Baiardo, Lorraine

Lorraine Baiardo Justice, Ph.D.

1973 Graduate

Lorraine Baiardo Justice, Ambridge Area High School graduate of 1973, is the granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants. Lorraine worked at Jones & Laughlin (J&L) after high school graduation to pay for her tuition to art school. She graduated from Edinboro University in 1977 with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting. Lorraine worked in industry for 10 years for companies such as Goodyear, Battelle, and Discovery Systems before completing a Master’s Degree in Industrial Design at The Ohio State University (OSU) in 1988. She joined OSU as a professor and taught and consulted for major American companies until she completed her Ph.D. in Communication in 1999. Lorraine was then invited to work at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) as the Director of the Design Program. After five years, Dr. Justice was offered a position as the Dean of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) where she worked in a global capacity to raise the value of the design field. While in Hong Kong, Lorraine helped raise US 35 million dollars to fund the Innovation Tower, designed by Zaha Hadid, for the PolyU campus and completed the book China’s Design Revolution (MIT Press). Lorraine is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers of America, an author, and a TED and TEDx speaker. She was listed as one of the top 40 in design by ID Magazine. She has received numerous awards for her work in the field of design and is currently a Dean Emerita and Professor of Industrial Design at the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Dr. Justice is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America, named one of the Top 40 Designers by ID Magazine, and is an active member of the TED community, where she gave a talk at TEDX Hong Kong in 2009, and 2010 at TED at Long Beach. She serves on the Editorial Board for 4 design journals, and advisory boards for universities and companies, and consults internationally for industry and government entities. She completed the book The Future of Design, Global Product Innovation for a Complex World for Hachette in 2019.

Dr. Justice has dedicated her career to helping designers, design writers, and design faculty and students to excel in the field of design. She enjoys working with others to achieve common goals and to make a positive difference in the world.