronic waste design competition. He's been an academic, administrator and practitioner involved with the direction and advancement of ID programs at the UIUC; Georgia Tech; and Auburn University. He is an active IDSA Fellow and a National Association of Schools of Art and Design accreditation evaluator. Bullock has served on the IDSA National Education Council several terms and is an officer of IDSA's professional interest section known as SAGE, which facilitates continued involvement of senior IDSA members and promotes mentorship. The SAGE Section also works with the Design History professional interest section to collect members' “living histories.”
