Twenty Years
Twenty years ago this weekend, I first arrived in Boston. I was coming from San Francisco, where I’d been living happily and planned to stay indefinitely.
But the plan to stay had changed when earlier in the year, I’d received a voice mail at work from John Maeda. “I was wondering if, ahh… you might be, ahh… still interested in applying for the Media Lab this fall…”
My application had been turned down the year before, putting me on the track to finish up at Carnegie Mellon and move to San Francisco to take a job with Netscape, which was—at the time of the phone call—a couple weeks into imploding in the face of behavior from Microsoft that would require some court time, combined with the internal arrogance of a startup that had grown incredibly successful and all the mismanagement that comes with it.

So I’d spent the previous weeks watching Netscape lay off my friends and so many of the coworkers who helped me get work done and generally made it a better place. It had been a miserable time, but I was still committed to sticking it out and getting things done. The lousier parts of the previous weeks—friends crying in their cubicles on the day they were laid off, and me realizing that the politically savvy do-nothings were being kept around—were like every bad 90s movie. I didn’t want that to cloud my judgement about next steps, so I hesitated.
I had a week to decide. Friends were supportive and listened patiently while I went in circles about the decision. I was really happy out West and not interested in a move. MIT felt like a collection of modernist-brutalist buildings surrounded by a pasture of concrete. Being turned down exactly a year prior was still pretty fresh. But as soon as I decided to make the trip, my roommate Madison burst out, “Finally. What the f*k is wrong with you? I was going to put a foot in your a** if you didn’t come to your f*ing senses…” and spent the rest of the time mocking my whining of the previous week.

A friend agreed to join me for the trip, and in the interest of taking it all in, we planned a route from San Francisco, over to Lake Tahoe, up to Yellowstone, back down through Yellowstone, then across South Dakota and Iowa on our way to a stop in Michigan to see my parents, then over to Pittsburgh (my co-conspirator was finishing up at Carnegie Mellon and we had to collect belongings), then East again to Washington, D.C. to pick up another car, then straight North to Boston. By “straight” meaning, “hey look, this I-95 highway—it goes all the way up!”
What’ll that be, a week?
Even with that nonsensical route, what eventually made it a two-week trip was that my car broke down as we were heading through the hills in Yellowstone. Making frequent stops on our way out of the park to cool the engine, we rolled into Rapid City, South Dakota on a Friday evening to a stunning sunset and a truck making its way up and down the main street blaring from a megaphone to advertise a sort of car-smashing rodeo event that would be breaking the Old West silence that evening.

We were hoping to make it just a little further East, but the car gave up as we left the parking lot the next morning. We got a tow to a repair shop just before it closed at noon. The helpful owner, wearing a Sinclair Oil hat and having pity on the two clueless 23-year-olds, promptly got on the phone trying to track down replacement parts. Even if the part were available, the nearest dealer was a few hundred miles away, and everything was closing up for the weekend. Just a few days into our trip, we were looking at a four day delay—parts ordered on Monday to arrive sometime Tuesday.

We left the helpful man in the green hat to go find food. As we made our way off we could hear him yelling into the phone… “You have any condensers on ya… fer a ’92 Saab? [long pause] A SAAAAAAAAAAAAB.”
It was enough to give the impression that Swedish automobiles weren’t often seen in that part of the country. That perhaps a cross-country trip in an older-model vehicle best known for its abysmal repair records even more than its uniqueness wasn’t the hardiest or most sensible conveyance for a romp of a few thousand miles.

Fighting off the disappointment of being stuck, we set about planning short trips in the area. Luckily the Wind Caves (amazing), Mt. Rushmore (exciting for this North by Northwest fan, but odd and sad in person, realizing that people saw this beautiful rock and their response was “let’s carve our faces in it”), the Crazy Horse monument (sadder as a response to Rushmore), and the Badlands (back to amazing) were all nearby.

Our pace quickened a bit once we got back underway that Tuesday, but we still had the majority of our driving to do. Without getting into the rest of the story (except to recommend the cross-country trip to anyone considering it) we found ourselves in Boston after two full weeks, quite a bit poorer for hotels and car repairs, but intact and having suffered only one real argument for the whole trip.
It was Saturday night and we couldn’t find my new street, Concord Ave, which according to my tiny map, seemed to connect to Harvard Square. Around and around we went, asking people if they knew where CON-CHORD avenue could be found. It didn’t help that we were pronouncing it like the plane, instead of CON-CURD, or the more locally appropriate CON-CUD (said about four times faster than I was attempting). In the process, we even saw a guy with a sweater tied around his shoulders. It may have been the long drive, but I was impressed to see a living, breathing Harvard stereotype in just my first hour in the neighborhood.

We spent an hour dizzily circling the rotary in Harvard Square. What the hell is a rotary? On a final spin, we happened to see a tiny piece of text that suggested that Concord Ave was in the same direction as Garden Street. Turns out Garden Street becomes Concord Ave a few blocks from Harvard Square, a fact that my tiny map had deemed unworthy to share with us.
The next morning my new roommate, a close college friend, took me to breakfast and I got to see Boston driving (and parking) first-hand. I held on tightly in the front seat and vowed to drive as little as possible that year. These people think this is a sport.
Still a week from registration day for classes, I found myself milling about Cambridge on Monday morning. I thought I might try the subway (the “T”), and oh look—Kendall/MIT—that must be my stop. I seemed to recall it from when I was out visiting a year and a half prior. I bought a token (a token!) and made my way to Kendall and finally the Media Lab. Perhaps John Maeda will be here. I should drop in and say hello.
My new advisor was indeed there and we sat down in his office for a bit. “We have a magazine editor visiting in a few days; think you can put something together?”
There was a pause while I looked at him a little blankly. It seemed like he might be joking. I’d just figured out how to use the T.
“Hahahaha,” he laughed, and we continue chatting. Having not seen me since I was in the throes of final projects at Carnegie Mellon, he said “You look… different.” Different? “You look… tan… healthy?” As a fair-skinned, orange-haired Northern European mutt, I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of such a thing before or since. But living in San Francisco had probably provided more Vitamin D than CMU’s senior design studio in the bowels of Margaret Morrison or the computer science labs in Wean Hall (where the ‘ground’ floor entrance is on 5, with 4 floors beneath it). This was my first lesson of working with John—he’d never shy from speaking whatever came to mind.
John told me about the Design By Numbers programming language he’d just finished, and the book that was almost done. I was furiously making mental notes. He spoke a bit about what some of the other grad students were up to. I don’t recall if he asked about my research plans, though if he didn’t, it would have been out of character. And when we were done, he said:
“So… what do you think you can do for Thursday?”
He hadn’t been joking. And so this would be my second lesson of the day: John loved deadlines. The more challenging, the better.
Instead of heading back to my apartment to unpack, I was directed to a chair near an SGI workstation. Somebody helped me get up and running. I found out that my new email was already active and that in fact, John had been trying to get in touch with me and the other two who were starting at the same time, Elise Co and Golan Levin. Over the next 24 hours, they each emerged, and along with a few other ACG members like Peter Cho, we kicked off the first of many, many late nights at the Lab—still days before the semester had begun.
Dave Small dropped by to help us use his C++ and OpenGL library for building our work. I made some lame 3D type experiments but John thought they looked too much like Peter Cho’s work so he yanked me away from that. This was lesson three: nobody should be doing work that might look remotely like someone else’s in the group. Everyone needed their own lane, which meant fresher work, but also no time wasted with finger-pointing about ideas being ripped off. As a group, he wouldn’t even let us do 2D work—because he did 2D. All of our own work had to be 3D.
A few days later we had our demos for our guest, Chee Pearlman, who was editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine. Eight issues a year, this was something that we pored over in studio back at Carnegie Mellon. And here in my first week at MIT, we had the opportunity to have work featured there.
I’m fairly certain none of the projects I shared made it into the piece, but Chee would return two years later to select my work to be showcased as part of the “The I.D. Forty: 40 Designers under 30” and it would be a surprisingly pivotal moment because it provided the smallest nudge that maybe this is getting somewhere, and a Ph.D. might not be such a bad idea after all. Even my family relaxed a little: on seeing my work in a magazine, they figured that even if they didn’t understand it, someone else seemed to be appreciating it.

I continued for another four years at the Media Lab and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that drew several interests together, applying them to genetics in particular. That helped land me a postdoc in genetics. My work caught the attention of the Design Department at my alma mater at Carnegie Mellon and I was offered the opportunity to return for a year. Once back in Boston, I continued freelance work and writing books about Processing, a project I’d started five years earlier with Casey Reas while he was on his way out of town. It was taking on a life of its own due to its growing community, and in spite of its status as a “side” project.
Perhaps most importantly, in the months before I went back to CMU, I’d also started dating Shannon. After we’d been dating just a few months, she gamely agreed to a U-Haul ride to Pittsburgh with all of our belongings. In a few weeks, we’ll celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary.
I grew to love Boston. I didn’t enjoy it the the first year. My first impression was that people were as cranky as New Yorkers but there was less to do. October brought back my favorite season (which had been absent in San Francisco), but as much as I enjoyed properly crisp air and the leaves changing, the sun was well into setting by 4pm. This was a far cry from the sunshine of living a couple blocks from Washington Square Park.


The shift began when I joined the rowing team and began spending more time on the Charles River, with Cambridge on one side and Boston on the other. As my network of friends expanded, going out got a lot more interesting. And unlike San Francisco, overheard restaurant conversations were about astrophysics and biology and engineering, instead of dot-coms and who was getting rich in the Valley. I learned that the crankiest of the people were often the kindest, and now have an ex-Marine, career policeman as a father-in-law to prove it.
When I was leaving San Francisco, I was quick to tell everyone that I’d be back in two short years. But fortunately for me, the last 20 years has completely undermined that plan.
For the last week I’ve been watching the moving trucks come and go, and I love thinking that a few thousand more people are about to have similar opportunities. And if that’s you, and you’re getting started here in New England, let me be the first cranky Bostonian to say:
Welcome to Boston.
