IIT to Host “The Infrastructures of Creativity” Innovation Conference
The Benjamin Franklin Project at IIT, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will host a two-day interdisciplinary conference on innovation titled “The Infrastructures of Creativity,” April 10 – 11, in Hermann Hall on IIT’s Main Campus in Chicago.
The Atlantic Enlightenment of the 18th Century ushered in an era of unprecedented innovation and creativity, as well as new types of institutional infrastructures that fostered and informed these creative processes. The conference will consider this historical moment alongside today’s innovation landscape, exploring what it takes for innovation to flourish. Speakers and panelists will also explore how institutional infrastructures inform creativity, its successes, and its failures. “The conference brings together a unique fusion of brainpower – scholars who study patterns of innovations along with some of the leading innovators of our day,” said Ben Lynerd, post-doctoral fellow of the Benjamin Franklin Project. “What we are exploring is not just the human capacity to innovate, but also the social and political conditions that make it possible.”
Keynote speakers:
Genevieve Bell (Director of Interaction and Experience Research at Intel Labs)
Michael Schrage (Sloan School of Management, MIT)
Sociologists Paul Starr (Princeton University) and Fred Block (University of California-Davis)
Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology) P
Public Radio Host Peter Onuf (University of Virginia)
Russell Betts (IIT)
Adrian Johns (University of Chicago)
Lori Andrews (IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law)
The conference’s call for papers has attracted submissions from all over the United States and Europe. Concurrent panel discussions include: Conceptualizing Innovation; The Art of Working the Boundaries; Creative Networks; Tipping Points: Ingenuity in Research, Development and Standards; Everyone’s a Critic: How Theory Drives Artistic Creativity; Contexts of Creativity; Innovation and the Problem of Collective Action; Innovation at the Frontiers of Medical Knowledge; and Social Dimensions of Innovation. The conference is free. However, registration is required for conference meals.
