Built the conference from a blank slate: a first-of-its-kind, student-led conference designed to reconnect Institute of Design alumni with current students around a shared question—how do we interpret the signals shaping what comes next in design?
Owned the project end-to-end for most of its five-month build, from theme and speaker strategy through venue, catering, hybrid production, and the content strategy that carried the event's reach past the room itself.
Co-Chair & Creator
Co-Chair (Daniela Vélez)
Student Committees (5)
Experience Design
Facilitation Design
Project Management
Design Strategy
Project Overview
The Institute of Design had never run an event like this. Alumni were a core part of the school's value proposition, but had drifted from the current student experience, and there was no existing platform for alumni and students to engage. SIGNALS set out to close that gap: a one-day, hybrid conference built around knowledge exchange, cross-generational dialogue, and a shared forward-looking question, aimed at reconnecting alumni to the school while giving students direct access to the people further down their own path.
Project Challenge
Approaching the challenge from a first-year student position, resources, institutional knowledge, and precedent were scarce. We were not only working without a playbook; we also had to identify a single theme compelling enough to resonate with alumni years into their careers and students still finding their footing, re-engage a historically disconnected alumni network, and recruit students to speak and staff the event alongside already demanding academic workloads.
The project gave the ID a working template for reconnecting its alumni base and set a structural precedent—hybrid access and post-event documentation—that shaped how the Institute approached community events going forward.
Attendees (in-person and virtual)
Attracted the highest turnout ID had recorded for this kind of event, built from zero precedent and no prior alumni-engagement platform to draw on.
Recorded sessions
Published and shared content generated over 600 interactions, extending the conference’s reach well beyond the people in the room.
The five-month build moved in four phases.
The first two months were spent almost entirely with Daniela: settling on the shared theme, mapping what each of the four stakeholder groups actually needed from the event, and defining a core planning structure before bringing anyone else in.
Months two through three shifted into outreach — building the speaker and alumni-engagement strategy, securing the venue, and starting marketing — while beginning to pull the broader student committee into concrete pieces of the work.
Month four locked the program itself: confirmed speakers and panelists, catering, and the hybrid production plan, with the wider committee and alumni advisory group now carrying their share of staffing and outreach.
The final month was execution — running the day itself, then immediately turning to documentation and a recap strategy to extend the event's reach in the days that followed.
20 weeks
Key Design Principle
This meant that access and documentation couldn't be treated as logistics—they had to be designed as part of the conference itself, so the event's value didn't end when the room emptied out.
Key Design Principle
This meant that every format decision had to actively manufacture opportunities for dialogue between alumni and students, rather than assume that shared physical space would produce connection on its own.
Conclusion
What stayed with me afterward wasn't any single tactic, but a different way of thinking about leadership itself: less about directing people toward an outcome, and more about designing the conditions—the roles, the framing, the moments of contact—that let people arrive at that outcome together. Structure and trust have to be built at the same time, or neither one holds.
