Azeez Alli-Balogun is a product leader driving meaningful business and social impact through the craft of Design. For over a decade, he has blended strategic insight with creative execution to generate meaningful and transformative product outcomes and user experiences. Alli-Balogun will give a presentation as part of the Department of Design’s Research in Design Speaker Series. His talk is Friday, Jan. 23, 12p.m. in Cruess Hall Room 1105. The event is free and open to the public.

As Head of Design at the XQ Institute, Alli-Balogun leads product design of a transformative educational architecture to make high school education more equitable. He’s also the co-founder and President of Aroko Cooperative, where he harnesses his passion for design to drive social impact by highlighting African and Indigenous cultures.

“Anything that you design is going to impact society in one way or another,” Alli-Balogun said. ”How do we start to include different cultural perspectives and ideologies into the making of our lived experience?” 

Alli-Balogun grew up in a Nigerian household in Louisiana. “The fact that I was in between so many different cultures, I started to see the plurality of the way that humans can exist in the world,” he said.

The Department of Design is part of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.