MIT N52’s Design Community Comes Together During Boston Design Week

The Open Design Studio offered a chance to meet N52's design community — MIT D-Lab, the Self-Assembly Lab, the Urban Risk Lab, MAD's Design Fellows, MITdesignX — while engaging in hands-on activities. As visitors explored the third floor of the N52 building, they mingled with designers showcasing various projects and design approaches, strolled down picture galleries, raised maize, customized bandanas, and designed the word “design.” Snapshots below.

May 16, 2024

The third floor of MIT's N52 building is home to a multidisciplinary design community, bringing together several organizations, all part of MIT's broader ecosystem.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

For this hands-on "Design Design" activity, participants were invited to "fill" the word design with productions inspired by Josef Albers' Interactions of Color.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

For MIT D-Lab's “Maize Raise” activity, participants received the following prompt:
In order to prevent pests from eating your grain, you must store your maize at least 15 cm off the ground. Using only two pieces of paper, support as many ears of dried corn as possible off the ground! Use the principles of design to plot and execute your approach.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

The Self-Assembly Lab is a research lab at MIT inventing self-assembly and programmable material technologies.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

The Urban Risk Lab at MIT is an interdisciplinary hub of design research and climate action. With a range of partners, they work globally to increase community resilience and collective capacity to adapt to climate shocks by embedding techniques and strategies of risk reduction through collaborative design.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

2023 Design Fellow Liane Makatura, a PhD student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, studies computational design and fabrication.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

Attendees were invited to customize their own bandanas by using a heat press and MAD graphic assets.

Image: Sebastian Ochoa

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