EVENT DESCRIPTION
Richard Feynman stated that the “experience of doubt and uncertainty is important.” A principle of scientific thinking is that we develop more reliable information about the world by questioning our beliefs and assumptions. Embracing uncertainty can spark creativity and lead to a nuanced understanding of the world. It can help us navigate complex systems and better respond to social and environmental challenges. Framing uncertainty as an impetus for creativity, Geometry of Uncertainty explores how attempts to visualize and comprehend events of the universe shape discovery and purposeful design across scientific and artistic disciplines.
The symposium is inspired by an initiative led by RISD’s Fleet Library and Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab to expand the teaching, learning, and research application of the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection & Archive. The first two days of the event feature keynotes, presentations, and panels on applications of visual mathematics and nature-inspired design in art and design education. The third day is a Design Science Maker’s Fair and an opportunity for attendees to share their own geometric models and creations.
In association with the symposium, the exhibition, "Inside Design Science Studio: Selections of the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection" is on view Aug 15 - Oct 15 at Fleet Library
Geometry of Uncertainty is open to the public and free of charge, but the deadline to register is Sept 9th. To attend, please register here
SCHEDULE
Friday
9/26
Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
4:00 PM
5:00 PM
5:15 PM
Registration Opens
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Keynote
Joseph Cambray – “Synchronicity: Revisioning the Shape of Reality”
Fleet Library, 15 Westminster Street
6:30 PM
Welcome Reception
Featuring the exhibition Inside the Design Science Studio: Selections from the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection and Archive.
Saturday
9/27
Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
9:00 AM
Keynote
Peter Lynch – “Fragments and Coherence” 10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Break
Panel 1: The Meaning of Design Science
12:00 PM
1:30 PM
Lunch
Michael Ben-Eli – “Geometry of Uncertainty” 2:10 PM
Panel 2: Teaching and Learning Design Science
3:30 PM
4:00 PM
Break
Keynote
Janet Echelman – “Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman”
5:00 PM
Closing Remarks
Sunday
9/28
20 Washington Place
10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Design Science Maker’s Fair
An interactive showcase featuring an inflatable structure by Pneuhaus and other design science related projects and activities. Attendees can register to display their own geometric models and creations.
9/26
Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
5:00 PM
5:15 PM
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Keynote
Joseph Cambray – “Synchronicity: Revisioning the Shape of Reality”
Fleet Library, 15 Westminster Street
Featuring the exhibition Inside the Design Science Studio: Selections from the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection and Archive.
Saturday
9/27
Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
Peter Lynch – “Fragments and Coherence”
10:30 AM
Panel 1: The Meaning of Design Science
Design science is an elusive and difficult to define concept. It entails the discovery and application of nature's “generalized principles,” a “grammar of space,” and a systematic approach to problem solving. Panelists who combine scientific and mathematical thinking with visual and spatial conceptualizing will share what design science means to them.
Stephon Alexander (Brown University), Olga Mesa (Roger Williams University), Beatrice Steinert (Brown University), Andrew Witt (Harvard University).
Stephon Alexander (Brown University), Olga Mesa (Roger Williams University), Beatrice Steinert (Brown University), Andrew Witt (Harvard University).
1:30 PM
Michael Ben-Eli – “Geometry of Uncertainty”
What is the impact of geometric inquiry in art and design education? A conversation on design science pedagogy is inspired by the Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection and Archive. The session includes presentations from RISD alumni whose work is informed by experiences learning from geometric models and faculty who have been developing teaching resources and expanding curricular engagement with the Loeb Collection.
Pneuhaus (Art and design collective), Jerome Arul (RISD), Laura Briggs (RISD), Anastasiia Raina (RISD).
Pneuhaus (Art and design collective), Jerome Arul (RISD), Laura Briggs (RISD), Anastasiia Raina (RISD).
4:00 PM
Keynote
Janet Echelman – “Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman”
Sunday
9/28
20 Washington Place
An interactive showcase featuring an inflatable structure by Pneuhaus and other design science related projects and activities. Attendees can register to display their own geometric models and creations.
KEYNOTES
Joseph Cambray, Ph.D. is Past-President-CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute; he is Past-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology; has served as the U.S. Editor for The Journal of Analytical Psychology. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. Dr. Cambray is a Jungian analyst now living in the Santa Barbara area of California. His numerous publications include the book based on his Fay Lectures: Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe. He has published numerous papers in a range of international journals. He lectures and gives workshops internationally.
Janet Echelman creates experiential sculpture at the scale of buildings that transform with wind and light. The art shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in. Her work defies categorization as it intersects disciplinary boundaries, from Sculpture, Architecture, and Urban Design to Material Science, Computer Science, Engineering, and Performance. Using unlikely materials from knotted fiber and atomized water particles to choreographed dancers, Echelman combines ancient craft with original computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents.
Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she recently received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, and Fulbright Lectureship, Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for "changing the very essence of urban spaces." Her TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views.
In September, Chronicle Books will publish Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman, a 288-page visual compendium of Echelman's oeuvre which accompanies a traveling mid-career museum retrospective.
www.echelman.com
Peter Lynch RA is a researcher and former Guest Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He is the principal of Building Culture PLA, a Stockholm-based studio that conducts research in architecture, urbanism, landscape design, and building technology. He founded his architecture practice in New York in 1991, taught in RISD’s architecture program in the 1990’s, headed the graduate architecture department at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1996-2005, received a Rome Prize in 2004, and co-directed design studios in Shenzhen and Beijing from 2008-2014. His Timescape Garden project, an urban wild garden in Norrköping Sweden, was exhibited at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. He is author of Fragments and Coherence: Essays and Works of Architecture (Skira, 2025), a monograph of original projects and a gentle manifesto about complexity and coherence in architecture.
SPEAKERS
Stephon Alexander, Professor of Physics at Brown University, is a renowned theoretical physicist, author and musician. His research bridges cosmology, particle physics, quantum gravity and the AI-physics connection. Alexander specializes the physics of the early universe, notably co-inventing a model that explains the origin of matter over antimatter in the universe and a new unification between Gravity and the Weak Interaction. A past President of the National Society of Black Physicists, he founded SoundPlusScience Inc., connecting music and STEM for high school students. His acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics, explores parallels between jazz and modern physics. Alexander has held positions at Stanford, Imperial College, Penn State, and Dartmouth, contributing globally to science and education.
Jerome Arul is an industrial designer, interdisciplinary artist, and Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). A career in design and manufacturing allowed him to work on projects in East Africa, Southeast Asia and China. He managed engineering and product design at EcoZoom and scaled up production of the Tubeho Neza cook stove program in Rwanda, enabled by the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism. EcoZoom’s products have been deployed by the World Food Programme, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Relief International. Since 2015, Jerome has co-taught a collaborative studio on product design and development with RISD Industrial Design, the MIT School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management. He has also taught design courses at the MIT D-Lab.
Michael Ben-Eli is founder of The Sustainability Laboratory, established to develop and demonstrate groundbreaking approaches to sustainability practices, expanding prospects and producing positive, life affirming impacts on people and ecosystems in all parts of the world.
Prior to launching The Lab, Michael pioneered applications of System Thinking and Cybernetics in management and organization. Over the years, he worked on synthesizing strategy issues in many parts of the world and in diverse institutional settings, ranging from small high technology firms to multinational enterprises, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care and educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and international multilateral organizations including the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Program, the Global Environment Facility, and others.
In recent years, he has focused his work primarily on issues related to sustainability and sustainable development and has been working to help inspire leaders in business, government, community, and youth accelerate a peaceful transition to a sustainable future. Michael is the author of the widely acclaimed five core sustainability principles. He has been the driving force behind developing The Lab’s current flagship project, Project Wadi Attir, and is leading development of The Lab as a world-wide network of advanced research, development, and education centers, based at different ecological zones.
Laura Briggs is a Senior Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a partner in BriggsKnowles Studio, a practice recognized for its use of light, color and the integration of energy efficient and renewable energy technology. Prior to joining RISD, she served as director of the Bachelor of Fine Arts of Architecture Program, interim dean of the School of Constructed Environments and chair of Sustainable Architecture at Parsons New School for Design. She taught architecture studio and ecological design and was the faculty lead for the school’s 2011 entry into the Solar Decathlon, which has now become a home for two families in Washington, DC, through the support and partnership of the DC government and Habitat for Humanity of Washington, DC. Previously, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University and at University of Michigan as the Mushenheim Fellow.
Briggs’ approach combines a scientific method with design practice. Her work on super efficient buildings, adaptable photovoltaic systems and concentrating solar has been supported by the US Department of Energy, Arnold W. Brunner Foundation, Deborah J. Norden Fund and through a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. She is a contributor to the Green Studio Handbook. The work of BriggsKnowles Studio has been featured in The New York Times, Dwell, Domus, Metropolis Magazine and Fine Living HGTV.
Olga Mesa is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University and co-founder of Nuvola Studio, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to leverage research, architectural design, construction, and material innovation to enhance education, the environment, culture, and communities. Olga is interested in the accord between form, forces and performance and how this interaction has a physical manifestation in material systems. Her primary research involves the investigation on how formal orders result from processes and contextual forces and how, with the inclusion of cultural forces, architectural form can be developed in an analogous manner to respond to a given context. Her work in architectural design as well as her research on dynamic building skins, material systems and innovative fabrication techniques has been the subject of numerous conference presentations, publications, and workshops in the United States, Austria, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Switzerland, Italy, and Singapore. She has taught architectural studios and seminars at RISD, MIT, TU Graz, Northeastern University Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and at the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial.
Pneuhaus is an art and design collective that creates playful, immersive experiences through inflatable architecture and spatial design. Rooted in the craft of pneumatics, the studio merges textiles with geometric modeling techniques to bring temporary environments to life. Their work transforms public spaces into sensory landscapes that encourage exploration and connection. By shaping air into structure, Pneuhaus reimagines how we experience space—inviting movement, engagement, and moments of surprise.
Anastasiia Raina is a biodesigner, researcher, and educator. She earned her MFA from the Yale School of Art and now serves as an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her work investigates the aesthetics of technologically mediated nature, inspiring new imaginaries that challenge our relationship to nature, technology, and humanity. In close collaboration with scientists, she transforms scientific research into visual language and develops novel frameworks for science communication that engage broader audiences. Anastasiia has exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Seoul, presented her research and served as a visiting critic at institutions including Yale, Columbia, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Parsons, Pratt, CalArts, Otis, and MICA. Her work has been supported by grants from the Hyundai Motor Group, the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund, the NEW INC + Science Sandbox Grant, and NSF’s STAC Collaborative Research Grant.
Beatrice Steinert is a developmental biologist, science and technology studies (STS) scholar, artist, and educator. Her research looks at the processes that shape cells and tissues (morphogenesis) and the visual culture of studying these microscopic phenomena since the end of the nineteenth century. Through her work she seeks to demonstrate ways of embracing complexity in the life sciences as well as making engaging scientific stories. She is a co-founder of the collaborative project Unfiguring, which explores how the arts can transform contemporary STEM. Steinert received a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and History of Science from Harvard University. She is currently a Provost’s STEM Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University.
Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of computation, AI, and machines to architecture, design, and culture. He is co-director of Harvard’s Masters in Design Engineering program, focused on transdisciplinary and trans-scalar systems design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based studio that combines design and data for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of the Future, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others.
ABOUT
is curated by:
Sasha Krieger
Arthur Loeb Design Science Teaching Collection & Archive Fellow
Jerome Arul
Peter Dean
Benedict Gagliardi
Alexandra Ionescu
Kyna Leski
Aliza Leventhal
Stephen Metcalf
Margot McIlwain Nishimura
Alecia Underhill
Graduates Assistants:
Sheetal Agrawal (Exhibition Design)
Jo Zixuan (Graphic Design)
Contact
designscience@risd.edu
Rhode Island School of Design
@RISD1877
20 Washington Place, Providence,
RI 02903-1358, USA
designscience@risd.edu
Rhode Island School of Design
@RISD1877
20 Washington Place, Providence,
RI 02903-1358, USA