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Mayor Sam Adams is kicking off the Industrial Design Society of America’s tonight at 7 p.m. at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower, located at 921 S.W. 6^th Ave.

Accompanying Mayor Adams during the opening event will be presentations by Sohrab Vossoughi, chair of the conference and founder of Ziba Design, and Eric Anderson, president of the IDSA board of directors. And right after the opening remarks, the first keynote speaker, Grace Bonney, founder and editor of the , will take the stage.

“I’ve been going to this event for over 20 years and I have never seen a mayor speak at one,” said Vossoughi. “This is a telling sign of how both the Portland community and the city government embrace design and the creative class.”

This year’s conference, the first time ever held in the Pacific Northwest, is titled, DIY Design: Threat or Opportunity? The conference runs from today through Saturday and features over 70 speakers.

Speakers range from Portland natives to designers from New Zealand. In order to tackle the topic of do-it-yourself design the planning committee has brought together supporters of the DIY industry, like Vanessa Bertozzi, director of community and education at , and big industry folk, like Muki Hansteen Izora, senior design researcher with Intel.

“Mayor Adams has always been an advocate of creativity and using creative clusters as an economic driver,” he said. “Hopefully some designers will see this over the rest of the week and think about opportunities in Portland in the future.”