Interaction design scholar Jeffrey Bradzell speaks at IIT’s In the Loop series
The Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design lecture series is back in full swing in 2015, with two events to satisfy the curiosity of nearly every stripe of design buff. The lecture series, In the Loop, is an ongoing effort organized by the Institute of Design as a forum to explore contemporary issues in design, architecture, urbanism and philosophy. In February, take note of two similarly accomplished, if very different, speakers.
February 19 is Jeffrey Bardzell, an associate professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. Bardzell’s talk, “Design as Inquiry,” promises to explore how the arts can serve as a conduit or medium to further explore and refine scientific conjectures. Bardzell wants to know, “if science and philosophy already give us knowledge, why even bother with the arts?” Substantial business, to be sure, and given the Institute’s reputation as one of the nerdiest research-based graduate design schools in the world, the discussion following the talk should be several calibers above other conversations available on a typical winter Thursday in Chicago.
On February 24, the Institute hosts the next In the Loop lecture with Mél Hogan presenting a talk entitled “Archive as Dumpster.” The title refers not to college students’ dorm rooms, but to a conceptual method of returning memory from a digitally mediated experience to a more tangible state. Hogan, an IIT professor who focuses on communication design, will explore the boundary between the chaos of rubbish and the discipline of the archive. In our increasingly immaterial existence, digging through the trash can feel positively ennobling. (Nick Cecchi)
February 19 at 6pm, and February 24 at 12:30pm at the IIT Institute of Design, 350 North LaSalle. Free.
