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This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of
Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by
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Joi Ito, 46-year-old director of MIT's
Media Lab since last September, has just selected the faculty's newest outpost: the troubled streets of downtown Detroit. "
I was in a rough neighbourhood there yesterday, where there are miles and miles of bombed out buildings, and it just blows your mind to see a bunch of kids building urban farms," he says back in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "
They have no streetlights. If you connect a streetlight to the grid, it gets controlled by the city and regulated. So they're thinking, how can we create solar-powered low-cost streetlights, as that will lower crime? They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
Welcome to Ito's vision for opening up the 27-year-old Media Lab, one in which -- for example -- urban agriculture might be researched in Detroit; the arts in Chicago; coding in London; and in which any bright talent anywhere, academically qualified or not, can be part of the world's leading "antidisciplinary" research lab. "Opening up the lab is more about expanding our reach and creating our network," explains Ito, appointed director in April 2011. His prior career spans venture capital and angel investing,
Creative Commons and the
Mozilla Foundation, nightclub DJing and cofounding the first Japanese internet service provider -- but he never actually earned an academic degree. Although, as Ito sees it, the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress. "In the old days, being relevant was writing academic papers. Today, if people can't find you on the internet, if they're not talking about you in Rwanda, you're irrelevant. That's the worst thing in the world for any researcher. The people inventing things might be in Kenya, and they go to the internet and search. Funders do the same thing. The old, traditional academic channel is not a good channel for attracting attention, funding, people, or preventing other people from competing with you.
"Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
By opening up the Media Lab, Ito hopes to move closer towards his goal of "a world with seven billion teachers", where smart crowds, adopting a resilient approach and a rebellious spirit, solve some of the world's great problems. His is a world of networks and ecosystems, in which unconstrained creativity can tackle everything from infant mortality to climate change. "We want to take the DNA [of the lab], the secret sauce, and drop it into communities, into companies, into governments," he says. "It's my mission, our mission, to spread that DNA. You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."
The lab, opened in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner as part of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, was intended from the start to foster antidisciplinary thinking. It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits." The same document -- written the year the Apple Mac was born -- stated: "Today, computers are awkward, if not debilitating, to use. The average so-called personal computer arrives with unreadable documentation, the bulk and weight of which usually surpass that of the machine itself." So how does the lab remain relevant in an era of sentient, voice-recognising and multi-sensor-embedded smartphones?
To Ito, that role is not about creating spun-out products -- although
celebrated products spawned by the lab include Guitar Hero, the Kindle, the XO laptop, LEGO Mindstorms, and the foldable CityCar. As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "
is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary". And that means t
urning the lab into a platform rather than a physical place. "
Nicholas comes from a slightly top-down, design-led background. I come from a very unorthodox community-building place --Creative Commons, Mozilla, Witness, Global Voices -- which are all about creating movements. To me there's a science to community building. If you extend the Media Lab as a network, and bring in different types of partners and nonprofits, and create more diversity, the lab itself could become a mission, a movement. People think of the lab as a lot of smart people in a really cool-looking building making really cool gadgets. But I want it to have a much stronger normative political message -- a lot of the kids at the Media Lab today don't want to make more money, don't want to become immortal, they just want to figure out how to fix this unhealthy system we have. There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."
And that will come from pursuing distinctly unconventional research goals. "We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity. [Conventional] peer review and scholarship play by predetermined rules -- that five other people agree that what you're doing is interesting. Here, even if you're the only person in the world who thinks something's interesting, you can do it. Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."
During a two-day "Sponsor Meeting" at the lab in late April -- open to a few hundred Media Lab friends and financial backers, ranging from BT to Bank of America, Hasbro to Hallmark Cards -- Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."
Because all the rules have been torn up. "Today any kind of science that's used to predict the future becomes useless. The world is no longer incremental or linear. A lot of risks come from the periphery, not what you're focused on. In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."
Ito himself is a product of the periphery. Born in
Kyoto, he moved as a child to Canada and then Michigan. Although he attended
Tufts and the University of Chicago, he dropped out before completing a degree, frustrated at the limitations of conventional teaching. Yet, partly through his research-scientist father, he had access to academics while growing up: "
When I was in high school most of my learning came from college professors -- I'd just email professors in Berkeley and MIT. I figured out a way to cobble together an education using academic institutions without actually getting a degree. So I'm an antidisciplinary self-made academic. Because I've come from the outside, I'm more focused on learning than education."
"My problem is I'm interested in everything -- I have a lack of focus," says Ito. "But my bug turns into a feature at the lab. Because the Media Lab is interested in everything. My main skill is connecting and trading contacts. When you have 350 random projects and 26 groups and 75 members [at the lab], the director needs to create context, make connections, pull the pieces together. My favourite thing is managing communities and creating energy. That's really what the Media Lab is -- it reminds me of an open-source community like Mozilla." He knows he will have succeeded when "the Media Lab name is as ubiquitous as the word internet".
He has convened an advisory council made up of friends and contacts, including
TED's June Cohen ("
It's no accident that June is one of our advisers. There's a lot we can learn from TED, the way the branding works and the platforms"); Grey-lock's
Reid Hoffman; writer
Seth Godin;
Alberto Ibargüen of the
Knight Foundation;
Michelle Kydd Lee of the
CAA Foundation; and -- his mentor on "wisdom" --
Peter Gabriel. So who sets the lab's broad priorities? "
I'm working with the faculty to come up with the things they're interested in," Ito says. "
The seven billion teachers, or Tod Machover wanting to make the eighth art -- these initiatives we're building on internally. But we'll also need the funding. Probably a third of my energy goes towards fundraising. So the priorities will be set by what are three to six big stories. One of the problems we have right now is there are 26 groups and 350 projects. The ones that become priorities will be those that can attract the funding, but also have the uniqueness, impact and magic. There's also pattern recognition: when you go mushroom hunting, you can't focus or you won't spot the mushrooms. It's when you stop looking that the mushroom patterns pop out. A lot of the priority setting isn't about laser focus. It's that combination of execution and peripheral vision. Part of our job is about picking priorities that others don't do -- if you can do what you do anywhere else, you shouldn't be at the Media Lab. You have to be a true misfit."
Ito, who married Mizuka Kurogane four years ago in Japan, has pledged to travel less -- two years ago, a Wired Infoporn (10.10) showed that between 1 January 2009 and 5 April 2010, he was away from home for 372 out of 460 days. "This year I barely left Boston for six months," he says. "I'll probably start travelling more again, but not as intensely as it used to me. Before, my job was running around mostly making connections. Now at the Media Lab I pick the colour of the furniture and make hires -- lots of face to face stuff." He's also on various boards, including those of TheNew York Times, the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
What about resistance to change as he imposes his ideas? "Surprisingly, knock on wood [he laughs], people are excited about the direction we're going. I listen a lot, I'm not pushing the lab in a direction it doesn't want to go. My background is community development. And MIT as an institution is trying to constantly reinvent itself. So far so good. We'll see if it's a honeymoon period or long-term relationship."
Ito was originally rejected for the role because he lacked academic credentials. "
The search committee said out of courtesy that I should send him an email appreciating his interest but that he didn't qualify,"
Nicholas Negroponte recalls over breakfast at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. "
Six months later, we came up empty, with no candidate. And Joi's name floated back to the top of the list. I sent Joi an email -- where are you? He said, I'm in the Bahamas. I said get your ass up to MIT as soon as you can. He came two days later."
Negroponte, director from 1985 to 2000, had been no fan of Ito's predecessor, Frank Moss, who took over in 2006 from Walter Bender. "They brought in the wrong person," Negroponte says bluntly. "The lab went through a five-year period like the dark ages." So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."
What does Negroponte -- the original investor in and a columnist for Wired 20 years ago -- see as the lab's role today? "It has at least three roles," he says. "To do what normal market forces do not do; market forces are great for what's not important in your life. In an organisation like Media Lab, you can take a level of risk that's unparalleled. You can start 40 projects of which only two succeed. VCs can't do that; corporate research can't do that -- because you have this other product line called people. The most interesting ones who come out of the lab have worked on projects that failed. And the third role is its antidisciplinary nature. It's been the only part of MIT that's a lab and an academic department -- we're really church and state. It worked."
What importance does he accord to commercial spinoffs? "
Very small." Take
littleBits, founded by
Media Lab alumna
Ayah Bdeir, which produces modular electronics kits and in which Negroponte is an investor. "
Whether littleBits succeeds or not is inconsequential. I hope she succeeds, as an investment. But startups are perforce small -- you've got to focus, the blinders get narrower. By definition it's not big thinking. I don't measure success by a list of 50 things that were born at the Media Lab -- e-ink; that's not important. The important part is that people were looking at electronic paper, at display techniques -- and whether that particular one worked, it brought us reflective displays in general, and the e-book. It had bigger effects."
Why does he think that efforts to create overseas spinoffs of the lab proved unsuccessful? "There was an attempt to take it to Japan, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, Ireland, India -- you think we'd learn our lesson. None of them took. In the US, there are half a dozen [institutions] that call themselves media labs. And none of them is like it at all. The idea clearly isn't 'generalisable'. It's the uniqueness of MIT -- it's both porous like Swiss cheese, and has an absence of other departments. So nobody when we founded it said, 'Wait a minute, I do that.' When we decided to call it the Media Lab, I remember a meeting in 1983 -- 'You mean media, as in TV, newspapers?' When I said yes, the answer was: 'It's all yours. Good luck.'"
What big problems does Negroponte -- founder of the One Laptop Per Child project -- believe the lab can help solve today? "The biggest is eliminating poverty. How do you have a world of infinite zero-cost energy, infinite zero-cost education, how do you make a creative society -- all these seemingly unrealistic things? Whatever path you take, you know the answer is through technology. In a world where technology is increasingly a bad word, it is up to an organisation like the Media Lab to keep pushing that technological envelope. In our original [1984] paper, it says the Media Lab will be the place where the invention and creative use of new media happen together. Video and TV were invented by engineers, thrown over the fence and used. Photography by contrast was invented by photographers. The entire evolution of photography was led by the people who creatively used it. My argument back in 1980 was that computer science would be like photography. Which at the time was near heresy."
So if he were starting from scratch today, what would be different? First, he says, he would abolish academic tenure. "A terrible thing." Research priorities "would be in synthetic biology, not computing. I'd fill the building with Ed Boydens, and would look to where nature and science inform each other. I'd look in places where Neri [Oxman] spends her time. The fact that she, Ed Boyden and Hugh Herr work together is amazing. I'd look to that for inspiration, whether the lab is a platform, a school of thought -- but probably not a huge campus building. The days of institutions may be over -- it would probably not be a building if we started today." Ito disagrees. "The building and the space and the core faculty are really important -- they're the custodians of the DNA," he says.
"The lab will be a network. You'll find the lab and its fellows, its affiliates, all over the world. I've just picked Billionaire Boys Club designer Christopher Bevans as a fellow of the lab; you'll be able to touch the Media Lab a block away from you in London, in all kinds of networks. Instead of just having large companies as our members, we'll have other academic institutions, and governments, and philanthropists, and arts bodies. You'll see more of the Media Lab in every kind of area."
The Media Lab timeline
1985
Media Lab (cofounded by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner) opens in an IM Pei building.
1990
The lab demonstrates the world's first real-time, moving synthetic hologram.
1994
The lab posts the web's first electric postcard where text and image are "mailed" via the net.
1995
Harmonix is founded by lab alumni Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. It developed Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Central.
1996
Patent filed for e-ink, now used in e-readers such as the Kindle. CSound is developed -- it's capable of delivering an entire Beethoven symphony over the internet in about ten seconds and rendering it in real time at CD quality.
1998
Launch of LEGO Mindstorms, developed in collaboration with the lab. MPEG-4 is released by the International Standards Organisation, featuring Media Lab's Structured Audio sound-processing tech.
2000
Walter Bender succeeds Nicholas Negroponte.
2001
Media Lab Europe opens in Dublin.
2002
Minority Report uses the lab's gesture-recognition tech.
2005
Negroponte announces the "$100 laptop" at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland.
2006
Frank Moss succeeds Walter Bender as director.
2007
World's first robotic ankle-foot prosthesis prototype is introduced.
2008
Nexi -- a mobile, dextrous, social robot -- makes her debut.
2010
The new Media Lab building, designed by Maki and Associates, opens.
2011
Joi Ito becomes Media Lab director.
2012
Hiriko, the commercial version of the lab's folding, stacking electric car, is introduced in Brussels MV.
David Rowan is the editor of wired. He wrote about Rakuten in 09.12
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Epilepsy app (left), epilepsy cap and wrist senor (right)
