Sci Fab ~ Envisioneer & Futurecraft ~ Fall 2019

My MIT Media Lab colleagues Dan Novy, Joe Paradiso and I are (finally) re-offering our Sci Fab class this Fall 2019 starting Monday night September 9th from 7-10pm!

In Sci Fab, we read and watch science fiction, and use the inspiration it provides to envisioneer and futurecraft something epic. First, we explore worldbuilding -- imagining science fictional universes across domains and scales. Second, we focus on exemplar artifacts that iconify those worlds, without violating the laws of physics, and iterate towards functional prototypes.

AI for Impact ~ Spring'19 @ MIT Media Lab...

Together with colleague Ramesh Raskar, I'm co-teaching the AI for Impact seminar this Spring 2019 every Mon afternoon starting Feb 11th from 2:30-4:30a in E15-341, the heart of the MIT Media Lab! Our goal is to bring computational, analytics, and AI techniques to bear on solving problems in the high impact realms of health & wellness, cities & sustainability, across scales of action from each of us as individuals to embracing all of humanity, in both developed and emerging markets alike, all broadly understood.  We want to help students identify top AI opportunities for impact and help make progress towards building prototypes, planning action ventures, and/or better understanding the emerging technology and impact trendscape.  Formerly known as "Imaging Ventures" or “AI Ventures”, this “AI for Impact” class seeks answers to the question:  If you could make almost anything, what's actually most worth making, i.e. what problems are most worth picking?  We believe starting with the right problem is 90% of what makes for great projects and ultimately epic, worthy solutions.

Eclipsed Dreams ~ Future Tourism That Wasn't...

The Atlantic spotlights What Would the Solar Eclipse Look Like From the Moon?

"In 1989, [artist Pat] Rawlings was working on illustrations for a collection of children’s science books by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Using acrylics, he painted a view of a solar eclipse as seen from the moon, and named it after the date when the next eclipse would cross over the continental United States: August 21, 2017. This week, Rawlings tweeted a photo of the painting, which is at the top of this story. “I actually thought 28 years in the future tourists might watch the eclipse from the Moon,” he wrote. “Sigh.”

P.S. Here's the real thing from Mon 8/21/2017...

"Scientists at UW–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) observed the eclipse through the eye of one of the world’s most advanced weather satellites, GOES-16. The eclipse images from the satellite were taken at a rate of one every five minutes. Stitched together, the images show the shadow of the moon tracking west to east across the continental United States."

Plus here's a previous eclipse seen in March 2016 over ASEAN + Pacific region via the Himawari-8 Spacecraft in Geostationary orbit!

Fall 2016 @ MIT ~ Ventures, Places, Futures!

I'm co-teaching a very cool folio of MIT class offerings this Fall 2016 and hope you'll either consider joining us or spreading the word about particularly relevant offerings to great students and colleagues who you think might appreciate them! These cluster into three big categories: Transformational Ventures, Creative Places, and Emergent Futures. Details below & online...  

• Development Ventures ~ Thu 10a-12n E14-633 ~ 15.375/EC.731/MAS.665 ~ http://developmentventures.org ~ Towards the entrepreneurial deployment of emerging market innovations solving problems faced by at least a Billion people worldwide in developing countries and underserved communities. First class: Thu 9/8  
• Revolutionary Ventures ~ Thu 2-4p E15-341 ~ 9.455/15.128/20.454/MAS.883 ~ http://revolutionaryventures.org ~ Exploring personal entrepreneurial strategies and envisioning and building transformative ideas and organizations to initiate and/or accelerate bold engineering revolutions. Email reven@media.mit.edu ASAP if interested. First class: Thu 9/8  
• Future Commerce (H1) ~ Tue 1-2:30p E14-633 ~ MAS.s71/15.s73 ~ http://mitfuturecommerce.org ~ New Media meets Markets & Finance. First class: Tue 9/13 (Half Semester offering)  
• Future Health (H2) ~ Tue 1-2:30p E14-633 ~ MAS.s72/15.s74 ~ http://mitfuturehealth.org ~ New Media meets Medicine & Wellness. First class: Tue 11/1 (Second Half of semester)  
• Understanding MIT ~ Tue 4-6p 9-450A ~ 11.s941 ~ http://understandingmit.org ~ Special seminar on the challenges of designing and building research universities and crafting conditions for a supportive, vibrant, and entrepreneurial learning community. First class: Tue 9/13  
• Model Cities ~ Wed 2-5p E15-359 ~ MAS.552/4.557 ~ http://mitmodelcities.org ~ Simulating & Visualizing Entrepreneurial, Innovative, & Creative Urban Hotspots. First class: Wed 9/7  
• SciFab 2050 ~ Tue 7-9p E15-359 ~ MAS.s60 ~ http://scifab2050.org/ ~ An informal seminar using Science Fiction, extrapolation, simulation, and imagination to envision what our world might be like in 2050. Email jpbonsen@alum.mit.edu if interested. First session: Tue 9/13

Star Trek + XPrize ~ Roddenberry's Worldview!

Thanks to my MIT Sloan colleague Anjali Sastry for spotting Gene Roddenberry's Worldview on the XPrize Foundation site!

Morrill Act ~ Catalyzing Land-Grant Universities!

Many thanks to New America Foundation's Ted Widmer, Boston Globe Ideas columnist and BU Presidential assistant, for reminding us all about Justin Morrill, the man behind America’s higher education -- including MIT, UCBerkeley, and a hundred more...

"Morrill is hardly a household name today, but his legacy is immense, felt in every single state. That’s because of a single bill he proposed, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. In the midst of some of the worst fighting of the Civil War, Congress passed a visionary piece of legislation that created more than 100 universities and reshaped the way Americans thought about higher education. [...] The result was nothing less than the creation of a new educational order for the United States. Older institutions did not lose their preeminence, of course. But new kinds of universities came into existence, with a broad reach and a public purpose. Both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were born of the Morrill Act, a fact of no small relevance to the state’s future economic development. [...] Many of the most eminent African-American colleges, including Hampton and Tuskegee, also owe their origins to Morrill’s bill. Native American schools would also be added. In other ways, the Land-Grant Act became better over time. Many of the land-grant schools were early advocates of co-education and advanced the cause of educating women. Morrill added new legislation to fine-tune the program and secure additional funding. [...] Morrill’s is a legacy that is simply too large to calculate and expands every spring as millions of future Americans [and untold International students too] graduate from public universities."

Wow! Epic and extraordinary.  Truly heroic in the best sense!  Check out Uni map...

2050 ~ Envisioning Future Humanity & Planet...

Various visions imagining us in 2050...

EPCOT ~ Disney Describing His Dream Project!

Check out Walt Disney himself describing EPCOT back in 1966...

Don't Panic ~ BBC's The Truth About Population

Gapminder's Hans Rosling is to be featured Thursday 7 Nov 2013 in the BBC's Don’t Panic -- The Truth About Population...

"We face huge challenges in terms of food, resources and climate change but at the heart of Rosling’s statistical tour-de-force is the message that the world of tomorrow is a much better place than we might imagine. Professor Rosling reveals that the global challenge of rapid population growth, the so-called population explosion, has already been overcome. In just 50 years the average number of children born per woman has plummeted from 5 to just 2.5 and is still falling fast. This means that in a few generations’ time, world population growth will level off completely. And in what Rosling calls his ‘Great British Ignorance Survey’ he discovers that people’s perceptions of the world often seem decades out of date."

Here's mini-trailer/promo from BBC... And here's the main event!

Sagrada Família Completa ~ Gaudí Envisioned!

WebUrbanist spots 3D Animation Completes Famous Basilica...

Burke's World ~ BBC Predicting the Long Future...

BBC again asks James Burke for his future thoughts...

Thought For Food ~ Innovation Challenge 2013

Thought For Food launches their innovation challenge 2013 which...

"...calls on students from universities around the world to form teams and produce a robust project proposal -- consisting of a business plan and creative pitch -- that presents an unexpected and out-of-the-box solution to the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050."

2045 ~ Envisioning Development of Humanity...

Global Future 2045 initiative -- international social network for social innovation. Here's promo video for last year's congress and broader vision for future... And here's lead impressario Dmitry Itskov...

Space of the Future ~ Microsoft Envisions Living

BBC pimps Microsoft Space of the Future...

Google Glass ~ Visualizations of Wearable Life

No Limits ~ Gene Roddenberry's Epic Star Trek

A salute to Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek!

Picturing SF ~ Essential Sci Fi Visuals & Images!

Charlie Jane Anders at io9 shares top 21 Pictures that Sum Up the Whole History of Science Fiction...

"Every era in science fiction's history has shown us a new vision of the strange and futuristic, and one image can spawn a million reflections in your mind's eye."

Here's just a sampling of my favorites, in chronological order...

Philip K Dick ~ Prophet of Epic Science Fiction...

Here's Prophets of Science Fiction episode on Philip K Dick...

Sight ~ Future World with Augmentation Contacts

Thanks to Miss Cellania for spotting Sight;-)

"In the world of a not-too-distant future, everyone wears augmented reality devices as contact lenses. Everyone is constantly wired, online, connected, dependent on technology. The short film Sight is the graduation project of Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem."

House of the Future ~ Schridde's Motorola Ads

Retronaut spotlights very cool 1960s Motorola ad illustrations by Charles Schridde envisioning the House of the Future!