Entangle Designathon
This Designathon invites students to explore the conference theme Entangle through a collaborative design process. Working in teams of two to four members, participants respond to a prompt connected to the relationships between humans, technologies, and environments across interconnected systems. Teams move through research, ideation, and prototyping to examine how interactions shape the world around us. This is an opportunity to experiment with design as a way to understand complex, intertwined processes and systems.
Conference Experience Designer
Senior UX Designer, MBTA
Senior UX Researcher, Symbotic
Assistant Teaching Professor, Art + Design, CAMD
Conference Assistant Director
Discovery-Oriented Design or How To Invent in Unexplored Territory
Artist and Engineer Andy Cavatorta shares the process that empowers his studio to deliver ambitious projects in diverse territories like arcade games, musical instruments, kinetic sculpture and theatrical set design. Research, ideation, and prototyping happen concurrently through dozens of fast iterations. Come learn how to recognize the Speculation Barrier, how to quickly navigate the Dark Forest of Possibilities, and the importance of fake rules.
Artist, Designer & Engineer; Principal, Andy Cavatorta Studio
Photos by Asher Ben-Dashan.
Processing Data: just practice and Cara Michell in Conversation
Gallery 360 and the Center for the Arts host a conversation between The Data at Hand exhibiting artists Amanda Ugorji and Sophie Weston Chien of just practice with Northeastern’s Cara Michell. By weaving data into material form in their series Soft City and Touching Toxicity on view in Gallery 360, Ugorji and Weston Chien invite viewers to imagine planning processes grounded in care, participation, and ecological justice.
Presented as part of Design Research Week 2026, this program explores how structural inequities become embedded in ecological systems and the built environment and how creative practice research can model approaches to urban-scale thinking that move beyond top-down decision-making, centering the lived experiences and spatial knowledge of residents as essential to imagining more just futures.
Assistant Professor, Architecture, CAMD
Architectural Designer, Artist, and Urban Planner; Collaborative Practitioner, just practice
Designer and Organizer; Collaborative Practitioner, just practice
Photos by Devyn Rudnick.