Terry Irwin is a professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and Director of its Transition Design Institute. From 2009 - 2019 Irwin was the head of school, where she led a multi-year process to redesign programs at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels to place social and environmental concerns at the heart of all curricula. Irwin was also one of the original founders of MetaDesign, a multi-disciplinary, international design office with offices in Berlin, Zurich, London and San Francisco where she served as Creative Director from 1992-2001.
Irwin received her MFA from the Basel School of Design, Switzerland and her MSc in Holistic Science from Plymouth University/Schumacher College, UK where she studied ecology and chaos and complexity theories. Her thesis explored how principles from living systems can inform a more responsible way of designing. Along with colleagues Gideon Kossoff and Cameron Tonkinwise, she developed Transition Design, a new area of transdisciplinary, design-led focus aimed at systems-level change and societal transitions toward more sustainable, long-term futures.