You are invited to the Liberal Arts and Engineering Symposium @ Union College on June 5th and 6th, where the NY6Think Tank will be hosting a special session on Friday, from 1:00-3:00pm on “Exploring the Aesthetic & Humanistic Dimensions of Maker Culture” followed by a session from 3:30-5:00pm on “Applying Design Thinking to Create Effective Makerspaces.” These hands-on sessions will be led by a team from IBM, RPI, and Union.

At these exciting events, we will explore the humanistic and aesthetic dimensions of the contemporary maker spaces movement, and of maker culture as a whole. We are fortunate to have as our opening speaker Jentery Sayers, editor of Making Humanities Matter who will speak about “Prototyping as Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities.”

Prof. Sayer’s talk will be followed by brief presentations by those who have been involved in creating maker spaces with the “issues” (and opportunities) surrounding the arts and humanities that have arisen in the design and development of their spaces. (We will be using a modified Pecha-Kucha format—15 slides @ 20 seconds each).

We will then divide up into teams that will be tasked not only to explore, but to create (i.e. make) solutions for the issues they identified through a variety of structured activities ranging from concept mapping to the aesthetic rendering of their ideas and documenting these ideas. We will continue the collaborative activity by using a Design Thinking ideation exercise to explore different solutions. As consistent with the concept of the NY6 Think Tank, our ultimate goal will be that of producing a public article, blog, performance piece, installation, and/or student exercises and learning modules that will help disseminate the ideas that we produce during this hands-on concept-building session.

Then stay for the keynote by Cornell University Professor Hod Lipson who will be speaking about “3D Printing: The Next 25 Years: The Promise and Peril of a Machine that Can Do (Almost) Anything.”

To register and view more program details, please click here.
Registration Closes on May 20th