2024 Emerging Leader Award: Hanson Cheng BArch 16
The RISD Alumni Association acknowledges the forward-thinking, globally beneficial and highly creative work of Hanson Cheng BArch 16 through the 2024 Emerging Leader Award.
Hanson Cheng is an entrepreneur and interdisciplinary designer whose innovative products and services promote sustainability, health and well-being. His designs range from market-ready products like responsive garments that prevent injuries to speculative research and design on synthetic biological systems that can power the aircraft of the future. An expansive thinker, Cheng designs solutions to problems that affect our daily lives.
Through his clean-tech startup, The Tyre Collective, Cheng is working to address the second-largest pollutant in our oceans after single-use plastic: microplastics from vehicle tires. Wear and tear on automobile tires generates microplastics that pollute the air, water and soil. The Tyre Collective has produced a device that captures plastic and rubber particles from tires at the source, preventing them from polluting the environment and allowing them to be processed into new products. With his co-founders, Cheng won the Terra Carta Design Lab award in 2022, was listed in Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 Europe and won the UK James Dyson Award in 2021.
About the Emerging Leader Award
The Emerging Leader Award recognizes alumni who graduated within the past 10 years, who have made significant achievements and contributions to their profession and/or community, think boldly, mindfully and creatively, and have helped to create new fields of study or contributed to fundamental change in their area of practice.
