Peter Edward Lowe, FIDSA

Peter Lowe founded Interform, an award winning product development and design firm in Silicon Valley. He worked with a variety of high-technology and consumer product companies, including GM, Steelcase, Samsonite, KitchenAid, The North Face, RCA and Apple Computer. He has a bachelor’s in industrial design from San Jose State University and first worked as head of mechanical design at Union Carbide Electronics at the start of the microprocessor revolution. He was a co-founder of Credible Systems, one of the first startup consumer electronics companies in Silicon Valley, and a vice president of the design firm, GVO. He has taught design at San Jose State University and at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Lowe has been the director of the Center for Design in San Francisco, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts as a prototype for multi-disciplinary, regional design centers in the US. He has been a design juror for ID magazine, the BusinessWeek/IDSA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) and for SIGGRAPH. He has served IDSA as a vice president and a director. In 1978, he co-chaired the THRIVAL conference in Monterey and in 1992, the WORLDESIGN conference in San Francisco. In 1991 he was made a fellow of IDSA. Lowe has had a deep interest in how the innovation and thinking skills used by designers, artists, and engineers could help children and their teachers meet the goals of national educational reform. He believed that design thinking is an intelligence as fundamental to being human as speaking, math and music. Like verbal, mathematical and musical intelligence, design habits of mind will not develop unless they are valued and taught. To better understand how children learn and how teachers teach, he studied child development at Bank Street in New York and art education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. During the 1990s, he served as a trustee of the Worldesign Foundation and headed Worldesign’s education initiatives. He also served as an educational consultant to the New York Foundation of the Arts, the National Academy of Sciences and worked with and taught at high schools in New York City. In addition, he worked with other educators around the nation to develop curriculum that helps kids learn the art of making and doing things. In 1997 he was given the Prakken Professional Cooperation Award by the International Technology Education Association for promoting collaboration between the design and education communities. He has designed and is building a “green” house in the Santa Monica Mountains of California. We are looking for an image of Peter. If you have one, please contact us.  

Activities for Peter

IDSA Award Winner | Fellow
Board of Directors | Chair