Students designing means to spark social change

BETTER TOMORROW: Students and professionals share venture ideas at the Rapid Prototyping Workshop during the A Better World For Design in September 2011. / COURTESY BROWN DAILY HERALD/RACHAEL KAPLAN
BETTER TOMORROW: Students and professionals share venture ideas at the Rapid Prototyping Workshop during the A Better World For Design in September 2011. / COURTESY BROWN DAILY HERALD/RACHAEL KAPLAN

When a group of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design students four years ago imagined a conference centered on using outside-the-box thinking to promote collaborative and creative solutions to some of the state’s economic woes, the goal was simple: just put the conference together.
“It’s funny that you even say, long-term goals. We didn’t have any,” said Steven Daniels, one of eight former students who founded the event and a previous member of the Brown Engineers Without Borders group that inspired the conference.
“We thought the [conference] was a huge success after a year of grueling work,” he said. “We swore we’d never do it again but all the speakers, who pretty much were our idols, said we had to do it again.”
During that first conference, in November 2008, Daniels was a junior at Brown and, like his cohorts, focused solely on using A Better World by Design to start a conversation around “using a multidisciplinary approach to design and technology as a catalyst for social change.”
Daniels, 23, is now a research engineer at IBM and living in New York. But like the conference, running for the fifth year at the Brown and RISD campuses from Sept. 28-30, his conversations on how to make the world a better place through nontraditional solutions, continues.
“It’s a very important conversation and we need to get more people engaged in it because this is how we’re going to change the world,” said Saul Kaplan, former executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation and founder and chief catalyst at the Business Innovation Factory, a Providence nonprofit focused on collaborative innovation.
Daniels and his undergraduate colleagues thought up the conference to countermeasure the neglect they felt from Brown as the Engineers Without Borders worked to use technology to promote sustainable development, despite underfunding that prevented them from thriving as charged. “There was a moment – there is pretty much every year – where there’s this feeling like everything was falling apart,” Daniels said. “The conversation [now] is definitely evolving. It’s interesting to see [that happen] outside of the conference, that being our original goal. We didn’t realize how kind of on the cutting edge we were at the time.”
That first year there were 300 attendees. The next year, there were over 500. The last two years, the conference has sold out at a 1,000 maximum capacity designed to support highly interactive sessions and panels.
The three-day conference remains entirely student run and organized around the thought that ideas, innovation and collaboration, not financial plans and bailouts, are what ultimately will lead the city, state and lives of students into more sustained stability.
This year’s conference will feature 18 workshops and keynote presentations.
Speakers have been minimized throughout the years to allow more time for collaborative learning.
Scheduled workshops this year are centered on insects as food sources, the challenges of Farm Fresh Rhode Island, and using hip-hop music to promote leadership skills within at-risk youth.
Panels will focus on persuasive communication, local food realities and design policy.
Professionals, higher education faculty and staff and any interested party are welcomed, but the conference also is organized for students and other young adults. Raaj Parekh, a Brown senior set to receive a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics next spring, is this year’s conference steering-committee chair.
He’s been involved with it for his entire college career in some way, going from attendee to volunteer, to committee member and now an expanded leadership role.
“You’ve heard so many stories of people meeting others on this and just hitting it off and thinking of ideas,” he said. “Now that we’ve done this, the question is what further impact do we have.”
Measuring the conference’s success through tangible methods may be difficult, but that was never the intention for an event meant to inspire rather than produce.
An ever-changing leadership roster provides a challenge, though mentors stay on, records are kept to provide guidance. The conference is successful, Daniels said, by allowing new minds to take charge each year.
That attendance has increased yearly and that innovative business leaders such as Kaplan – who gave a presentation once while he was running the EDC – keep coming back is evidence enough for some.
“I think the fact it grew into a [conference] that has people from all sorts of different majors [on committees] shows that we’ve been successful in encouraging a multidisciplinary approach,” said Beth Soucy, a fifth-year student who is pursuing a dual degree between Brown and RISD in environmental studies and industrial design. “Communication between the two schools has grown as well. I think the conference is trying to broaden people’s conception of … design. They are trying to show that can be applied to larger social and environmental problems.” •

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