We here at Scout have been hard at work organizing Interventions: Shift, our 8th annual conference on design! Join us on March 23, 2025, at the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC) for a day of reflection and celebration, where conventions break, perspectives shift, and disability offers a powerful lens for reimagining the world. Through bold ideas, unexpected collaborations, and hands-on exploration, we’ll highlight how diverse perspectives drive creativity and innovation. With insights from everyday life-hacks, co-design practices, and disability studies, we’ll demonstrate how design by and with disability enriches the creative process. Keynote talks, panels, immersive workshops, and boundary-pushing showcases will challenge assumptions, reveal ingenuity in the everyday, and shift perspectives. This is more than a conference — it’s a call to rethink the spaces, systems, and experiences we create. Are you ready to shift with us? Be part of the conversation by following us on Instagram @interventionsbyscout.

https://www.interventions.design/

Speakers

Ciara Morley — Director of User Experience Design for the UXD Accessibility team at Fidelity.
Sara Hendren — Artist, design researcher, Associate Professor at Northeastern University, and the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, a book exploring the places where disability shows up in design at all scales.
Lee Moreau — Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University and the founder and director of Other Tomorrows, a design and strategy studio based in Boston. Previously, Lee was the VP of Design at EPAM Continuum, Director of Environments at 2×4, and worked as a designer at IDEO and at the Rockwell Group.
Jonah Goldsaito — Principal Designer at Khan Academy, Jonah is focused on giving classrooms around the world transformative new powers using AI developed at Khan Academy.
Rua M. Willliams — Assistant Professor at Purdue University and former Just Tech Fellow (2022-2024) with the Social Science RESEARCH Council. As PI of the CoLiberation Lab, Dr. Williams’s work explores how disabled people imagine and build their own sociotechnical worlds, and investigate how technology policy and research practice interact to disrupt disabled people’s bodily autonomy and access to meaningful public life.
Andrew Leland — Author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in memoir and named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, NPR, and others.
Chrissy Glover — Assistive technology designer and educator, previously CEO and co-founder of Imago Rehab, a Wyss Institute spinoff health tech startup focused on providing innovative rehabilitation solutions for stroke survivors.
Paul DeFazio — Blind/low-vision architect, designer, and multidisciplinary artist at the Institute for Human Centered Design and the Critical Design Lab, a multi-disciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative rooted in disability culture.
Manasi Vaidya — User experience researcher at MathWorks, focusing on making MATLAB more accessible; previously at MIT AgeLab.
Joe Walsh — President of Adaptive Sports New England, Joe is a two-time Paralympian in cross country skiing and former Managing Director of Paralympics for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC). Joe served as Vice President of the International Blind Sports Federation from 2013-2017 and was the first Paralympic athlete representative elected to the USOPC Athletes’ Advisory Council and Board of Directors.
Fatimah Aure — Senior Manager, Networks, at The Kelsey’s, Fatimah leads The Kelsey’s efforts to grow the field of leaders, advocates and champions of disability-forward housing solutions.
Darcy Gordon — Instructor of Blended & Online Learning Initiatives at MIT, Darcy blends her pedagogical and scientific expertise to foster authentic learning experiences online and broaden participation in teaching and learning biology.
Rebecca Erde — Designer, Fabricator, and Educator at Pratt Institute, whose work explores design for resilience and mental health.