Meaning, Exploration, and Application of Design Science

A Design Science Symposium and Maker’s Fair at RISD

September 26-28, 2025

The Design Science Symposium is an interactive meeting of thinkers, makers, and educators interested in spatial phenomena, complex systems, and nature-inspired design. The 2025 event is inspired by an initiative led by RISD’s Fleet Library and Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab to expand the teaching, learning, and research application of the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection & Archive and will focus on applications of visual mathematics and inductive reasoning within art and design education. Framing uncertainty as an impetus for creativity, we will explore how attempts to visualize and comprehend visible and invisible events of the universe shape discovery, understanding, and purposeful design across scientific and artistic disciplines. To showcase synergetic relationships between the visual and verbal, linear and nonlinear, analytic and intuitive, and artistic and scientific, the symposium brings together individuals from various disciplines. The first two days of the symposium feature presentations and panels that consider the application of design science to art and design education. The third day is a Design Science Maker Fair and an opportunity for attendees to share their own geometric models and other related creations. 

Keynote Speakers:

Joseph Cambray, Jungian Analyst and author of Synchronicity: Nature & Psyche in an Interconnected Universe.

Janet Echelman, artist whose large-scale experiential sculptures intersect disciplinary boundaries from sculpture, architecture, and urban design to material science, computer science, engineering, and performance. 

Peter Lynch, architect, researcher, and principal at Building Culture PLA, a Stockholm-based studio that conducts research in architecture, urbanism, landscape design, and building technology.

I moderated a panel of the following keynote speakers:

Joseph Cambray, Jungian Analyst

Janet Echelman, Fiber Artist

Peter Lynch, Architect.

All photos by the visual maestro, Ryan Conaty