What i learned at MIT
(in a few hours at the media lab.)
i got to spend the day with my friend Kevin Slavin at the MIT Media Lab this past Tuesday, and outside of the excitement i think anyone would get at the prospect of getting taken behind those doors that say “invited guests only past this point” i was a bit worried about what i would find.
academia has never been my strong suit. i got out of high school (mostly) because the administration didn’t want to deal with me, i’ve managed to talk my way into after getting rejected, then rapidly drop out of, a few universities. As a designer a degree really never meant much to me since people were already paying me to do what i loved, so i went through “learning on the job” and a whole lot of trial and error combined with what probably amounted to a community college degree’s worth of funds thrown at barnes and noble. however as i got more involved in the technical side of the web, the more i became concerned with my lack of a formal college education, technology and stupid people rarely mix. though i like to think i’ve moved past this (i’ve hired and paid the salaries of graduates of some of the finest universities, i’ve taught programs from certificate, to undergraduate to executive education, etc.) when confronted with the reality of being within schools or actively getting above my academic grade i sort of freak out.
so here i was walking into a building full of some of the brightest people in the world to get a peek at, and talk to the people solving the problems we didn’t even know existed yet. as you walk through the sensors group at the media lab you see countless things that your peers having been working on the past few quarters, you may even make a comment about how “so and so is working on this for this client right now”, then you’re informed that was made 15 years ago by a student with a great idea who ultimately realized it wasn’t the right solution. this is the moment you realize you’re completely out of your environment. whereas your job is to rapidly think about problems and create on the fly, deployable solutions, these people are thinking about every minute detail and not just solve the problem, but study the solution and the effects it will have on the world.
the people i had the chance to speak with were so pure in their research and their ideas that even my commercialized skew towards technology didn’t faze them, as i mused about the applications of one student’s project in the out of home space she kept the focus of her work and continually suggested that i give it a try and let her know what the response was. it’s amazing to see when money isn’t the motivator, but invention and understanding is. it’s also humbling to sit down with someone and talk about a technology that you’re using to help clients sell more sugary soda water and bad credit lines that they are using in the spaces of urban planning and population control . . . it crosses into embarrassing when you tell them the story of how you evolved from the same headspace into said soda sales and credit line pushing. however this is a place of no judgement, these are people creating for the world and not for a client. there’s no outcome other than the future, it’s what a lab really is. (and what it should be to everyone, not just a buzzword we slap at the end of what we’re doing when we’re not making iOS apps)
i’ll save the part about sitting in on Ed Boyden’s chat about what the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering is doing and how they’re reverse engineering the brain for another post, let’s just say i walked out of it wishing i had pursued above mentioned degree so i could work on problems that complex, if even from an experience and interface POV.
these are the true innovators. we spend so much time talking about invention, change, the future, etc. but the reality is that we’re still just selling the present. i’ll be the first to admit it’s unfair to compare the academic space to the commercial space, but if we want to be inventors of the future, i think we need to look into these kinds of halls much closer than we already do.
