On Thursday, October 16, 2008 (4pm), as part of Brown University’s Distinguished Lecture Series, RISD President John Maeda spoke in Starr Auditorium, MacMillan Hall (map). For some years the president has explored concepts of simplicity and at Brown he discussed ways to balance simplicity and complexity in business, technology and design — and offered guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Also at Brown, November 7-9, Brown and RISD students (including Tino Chow ‘09 ID) together have organized A Better World by Design, a humanitarian design conference that asks the big question How can we use technology to improve the world? Click here to register for tickets: students $40; non-students $100. See the roster of world-class speakers here. That RISD’s new president should be delivering a lecture and RISD students organizing a conference at our Ivy League neighbor’s house ought to come as no surprise. RISD and Brown have long enjoyed reciprocal arrangements, some of which are formal. For example, students have always been able to take credit-bearing classes at each other’s institutions, use each other’s libraries and athletic facilities and participate in clubs and religious organizations such as Brown-RISD Hillel. More informally (but just as important!), the schools’ adjacent campuses lead quite naturally to social interaction in Providence’s bustling College Hill neighborhood. The RISD-Brown connections are only getting stronger as the two institutions increasingly draw on their complementary strengths to provide students with a range of opportunities to develop and integrate academic and artistic work. In 2007 the schools announced the establishment of the Brown/RISD Dual Degree, a five-year joint BA/BFA program in which students may combine disciplines such as philosophy with sculpture, or art and design with math or anthropology, for example. The first students admitted to the program began their studies this fall. Earlier this fall RISD Director of Library Services Carol Terry and her counterpart at Brown announced yet another new collaboration, the establishment of CHiL (College Hill Libraries). Now students, faculty and staff may borrow — not just browse — books at each other’s libraries. (Bonus for RISD: our library already enjoys a close relationship and shares an online catalog with the historic Providence Athenaeum [1753]; members of the RISD community have reciprocal borrowing privileges there, as well.) As a specific example of the closeness between the two institutions, this fall semester (and for several years previous) RISD illustration students and Brown computer science students together are exploring “Virtual Reality Design for Science” in Brown’s supercomputing and immersive virtual reality lab, known affectionately as the CAVE. The course, taught by RISD Prof. Fritz Drury, with biology and computer science faculty from Brown, examines visual and human-computer interaction design processes for scientific applications in virtual reality: artists and designers learn to interact with scientists in designing and realizing applications and creating designs for scientific purposes. Says RISD student Lincoln Bostian ‘10 IL of his experiences in the CAVE, “it really is a sight to behold!”