IIT talks innovation at "Infrastructures of Creativity" conference
The Benjamin Franklin Project at IIT hosted an interdisciplinary conference on April 10 and 11, bringing researchers and professionals from around the country together for a series of panels and lectures centered around the common theme of innovation.
The event, titled "Infrastructures of Creativity: A Conference on Institutions and Innovation in the 18th and 21st Centuries," was made possible through a partnership between IIT Sociology Professor Christena Nippert-Eng, who serves as the director of the Benjamin Franklin Project, and the Jack Miller Center. The conference also received support from the John Templeton Foundation and the Brinson Foundation.
In addition to being directed by Nippert-Eng, IIT visiting assistant professors Benjamin Lynerd and Carolyn Purnell also teach select course offerings through the Benjamin Franklin Project. All three professors were integral in the planning and execution of the "Infrastructures of Creativity" conference, which is one event in a multi-year series of special events and courses offered at the IIT campus through the Benjamin Franklin Project.
The conference's theme of innovation was inspired by commonalities between the nation’s founding and today’s era of technology, according to Purnell.
“The Benjamin Franklin Project is dedicated in large part to showing how the ideas of the Enlightenment are still relevant to today's world, and the eighteenth century was a time of intense creativity, experimentation, and optimism.” Purnell said. “The technological landscape of today, in many ways, resembles that of the past, and we kept noticing a number of shared principles, approaches, and mindsets. Bringing these innovative concepts to the fore seemed like a fruitful way to consider the relationship between the present and the past.”
Lynerd added that the concept of innovation is “the idée fixe of the twenty-first century” highly embraced at IIT.
“We need to look no further than our own campus, which is planning to build an entire Innovation Center in the next couple of years,” Lynerd said. “But the concept also has a rich history and a lot of complexities wrapped up in it, and we thought it would be a good idea to explore some of that texture for a couple of days [through the conference].”
Among guest lecturers at the conference, Lynerd said, were experts from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, sociologists, economists, designers, philosophers, political scientists, art historians, museum curators, and research directors at Intel and Google.
“To have the concept of innovation teased out within a brain trust this diverse is pretty breathtaking,” said Lynerd, who served as a moderator at the conference.
A number of additional faculty members from IIT's Department of Social Sciences participated as speakers and moderators at the conference as well, including political science professors Daniel Bliss, Laura Hosman, and Matthew Shapiro; and sociology professors Noah McClain, Nippert-Eng and Ullica Segerstrale.
“We were delighted at the warm, collegial atmosphere and the intense intellectual excitement that the conference seemed to foster,” Purnell said. “It was a truly energizing event, and we couldn't be more grateful to everyone at IIT who helped make an event like this possible.”
Pictured: IIT Professor Benjamin Lynerd moderates a panel titled, "The Art of Working the Boundaries" on Thursday, April 10.
