Better World by Design, a joint venture organized by students at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, will hold its 15th annual conference this Saturday.
Design professionals and educators will give a series of talks on the “ways that design can center alternative narratives,” according to the group’s website. Speakers include professors from the University of Toronto and the University of California at Los Angeles as well as senior designers from Adobe and Sonos.
The conference, titled “Knots” this year, explores interdisciplinary approaches to design. The theme is a metaphor for combining different disciplines and perspectives to build solutions to problems, explained the conference’s co-organizers, Nicole Nedeff, Henry Ding and Naemi Ditiatkovsky ’25. Nedeff and Ding are fourth-year students at RISD.
Featured speakers at the conference come from various disciplines, which organizers attributed to their broad understanding of design.
They noted that conference attendees can expect to receive “advice on their own personal journeys in design, become better acquainted with spaces they’ve been interested in or simply learn something new about a novel area of design.”
The conference, hosted at buildings on both Brown and RISD’s campuses, will begin with a 9 a.m. breakfast at Sayles Auditorium, where architect Petros Babasikas will deliver the opening keynote.
Babasikas, director of the architectural studies program at the University of Toronto, focuses his research on creating public spaces that combat the climate crisis.
The first set of talks will begin at 11 a.m in Freidman Hall. Adobe’s Jeremy Joachim, a senior experience designer specializing in generative AI, will speak on how AI can enhance creative potential. His presentation, “What If? How Emerging Technology Can Foster Creativity,” will also evaluate the balance between human creativity and technological advancement.
Allison Wong, a community engagement manager at architecture firm and nonprofit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, will also speak at the event. The nonprofit creates housing opportunities for people exiting incarceration and designs spaces with an eye for restorative justice and community building.
The second set of talks will begin at 1 p.m. Mindy Seu, a designer and an associate professor in UCLA’s design media arts department, will present at 20 Washington Place, also known as Prov-Wash at RISD. They focus on exploring “feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse and the materiality of the internet,” the program’s website reads. The talk will be an “immersive performance lecture” recounting a “sexual history of the internet.”
RISD alum Bona Kim, a senior product designer at audio manufacturer Sonos, works with the Sonos ecosystem to enhance listening and content experiences. Kim’s presentation will evaluate the intersections of hardware and software by sharing real-world examples of how the diverse disciplines come together.
MIT Media Lab researchers David Kong, Zoe Lee and Annie Chen will present the closing keynote at 2 p.m.
Isabel Hahn contributed reporting.
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