The N Square Innovation Summit at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will bring together a network of innovators collaborating on new solutions to nuclear weapons threat. The summit will comprise master classes in design and topic-specific workshops, culminating in Signals for the Future: New Ways to Tackle Nuclear Risk, an exhibition and discussion.
Signals for the Future, the capstone event of the summit, will take place on November 15 at RISD. The exhibition will showcase new tools and ideas developed by members of the inaugural cohort of fellows from the N Square Innovators Network (NSIN). NSIN is a community of cross-sector leaders - data scientists, nuclear weapons experts, designers, historians, technologists, policy experts, diplomats, Hollywood filmmakers and producers, and many others - working to prototype and pilot breakthrough approaches to nuclear proliferation while accelerating achievement of international nuclear arms control and disarmament objectives. The exhibition opening will feature presentations of key ideas, followed by a discussion with philanthropists in the nuclear threat reduction field.
"Design can contribute to new thinking around foreign policy and global security, but designers can't do it alone. We can't even come close to having an impact until we understand the culture and constraints of the disciplines that have devoted their careers to these issues," commented Tom Weis, assistant professor, RISD Industrial Design. "The collaboration with N Square and the Innovation Summit will help bridge this gap by bringing together experts from varied fields eager to collaborate with designers to explore new approaches to very complex problems. Design alone won't save the world - but given a seat at the table, it just might contribute in ways we've yet to imagine."
The N Square Innovation Summit at RISD & Signals for the Future will explore how we might collaboratively: use open source data to identify, track, understand and prevent security breaches that pose a threat to humanity; engage new people, facilitate new partnerships and accelerate the development, integration and adoption of new ideas and approaches related to nuclear threat reduction; use cultural pressure and social influence to spark innovation and create policy changes that reduce or eliminate nuclear danger; and improve engagement by non-expert citizens and private sector actors to reduce global risks, better articulate particular problems and opportunities and provide them with tools for active engagement.