Founders Spotlight: Irwin Miller BArch 94 P24
Celebrating RISD’s alumni founders and entrepreneurs
We celebrate RISD founders by remembering their work and shining a light on the entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong in our students and alumni. In this series, alumni founders share thoughts on getting started, taking risks, and how their education prepared them to create something entirely their own.
Irwin Miller BArch 94 P24 is the founder of Irwin Miller Design Studio, Inc, a studio offering services in architecture, design, art and film, with clients including Netflix, Disney, Eataly, MAK Museum, the Prado Museum, Arclight Cinema, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Here, he talks about getting started and how his RISD education prepared him for what he’s doing now.
During Covid, I found myself rethinking what kind of work really makes me happy. It was not the Zoom calls and tracking performance metrics, but working with creative people, nurturing talent and being challenged by inspiring clients.
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Before that, I had no plans to start my own business. I never wanted to have my own firm. Never! It was not like a “someday I'll have my own firm” kind of thing. But I realized I was doing so much of what I loved as a hobby on the weekends—working on a music video, or helping out with a set design. It got to the point where I thought I could shift and make that kind of work my main thing. And then I got busy and it was like, “wow, I’m getting jobs! This is actually working out.”
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RISD taught me to think about all aspects of design through courses in Freshman Foundation and Wintersession. Learning divergent skills and empathizing with those you collaborate with is vital to being successful. No one does one thing and stays exactly in their lane anymore – and that is a good thing.
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I believe that if you graduated from RISD, you most likely have the skills to differentiate and grow something unique in your own venture as long as you approach your work with the kind of wonder, relentless commitment and excitement we all had during our years at school.
The ideas that led to the founding of RISD were nurtured by a small group of women who had joined forces to raise funds for Rhode Island’s contribution to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. In 1877—four decades before women in the US gained the right to vote—Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf and the 34 other members of the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission invested their group’s surplus in founding a school of art and design.
In 1877, 35 women, armed with $1,675 and a vision, founded RISD. Understanding that a school for art and design could produce world-changing critical thinkers and makers, the founders were innovators whose impact stretches across the globe.
