Meet the 2026 SEGD Fellows

September 2, 2026

Cybelle Jones

SEGD Honors Jonathan Jackson, Donna Lawrence, Despina Macris, and Mark Ross for Their Lasting Contributions to Experiential Design

SEGD is proud to announce the 2026 Class of SEGD Fellows: Jonathan Jackson, founder of WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA); Donna Lawrence, founder of Donna Lawrence Productions (DLP); and Despina Macris and Mark Ross, founders of Dotdash.

Since 1987, the SEGD Fellows designation has recognized individuals whose work, leadership, and ideas have made a lasting and profound impact on experiential and environmental graphic design. It is SEGD’s highest honor, recognizing not simply a body of work, but an enduring contribution to the evolution of the profession and the ways people connect to place, story, information, and one another.

This year’s Fellows arrived at that work from remarkably different directions: architecture and graphic design, theater and performance, filmmaking and documentary storytelling, advertising and visual communication. Across four decades of practice, they have helped expand what experiential design can be and who it can serve.

Their work spans museums and memorials, healthcare and transportation systems, civic spaces and national monuments, global events and cultural institutions. What connects them is a belief that design carries responsibility: to make complex places more understandable, difficult stories more accessible, and experiences more meaningful for the people who encounter them.

This October in Kansas City, the SEGD community will have the rare opportunity to celebrate all four together, hear each Fellow reflect on the work and ideas that have shaped their careers, and join them for a conversation about where the profession goes from here.

Jonathan Jackson: Design As It Should Be

Long before Jonathan Jackson founded WSDIA, he was a ten-year-old drawing Nike shoes on loose-leaf paper. His mother introduced him to architecture, opening a door into a profession he hadn’t known existed. That early intersection of architecture, graphics, and curiosity would eventually become the foundation of a practice whose name itself is a philosophy: WeShouldDoItAll.

Co-run with his partner Sarah Nelson Jackson, WSDIA moves across typography, identity, products, exhibitions, and spatial design, resisting the idea that disciplines must remain separate.

The studio’s early work for Nike eventually led to one of the defining projects of Jackson’s career: five years designing for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture with Ralph Appelbaum Associates. More recently, WSDIA completed the Tekαkαpimək Contact Station at Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in collaboration with the Wabanaki Nations.

Those projects have shaped Jackson’s thinking about what it means to design histories and cultures that are not one’s own, a process that requires patience, humility, trust, and a willingness to reconsider the traditional design process itself.

They have also reinforced his commitment to opening doors for others. WSDIA operates with team transparency and gives its team access to contracts, invoices, and business knowledge that are often kept separate from creative practice.

Jackson recalls meeting a thirteen-year-old visitor during the installation of an exhibition on Black changemakers who was inspired to learn about the field of design.

“That’s the whole point,” Jackson says. “Giving kids who don’t know this world exists a way in, the way my mother once did for me.”

Donna Lawrence: Finding the Root of the Story

For more than four decades, Donna Lawrence has shaped how audiences encounter history, science, and culture through cinematic and place-based storytelling.

As founder of Donna Lawrence Productions in Louisville, Kentucky, Lawrence has continually pushed beyond the conventions of traditional documentary film. Her studio’s 1985 installation at the Kentucky Derby Museum choreographed 97 slide projectors around a 360-degree space, an experience without precedent at the time. 

Nearly two decades later, DLP helped transform the National Constitution Center’s circular theater into a live theatrical experience combining actors, projections, sound, and architecture.

Born out of the need to connect audiences with vast, sweeping stories in relatively few minutes, a form Lawrence refers to as haiku in the filmmaking world, her practice is based on a simple principle: Connect visitors with the unique convergence of forces at the heart of a story, in a deep and authentic way, and you connect them with the larger, ongoing, and reverberating world of that story today.

That approach flows through every creative and technical decision and has guided work spanning civil rights, war, national identity, science, energy, music, and culture, often giving millions of visitors their first encounter with a place or its history.

“The only words that really come to mind are ‘make it count,’ whatever that means for you, in your discipline, with the resources you have,” Lawrence says. “Every new tool has been thrilling and liberating, but the core of the work hasn’t changed. It’s still about being a conduit, connecting people with great stories.”

Despina Macris and Mark Ross: Clarity as an Act of Generosity

When Despina Macris and Mark Ross founded Dotdash in Brisbane, Australia, in 1987, neither imagined they were beginning a career devoted to wayfinding.

Macris brought experience in art direction, illustration, advertising, fashion, and theater. Ross came from architecture, contemporary dance, and experimental performance. Together, those disciplines shaped a practice that would come to see wayfinding not as signage applied to a place, but as the relationship between people and their environment.

Over nearly four decades, Dotdash has completed thousands of projects across healthcare, transportation, education, civic, cultural, and public environments, establishing Macris and Ross among the field’s most respected voices in wayfinding and information design.

Their work is grounded in systems thinking, but equally in empathy. Accessibility and inclusion are not treated as additions to the design process, but as fundamental to it. Their work with Indigenous communities similarly begins with listening and an understanding that design must emerge from the culture and intelligence already present in a place.

“If information is confusing, people become anxious. If it’s clear, they feel confident,” Macris says. “I’ve always believed clarity is an act of generosity.”

Ross adds, “Wayfinding isn’t something you apply to a place. It grows from understanding the place itself. We’ve never thought of ourselves as sign designers. We’re designing the relationship between people and their environment.”

The Laureates of Experiential Design

For Jonathan Jackson, Donna Lawrence, Despina Macris, and Mark Ross, becoming an SEGD Fellow places their names within a remarkable lineage of designers, thinkers, storytellers, and innovators who have helped shape not only experiential design, but the broader culture of design around the world.

They join Paula Scher, Bruce Mau, Deborah Sussman, Sylvia Harris, Lance Wyman, Michael Gericke, Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, Marquise Stillwell, Stefan Sagmeister, 2025 Fellows Ingūna Elere and Holgers Elers, and generations of SEGD Fellows whose ideas and work have fundamentally changed how we understand and experience the built environment.

The significance of that company is difficult to overstate. Collectively, SEGD Fellows represent a living history of the profession: people who established new disciplines, challenged conventions, created work that became cultural touchstones, and expanded the possibilities of what design in space could accomplish.

The 2026 Fellows continue that legacy in distinctly different ways. Across their careers, they have expanded the possibilities of place-based media, redefined wayfinding around human experience, brought graphic identity deeply into space, and challenged designers to listen more closely to the people and communities whose stories they are entrusted to tell.

And while their careers have unfolded alongside enormous shifts in technology, media, public space, and the profession itself, certain principles remain remarkably consistent: curiosity, listening, clarity, collaboration, respect for the audience, and an understanding that technology and form are only as powerful as the ideas and human experiences they serve.

Celebrate the 2026 Fellows in Kansas City

On Saturday, October 24, 2026, the SEGD community will meet in the middle at t the 2026 SEGD Conference Experience Kansas City, to welcome Jonathan Jackson, Donna Lawrence, Despina Macris, and Mark Ross into the SEGD Fellowship.

The morning will begin with the Fellows and Achievement Awards Ceremony, honoring individuals whose work, leadership, education, and service continue to move the profession forward.

Then, we get to hear from them. Each Fellow will take the stage to share the work, ideas, pivotal moments, and lessons that have shaped their careers. The program will culminate with Fellows in Conversation, bringing all four together with Alan Jacobson, FSEGD, Chair of the SEGD Fellows Committee, for a conversation across disciplines, perspectives, and nearly four decades of practice.

For the SEGD community, it is one of those opportunities that goes beyond hearing a great talk. It is a chance to spend a morning in the company of people who have helped build this profession: to hear the stories behind work that changed it, learn from the choices and questions that shaped their careers, and celebrate them together as they take their place among the laureates of experiential design.

Come to Kansas City. Be in the room. Celebrate the 2026 SEGD Fellows with us.

About SEGD Fellows

Since its inception in 1987, the SEGD Fellows program has honored individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of experiential and environmental graphic design. Fellows are selected for their commitment to excellence, leadership, innovation, and service to the profession, helping define and advance the evolving language of experiential design around the world.