![]() Dedication Introduction Dan Ariely Walter Bender Steve Benton Bruce Blumberg V. Michael Bove, Jr. Cynthia Breazeal Ike Chuang Chris Csikszentmihályi Glorianna Davenport Judith Donath Neil Gershenfeld Hiroshi Ishii Joe Jacobson Andy Lippman Tod Machover John Maeda Scott Manalis Marvin Minsky William J. Mitchell Seymour Papert Joe Paradiso Sandy Pentland Rosalind Picard Mitchel Resnick Deb Roy Chris Schmandt Ted Selker Barry Vercoe |
William J. MitchellWe make our cities, then our cities make us, and so on recursively. In the end, we are what we live in. So I look for ways to create great spaces, buildings, and cities, using the new means available to us in the twenty-first century. Ancient buildings had structural skeletons to hold them up and protective skins to keep out the weather and the bad guys. In the early industrial era, buildings acquired mechanical physiologiesincreasingly elaborate systems for circulating air and water, supplying energy, and sucking out waste. Now, with networking, sensors, and embedded intelligence, buildings are getting electronic nervous systems. They are becoming less like fossils, more like living organisms.
Our buildings and cities are no longer just dumb piles of brick or stone. Nor are they the mechanically produced, mechanically augmented "machines for living" imagined by early modern architects. They can take unfamiliar forms, serve unprecedented functions, and delight us in unexpected ways. We need to understand, through inventive exploration and critical analysis, the emerging social and cultural opportunities that they represent. Favorite recent read: Australian poet Les Murray's Conscious and Verbal |
Copyright 2003 MIT Media Laboratory; Image Suguru Ishizaki |