UH Calendar

ADAPTATION Lecture: David Patton

Monday, February 5, 2024

6:00 pm -

Adaptability for Career Joy and Longevity

In a career spanning three decades, David Patton has worked and been successful in seven different product design industries. He owes this success to his ability to be adaptable to any challenge or situation. Through this lecture, he will show you how being adaptable bucks the conventional wisdom of staying in place. Adaptability is your respite from the fear of making a wrong choice, taking a different path, or trying something new. Adaptability is a mindset that when properly leveraged will keep you engaged, joyful, and excited about your career for life.

About David Patton

As Director of Design at Quorum, David Patton leads a team of talented designers who craft solutions that create truly transformative experiences wherever people are. Making products that positively impact and enrich everyday people remains a driving force in his work. He has over 30 years of experience in designing products across multiple industries, from lighting and ceiling fans to consumer electronics and furniture.

Patton’s passion for creating innovative and transformative product solutions stems from the importance of experimentation, speed, and staying connected with  materials. One of the most pivotal moments in his career was when he co-invented the original VARIDESK product, a sit-stand desk that eased his boss’s back pain and revolutionized the ergonomics industry. Since then, Patton have been involved in developing and launching over 100 products, including the award-winning Product Innovation of the Year by the CHWA and EHBC. He values workshop-focused design practices that foster teamwork and shared learning, and he strives to deliver products that exceed customer expectations and enhance their well-being.

About the Lecture Series

Adaptation implies a response to change. To adapt means to adjust, modify, and alter one’s response to changes in its various forms: slow, radical, planetary, and local. Adaptation suggests acknowledging new ways, ideas, technologies, and mindsets reacting and responding to possible futures, messy pasts, and complex contexts. Adaptation also refers to switching genres and media to serve better communication or to reach new audiences.

The processes of adaptation are often not as transparent as we would like them to be. They invite analyses, careful investigations, and debates on usefulness, functionality, reuse, ruin, and waste. Adaptation may sometimes mean finding ways to survive conditions that are not ideal and out of control, whereas to adapt may mean recalibrating one’s expectations to fit into new paradigms. As we confront inequities emerging from discrimination, gentrification, and climate change, among other global shifts, adaptation is everywhere.

Our lecture series cuts across geographies and disciplines to look at crises and inflection points, changing extraction and expert cultures, mutating legal, regulatory, and mapping systems, preservation and surgical interventions, and innovative and interdisciplinary construction practices.

Visit the Lecture Series Page