Joe Jacobson

Like many of my colleagues, I feel that at the end of the day our group is interested in carrying out research that has the potential to have a positive impact on people's lives. The initial research we carried out on electronic paper was motivated, in large part, by the question of whether it might be possible to create a $10 e-book, which might come pre-loaded with something like 1,000 books. At that price, you could imagine giving one to every child on the planet.

Our work in personal fabrication—which aims to give an individual the equivalent of a billion-dollar chip fab on a desktop—was motivated by the idea of being able to allow many people to be creative in a space, namely that of atoms, where now only a very few people can play. Along those lines, much of our recent research involves creating and controlling structures at the molecular-size scale.

Ultimately, I feel that helping to create an optimally interesting world is what it is all about. One of the reasons I came to MIT, and to the Media Lab, was because there were so many people working in so many disparate fields. Inevitably, almost every week, there is something interesting to hear about or see. Can we ever get to the point where there is something truly amazing every day? I feel that this should be possible if we can get as many folks as possible involved in the creative process: every person on the planet has a unique contribution to make. In the words of Daniel Webster, "Let us ... see whether we also in our day and generation may not perform something worthy to be remembered."*

*Spoken at the entrance to the United States House of Representatives on the occasion of the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument, 1825

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