Anne Balsamo, dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School, has been selected to deliver the first lecture in the Design Dialogues Speakers Series at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. The series examines the transformative power of design in making our world a better place. Through provocative themes that vary each year, speakers address the question of how design can fulfill its potential in generating new conditions of economic, social, and technological possibility.
The series was developed by a multidisciplinary team of scholars engaged in joint research through the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH). “Recovering Prairie Futures: Midwestern Innovation and Inter-disciplinary Digital Developments” is coordinated by Anita Say Chan, assistant professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and Institute of Communications Research and Michael Twidale, GSLIS professor. In total, the Prairie Futures team includes more than twenty faculty from eight campus units, and three external design sites.
The overarching theme emphasizes innovation, inclusivity, collaboration, and interdisciplinary knowledge creation:
At Illinois, thinking about design, talking about design, and doing design is a central part of what we do. It is in our history. Pioneers designed our University 150 years ago, and ever since, numerous innovators have designed products, concepts, experiences, and ways of teaching that have transformed our world. And today, we continue to have various new design initiatives being undertaken. This speaker series contributes to this exciting set of activities by highlighting a number of aspects of the design process that may sometimes be marginalized or overlooked. Our invited speakers will help us all—designers, users, and the broader campus community alike—think about how to make the design process more inclusive in terms of its products, process, and practice. Inclusive design is not achieved by simply saying “we are inclusive”; explicit design interventions are required. As the University of Illinois’s own investments in design enter into an expanded phase to foster a new generation of multi-disciplinary twenty-first century design thinkers, this speakers series invites cross-campus engagements and dialogues to think through the potential for designing distinctly, inclusively, and purposefully.
Balsamo will deliver her lecture, “Designing Culture, Creating Multidisciplinary Collaboration,” on Friday, April 22, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in the auditorium of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana.
Abstract: How does interdisciplinarity impact innovation? Anne Balsamo shares an approach to the study and practice of technology-based innovation to demonstrate how the real business of innovation is the reproduction of culture over time and over place. She discusses the role of the humanities and sciences in cross-disciplinary collaborations that focus on the creation of new technologies. And she explores how—given that the humanities seriously considers questions of ethics, cultural and social good, and intentional future-making—there is an important role for humanists in the process of creating new technologies.
Balsamo has served as dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City since 2012. She is a cofounder of FemTechNet (a Prairie Futures external design site) and was a key designer of a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) offered by that network in 2013. She is the author of Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, which examines the relationship between culture and technological innovation with a particular focus on the role of the humanities in cultural innovation. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent biotechnologies.
The Design Dialogues Speakers Series is funded by IPRH, the College of Engineering, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the Recovering Prairie Futures IPRH Research Cluster. Other co-sponsors include:
- Graduate School of Library and Information Science
- College of Fine and Applied Arts
- School of Social Work
- University Library
- Illinois Informatics Institute
- Center for Advanced Study
- Center for African Studies
- Center for Digital Inclusion
- Center for Global Studies
- Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning
- Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
- Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
- Disability Resources and Educational Services
- Global Crossroads Living-Learning Community/University Housing
- Makerspace Urbana
- MakerLab (College of Business)
- Anthropology
- Asian American Studies
- Business Administration
- Comparative and World Literature
- Gender and Women Studies
- History
- Latino/a Studies
- Media and Cinema Studies
- Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
- Office of Diversity, Equity, and Access
- Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
- Office of Undergraduate Research
- Unit One/University Housing
- Sociology
- Spurlock Museum
- Institute of Communications Research