Since its launch in October 2022, MIT MAD; has been working to create a shared, inter-disciplinary culture of design at MIT, aimed at tackling our most pressing societal and environmental challenges. The best representatives of this ambition are MAD’s Design Fellows—graduate MIT students/researchers currently exploring the frontiers of design.

This event will bring together, in dialogue, three generations of Design Fellows: the inaugural 2022 cohort, the current 2023 group, and the newly selected 2024 designers. With all of them, we will see how design is fundamental in addressing environmental, health, and technical challenges.

Free with museum admission.

This program is presented as part of Boston Design Week.

This event will present innovative areas of design action, by showcasing some of the key topics explored by MIT Morningside Academy for Design’s Fellows during the academic year 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.

We will also present the incoming cohort of Design Fellows, who will join MAD for the 2024 academic year.

How can design address different dimensions of sustainability? We will explore this question through three dialogues, ranging from the design of solar-powered vehicles, to the definition of analytical and sensing mechanisms to improve buildings’ thermal performance, to the elaboration of energy-efficient systems to cook. The event will show how sustainable design solutions are possible for every scale and context, and how these solutions can transition from academic experimentation and research to real-world implementation.

This session visualizes the MIT Morningside Academy for Design and MIT’s commitment to finding sustainable design solutions for a planet subjected to multiple environmental and climatic crises. The dialogue will complement the many activities programmed around Earth Day in the Boston area and is presented as part of Boston Design Week.