I was invited to organize and help facilitate a Student Fellows Symposium in conjunction with the 2018 Sackler Colloquium sponsored by the Arthur M Sackler Foundation, Google, and the National Academy of Sciences. The Colloquium was titled Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity, and the Symposium was titled Role/Play: Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaborations. As part of this role I was also invited to design the graphics and poster for the events. My collaborator and co-chair, Molly Morin, created parametric/generative artwork for use in the materials, and we worked together with the organizing committee to finalize the designs. Included here are images and descriptions of the poster, a hand stitched booklet I created for the participants and special attendees, and from the event itself which represents another type of design (event/experience).
///// Poster
This poster strives to inform and attract a specific yet varied audience: students/academics/practitioners who are practicing or interested in the connections between art/design and science/engineering/medicine. The goals for the project were to create a sense of curiosity and to hearken back to figures of the past who worked in the spaces between these creative and scientific realms (Audubon, da Vinci). The brief was specific and driven by a committee of scientists/engineers—the designer (Liese Zahabi) and artist (Molly Morin) worked together to incorporate their suggestions to create a poster that would appeal to the myriad of target viewers and have lasting appeal. The poster is 24 inches by 36 inches, and was displayed at several universities around the country prior to the event, and then at the National Academy of Sciences during the event.
///// Booklet
This 40 page booklet includes artwork from and related to the event poster, short essays by the two co-chairs and Ben Shneiderman, chair of the colloquium committee and the creator of both events, bios of the three invited non-student speakers, and the names, affiliations, and abstracts of the 48 participating students. The booklets were printed and trimmed by hand, and then hand stitched and finished with a belly band. Molly Morin also made individual prints that fit inside the booklets using a generative coding process: each piece of art was unique. The booklets and artwork serve as keepsakes from the event and were well received.
///// The Event
The symposium itself was a long one-day event on March 12, 2018, which was followed by the two-day colloquium. A call was put out to universities and professional organizations throughout North America for graduate student projects that combined art/design with science/engineering/medicine in some way. We received over 200 proposals and selected 54 students (48 were able to attend) as Sackler Student Fellows. Students presented either 15-minute or 6-minute talks, or participated in a poster session/creative exhibition. We were able to include many different types of projects, from many different types of students, affiliated with many different types of institutions, which created a wonderfully diverse set of perspectives. Here are some images and tweets from the event.
