WDD: Kimberly Introduces Interventions: Ignite
Meet Kimberly Do, the director of Scout’s 6th annual design conference, Interventions: Ignite. Tickets for Ignite are now on sale — grab yours now!
By Elizabeth Cui ft. Kimberly Do
Hi everyone!
My name is Kimberly, and I’m the director of the Scout conference! I’m also currently a first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at Northeastern. I was at Georgia Tech for my undergraduate studies, where I majored in Computer Science and Industrial Design.
What led me to Scout was my initial interest in UI design as well as human computer interaction (what I’m actually studying right now!). At Georgia Tech, I was a part of Hackathon and I did a lot of work organizing various hackathons and makeathons — including a textile makeathon! Given my history in event planning and my interests in design and research, I wanted to find an organization where I could continue facilitating spaces where people could come together and be exploratory. I found Scout through Google search last summer: They had their apps open, I applied, and the rest is history!
This year’s conference, Interventions: Ignite
Conference is the team in Scout responsible for hosting our annual design conference at Northeastern University. Our mission is to foster ideas, champion young designers, and connect the greater Boston design community. We bring to life ideas that may be missing in conversations — things that aren’t touched upon in lectures or more traditional “student” settings. Our name, Interventions, means to intervene in student design and creativity. We have a different theme every year, with 2023 being Interventions: Ignite.
Interventions: Ignite is on Saturday, April 8, 2023 in ISEC (Northeastern University Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex). Tickets are now LIVE on our website, and can be purchased here.
Ignite urges young creatives to find inspiration through the sources in their lives and the lives of those around them, in order to ignite a passion in the incredible work they do.
Our tracks:
1. Igniting creativity from within
We all have our personal experiences and encounters that we go through in our daily lives. How do all these factors come together and enable us to pursue design in new ways?
2. Igniting creativity from the medium
How do we embrace the medium for not what it does but for what it is? We hope to ask how we can embrace the limitations of our design mediums to ignite experimentation, discussion, debate and innovation.
3. Igniting creativity through practice
We choose to use different tools, methods, and techniques to enable our designs. How are the choices that we’re making/not making furthering our exploration of design? How can we make innovative design methods and practices more accessible?
Our Goals for Ignite
These goals are the result of my team brainstorming at the beginning of the fall semester:
Creating Community
As students, our main opportunity to interact with others (at least in a class setting) are group projects. These can be iffy — good or awful! So how can we work in exciting, collaborative, productive contexts? Our conference aims to draw not only students, but professionals from diverse walks of life: studios, government, corporations. We hope to create a magical opportunity to create community in new contexts.
Inspiring Impact
This goal is twofold. Our expectation isn’t that students come, enjoy the day, and go back home. We hope students can latch onto an ear worm that will grow in their minds and for the rest of their lives. This goal is to help students inspire their design career and even their design philosophy! The second half is impacting the world and beyond. Many of the speakers we’re inviting are actively helping different communities, showing that design can make a positive difference and be directly impactful in the world we live in.
Enabling Exploration
We’re lucky to be at a school that embraces interdisciplinary work. But we can easily get pigeonholed into our majors and stick to our individual career paths. Only focusing on one thing can lead to forgetting about how there are SO many cool things out there. At Ignite, we’re enabling students to go beyond the bounds of their comfort zone. Students can get excited to try new things, meet new people, and apply their skills to things they may have never seen before!
Facilitating Growth
Facilitating growth is all about opportunities for students to build their own careers. We understand that furthering your career is also a way you can expand your craft and your impact. Ignite is a chance to find opportunities to expand what you enjoy and what you like to do! We hope to provide resources through a career fair, lunch with professors, and networking opportunities with other clubs.
Our Mission and Beyond
Overall, Ignite is about rethinking what design can and should be. It’s been a very collaborative process and sparked many intimate conversations! For example, the lunch with professors developed from a brainstorming session with CAMD professors and Scout advisors. We wanted to know what mattered to them — in addition to what mattered to students. The professors loved the idea, and it was so fun to be able to work with a group that has traditionally been siloed from us!
Everyone says “students should talk about this” or “students should do this,” but we wanted to actually amplify their voices. This year, we’re championing talented young creatives by inviting students to speak and/or display their works.
If you’re a student and interested at being a speaker at Ignite, sign up here! And if you’re interested in presenting your creative work in the form of a poster, sign up here!
I’m so excited for conference and can’t believe it’s a month away — it gives me goosebumps. If you made it all the way here, here’s a sneak peek at one of the workshops we’re having: we’re partnering with the Huskiana Press! It’s a unique hands-on opportunity to engage with letterpress materials on Northeastern’s 19th-century printing press.
Excited? Grab your ticket to Interventions: Ignite here.
💫 That’s all for now! Thanks for reading!💫
