Reflecting on the Inaugural Day of Design

As we look forward to this year's Day of Design: Adapt, we’re reflecting on the connections and creativity from 2025’s inaugural event.

Cultivating interdisciplinary design, inside and out of the traditional classroom

Last year's Day of Design: Connect, held at the MIT Museum, brought together an interdisciplinary group of educators from greater Boston and beyond. Participants reflected the range of spaces where design education happens today, inside and out of the traditional classroom -- public districts; vocational and technical schools; and nonprofits and out-of-school-time organizations. Educators’ areas of focus covered STEM, the arts, and the humanities, representing math, science, English, and social studies, as well as engineering; computer science; graphic and fashion design; robotics; library science; and edtech/AI integration.

Their wide-ranging experience encouraged the day’s rich, cross-disciplinary conversations and engaging hands-on workshops, as educators who wouldn’t typically learn together had the opportunity to discover common ground in shared design skills.

Offering flexible design frameworks for K-12 education

Each Day of Design event is grounded in key skills, and 2025 focused on the building blocks of storytelling, iteration, and collaboration.

The afternoon opened with an interdisciplinary panel of MIT faculty -- Sara Brown (Music and Theater Arts), Muriel Médard (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), Sebastian Lourido (Biology), and Justin Reich (Comparative Media Studies/Writing) -- who spoke to how those three skills show up in their own vastly different fields.

Participants then broke into workshops designed around the three skills, led by facilitators from the MIT’s Edgerton Center, D-Lab, Lifelong Kindergarten group, and IDEO, as well as NuVu Studio and the Fab Foundation, each bringing a unique approach to hands-on design education.

The day closed with a communal dinner at the Welcome Center, giving educators from such different corners of the K-12 world a chance to continue the conversation informally.

Join us in 2026!

Interested in bringing joyful, hands-on design activities into your classroom? Looking for ways to challenge yourself and your students to think collaboratively and creatively? Join us for the 2026 Day of Design on October 28!

This year we’re focusing on three design mindsets that are important when we think about our students adapting to a rapidly changing world: “beginner’s mind,” “flexible thinking,” and “bias towards action.”

This event is free, but attendance is by application to ensure a balanced mix of perspectives and subject areas.