Tomorrow’s Designers, Designing Today will present innovative areas of design action, by showcasing some of the key topics explored by MIT MAD’s fellows during the academic year 2022-2023. The event will be a celebration of the capacity of design to deeply improve and transform our relation to the world, through works that seek how we can create better, more sustainable, and more inclusive buildings, public spaces, communities and digital systems. 

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The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) is the newly created design hub at MIT. MAD’s central goal is to use design tools to transform learning, catalyze innovation, and empower society, thus bridging between the powerful design agendas underlying many academic works, and real world’s most pressing challenges.

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This contribution to the Boston Design Week will debate some key contemporary areas of design action which are currently explored by MAD fellows—graduate students supported by MAD and MIT faculty. We will also present the incoming cohort of MAD fellows, who will join the Academy for the  2023-2024 academic year. The event will be a celebration of the capacity of design to deeply improve and transform our relation to the world, through works that create better, more sustainable, and more inclusive buildings, public spaces, communities and digital systems. It will also be a demonstration that the real test of learning is the act of doing. 

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Tomorrow’s Designers, Designing Today will include three dialogues: between designer, computer scientist, and artist Jonathan Zong—who uses design to empower marginalized individuals and communities—and Arvind Satyanarayan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and director of the MIT CSAIL Visualization Group; between engineer and designer Jana Saadi, who investigates the interaction between designers and digital design tools, and Maria Yang, Gail E. Kendall (1978) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, founder and director of MIT’s Ideation Lab; and between architect Justin Brazier, who studies how design enhances cultural identity and economic sovereignty, and Professor of Architecture Sheila Kennedy.

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