Schedule
8:00 AM
SIGN IN
Grab the official Interventions: Ignite pamphlet to receive a hand copy of our day-of schedule, speaker profiles, and a special guide to the Hearth, our UX exhibition.
BREAKFAST
Join us for a hearty breakfast sponsored by La Colombe! We'll be serving delicious pastries and a variety of La Colombe coffees.
9:00 AM
Opening Ceremony
Auditorium
We'll officially begin the day with the Interventions: Ignite opening ceremony, where you'll learn about our schedule of events and hear opening remarks from Kimberly, our conference director.
9:30 AM
WHAT ACTIVE PRACTICE MEANS IN INCLUSIVELY DESIGNING WITH DISABILITY
GRACE JUN
Auditorium
People are increasingly questioning the attributes of “normalcy,” leading to a growing interest to meet the needs of people who have been marginalized. Diversity, inclusion, and equity (DE&I) are being embraced in everyday conversations, and it’s important to extend that to disability. Yet designers need hands-on experiences and environments that inspire action. This presentation provides examples on how to actively practice inclusive design when making clothing more accessible with people with disabilities. Clothing is one of the oldest and most necessary forms of self-expression, but it’s still not widely designed for the one of the most marginalized groups in the world—people with disabilities (PWD). This is a problem for several reasons, one of them being that it can negatively impact someone’s decision to engage in their community, speak up at work, or attend social gatherings that expect a particular dress code. Codesign, participatory design, and service design are some of the many approaches that designers can utilize to actively address DE&I needs. Participatory readiness fosters engagement in our communities, and in doing so, increasing disability inclusion.
EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL RULE BENDING
Elliott Montgomery
Room 140
Often, speculative design works propose imaginative scenarios that rely on fictions and fantasy technologies to suggest alternatives to our current reality. While these works are delightfully provocative, they are often dismissed by skeptics as being physically impossible, and therefore less strategically valuable. In this talk, an alternative subset of speculative design is identified, described as ‘social rule bending’. These works are conceptually accessible and may help designers open new doors for speculative design practices.
10:30 AM
STAMP IT OUT! A LETTERPRESS WORKSHOP
HUSKIANA PRESS AT HOLMES HALL
Experience the history and practice behind traditional letterpress printing with the Huskiana Press, located at Holmes Hall. Join us for this workshop to learn about letterpressing (and take home a little souvenir of your own)!
IT’S A PROCESS! NAVIGATING YOUR DESIGN CAREER
Jason Yang, Daria Koshkina, Christina Allen, and Patrick O'Grady; moderated by Catherine Clark
Auditorium
Our personal experiences and backgrounds shape our creative approaches and understanding. Learn about how to navigate a design career from within (and outside of) design..
11:30 AM
Lunch
Atrium
Join us for a delicious vegetarian and vegan-friendly lunch catered by the Clover Food Lab.
Spark Symposium
Atrium
While enjoying your meal, come admire some incredible student poster presentations at the Spark Symposium.
Lunch with a professor
Atrium
Enjoy good food and great conversations with professors at the “Lunch with a Professor” event! Attendees of this event will have the opportunity to engage in a casual conversation with a professor over a delicious lunch.
12:30 PM
Student Lightning Talks
Auditorium
Learn more about how students are “igniting” their creativity at the Student Lightning Talks. Presentations by Nandini Ghosh; Reid Weigner, Yihao Kong, Aamil Amin; Rohan Tandon; and Zlata Rezanova, Chris Kuang, Susan Dinh, and Esther Yang.
1:30 PM
Soft Technology
Lea Albaugh
Room 140
We have gotten delightfully good at using computation to help us make physical material objects -- from CNC milling and 3D printing to pen plotting and computational knitting, at scales from nanoscale to infrastructural, computational tools for designing and fabricating can help us make things in qualitatively new ways. However, computational fabrication tools, especially those aligned with the Computer Aided Design/Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tradition, often treat materials as interchangeable and computation as simply a means to an end. Such tools miss out on the possibilities of computational materiality itself as a source of inspiration, from the distinct affordances of different materials and cultural histories of fabrication processes, to uniquely computational ways of working like procedural generation and glitch. I will describe some of my own work on idiomatic and exploratory systems for computational weaving and knitting as the basis to discuss complexities and opportunities at the seams between material and computational processes.
1:1 Design for Social Impact
José Menéndez
Auditorium
José R. Menéndez is a graphic designer and educator, with a background in marine science communication and landscape architecture. An Assistant Professor at Northeastern University CAMD, his multi-disciplinary practice, research, and teaching are intertwined as he investigates topics such as community engagement through health communication and social justice; expanding the canons of graphic design by highlighting Latin American and Caribbean practices through the online archive Gráfica Latina; and designing spatial justice and ecological narratives in the landscape. Through the lenses of experimental publishing, printmaking, branding, exhibit design, public space interventions, and climate visualizations, 1:1 Design for Social Impact presents José’s practice at Buena Gráfica Social Studio, where he examines the design practice as a platform for multilingual communication, dissemination, access, visibility, equity, and justice at multiple scales.
2:30 PM
Career Fair + Marketplace
Atrium
Club Showcase
Room 142
Learn more about creative student life at Northeastern University in the Club Fair.
4:00 PM
Automating the Creative Process: A debate on how AI will transform the arts
Derek Curry + Jennifer Gradecki
Auditorium
The introduction of new technologies has always provided both challenges and opportunities for creative practitioners. Just as the invention of photography liberated painters to pursue the abstract styles that epitomized modern art while simultaneously ending the careers of many portrait painters, the impact of artificial intelligence to creative fields will be emancipatory for some and career ending for others. Questions over copyright and the ethics of using the work of human artists without compensation or their knowledge are already newsworthy debates. Is it possible that AI can fully replace creative practitioners? Will large language models be capable of writing great literature or sit-coms without human assistance? Will art galleries one day exhibit only artwork generated by neural networks? Will dead musicians and actors be reanimated by the record labels and movie studios that own the rights to their work, replacing younger performers? Or, like photography, will the role of creative practitioners simply evolve to work with the affordances of their new tools? This debate will present both sides to several real-world scenarios analyzing what the changes mean for the creative fields as a whole and the lives of working artists, writers, and musicians.
Towards a Better Tomorrow: Designing for Social Impact and Social Change
Estefania Ciliotta, Miso Kim, Tandem (Scott, Maria, Shelby) + Mark from MONUM
Room 140
How do you harness design to enable and initiate social change? Learn how designers from the nonprofit, government, and academic sectors approach design for social impact.
5:00 PM
Closing Ceremony
Auditorium
We’ll officially end the night with brief closing remarks and reflections.
5:30 PM
Light Snacks + Refreshment
Networking
Mingle with other attendees and join us for an evening of casual networking and mochi doughnuts.