MIT 2020 ~ Imagining Institute as LEED Campus

I came to MIT as a freshman from sunny suburban California in the mid-1980s. At the Institute I discovered Project Athena, a campus-wide computing network which gave me and thousands of fellow students access to high-end workstations, online email, instant messages, networked files, served applications, and more, all functionality we today would call the Internet & Web.

In other words, we saw the future first.

Project Athena made MIT a predictive microcosm, a living lab, a place where my classmates and I experienced everyday artifacts ten years before the rest of humanity. But only in the narrow domain of information and computing, alas. Because, by contrast, the physical environment of the Institute was (and remains) an aesthetic embarrassment and environmental anachronism, an ugly concrete jungle, electrically inefficient and thermally porous, ill-maintained and locally-optimized, kluged together, and worse. Even small details tell all -- despite over a century of closed-loop temperature feedback control systems, my dormroom heater was open-loop and had two settings: On & Off. Although our motto is Mens et Manus, we at MIT have not practiced what we preach about energy and innovation.

Things are improving, however, so I'm increasingly optimistic. The new MIT Sloan expansion project is supposed to be the first really integrated design effort and promises to become a top-tier LEED Building. Plus there's growing interest in Greening MIT, in Walking the Talk on campus, and in addressing global climate and energy challenges more generally.

But beyond good intentions, new technical inventions, and LEED Buildings, what we really need are complex, scalable solutions of enormous magnitudes. We need LEED Cities, and even LEED Countries, and ultimately we need to become a LEED Civilization on a vital planet Earth.

That's all rather much for us to tackle alone or at once, but we can commit to things closer to home: let us make MIT a pioneering LEED Campus by 2020, a microcosm of urbanized humanity to-come, and a beacon of inspiration for how we might craft a vital, prosperous, sustainable future. This would mean inter-connecting things which are usually seen as separate silos: renewing our physical plant, transforming operating practices, empowering students and leveraging extracurricular activities, orchestrating inspiring educational initiatives, and building institutions to shape and deliver the deep research agendae embodying the principles & practices we seek more widely.

In the upcoming dozen years, let us band together, rally resources, and act coherently to pursue a five-fold path:

(1) Research -- Recognizing that truly integrative solutions are needed, including especially innovations in the applied social sciences, let us commit to raising $100-200 Million to create an Institute for Systems Strategy & Innovation (ISSI) at MIT to pursue a global research agenda embracing energy & environment, cities & society, and the dynamics of individual & organizational change. To properly study complex systems, such an ISSI would enable both thinking-and-doing: both collecting systems data through a globally distributed Innovation Observatory Network (ION) and practicing solutions for-real on actual systems, including our own MIT urban campus as Living Lab.

(2) Education -- To educate and inspire new generations of MIT students to both imagine and enact constructive change, let's create Institute-wide elective class offerings in Systems Strategy & Innovation and other emergent domains. Let's scale-up financial support for systems-oriented degree-programs and also minors in energy, environment, and more.

(3) Extracurriculars -- Since so many solutions have emerged from interested grassroots student initiative, let's leverage this by financing a $5-15 Million per annum exploratory research fund and seed grant mechanism to float tangible exploratory projects, perhaps largely managed by and for students.

(4) Infrastructure -- Let's envision an future campus with a truly integrative design and plan, where we cut across infrastructural and aesthetic and social silos, and instead weave together a really great, livable, economic, and vibrant environment. This means crafting a master-plan which will emerge over time to spotlight key needs, including building new capacity, for instance, expanding the MIT Co-Gen facility, as well as systematically retrofitting one to three buildings per year, and crafting the institutional ability to scale and replicate doing these things.

(5) Operations -- We can and must aim for greatness in execution at the Institute, setting and delivering on bold overall operating goals: for instance, let's systematically reduce emissions and waste; cutting 1-3% out of each annual energy budget, on a per-capita basis; deploy metering & feedback sub-systems to enable individual incentives & behavior modification; shoot for a carbon-neutral MIT Sloan by 2015 and a carbon-neutral campus-wide by 2020, and more.

Bold, but not impossible.

The MIT of 2020 should be a microcosm of what we want our planet to become.

MIT as Microcosm ~ Energy is Not Enough...

As ardent readers of Maximizing Progress know -- from having read either my Imagining MIT piece, or my personal MIT 2020 story -- I'm one of those at the Institute who are interested in having our campus be a predictive microcosm of what the world might become in the future -- i.e. green, clean, efficient, effective, beautiful, amazing. But getting there soon -- or even launching an initiative to raise the money -- means educating and inspiring people and rallying folks around big ideas and common goals. Towards that end, I wrote a small missive to our organizing team pleading with them to embrace a bigger vision. Right now everything is very energy-centric, with some folks pushing to be under the umbrella of the MIT Energy Initiative. I argued that "Energy is not enough..."

With all due respect to Energy Initiative folks and our Walk The Talk leadership, I think Energy alone is NOT enough for even our initial efforts.

This is not merely a quibble over selecting our top short-term tactics, but a matter of core strategies and overarching vision.

I deeply believe the Institute needs a much broader -- and more inspiring -- action agenda. We ought to aspire towards Regeneration & Vitality in the large. This means embracing economic renewal, environmental sustainability, worthy aesthetics, and transformative innovations in physical infrastructure, operational excellence, institutional leadership, and beyond.

If we at MIT can't get our own house in order by 2015-2020 (or sooner), what moral standing do we have for advising others, and what hope do we have for our planet more generally?

Indeed, the MIT of 2020 should be a microcosm of what we want our civilization to become. Using our campus-as-testbed would allow us to see the future first. Plus using our campus as exploratory learning-lab both lives up to our Mens et Manus motto and educates and inspires new generations of innovators. We urgently need to ramp-up our efforts to do this not merely in Energy, but across many different dimensions, including at least:

• Aesthetics -- The MIT campus could use an intense aesthetic upgrade, with greenways, widewalks, bike lanes, underground parking, greenroofs, indoor foliage, informal cafe-style seating, proper maintenance, essential repairs, and more. The best of these initiatives would offer two-for-one. For instance, attractive roofgarden cafes would also boost our LEED qualities. It is inexcusable that MIT today owns and just land-banks ugly surface parking lots in the heart of Kendall Square, along Amherst Street, and along the premier pedestrian and urban thoroughfare of Mass Ave.
• Environmental -- In addition to pure aesthetics, many of the tangible aspects of campus energy are predominantly environmental in nature, for instance, localized air temperature control, fresh-air access, insulated entry-doors and windows, wide-spread recycling, waste minimization initiatives, emissions remediation, garbage handling, transportation solutions, and more.
• Information Technology -- Lots of new energy ideas would benefit from MIT having a campus-wide Project Athena Version 2.0, this time a distributed mobile-wireless network enabling sensors and distributed information mining, and most important, the feeding forward of essential info to users via mobile phones and other highly distributed end-points. We could mine social patterns of energy-use and transport behavior and fast-iterate accordingly.
• Economic -- Our near-neighborhood is too much of an economic monoculture of bland office parks and corporate labs. Those are certainly essential, but alone insufficient. We need to extend the mixed-use aspects of University Park to pervade greater-Kendall Square, the Mass Ave axis from MIT-through-Central, and the edges of the Institute along Main, Vassar, Portland, and Albany. This means ground-floor retail, a mix of residences and offices, and orchestrating a few investments in conference facilities, entrepreneurial incubators, and university coop residences. (Plus the aesthetic improvements noted earlier).
• Organizational -- Many of the underlying challenges here are actually driven by the Institute's loosely-coupled organizational form. This structure works wonders in allowing for distributed innovation and fast-action at small-scales, but can impede bold cross-connections and big moves. If our institutional leadership neither gets this nor understands how to both weave together an integrative vision and inspire people to rally around it, then we will continue to remain stuck where we are -- more muddling. In this regard, MIT is yet again a microcosm of the nation and world at-large.

We need to BE how we want the world to BECOME. Aspiring to anything less means becoming irrelevant.

MIT Nuts & Bolts of New Ventures ~ IAP Jan 2020

Nuts Logo

On Tuesday night, 21 January 2020, Joe Hadzima and I kick off the latest incarnation -- the 31st year (!!) -- of our MIT Nuts & Bolts of New Ventures course over the MIT Independent Activities Period (IAP 2020). Joe starts with the essence of business planning as a process of iterative imagination and special guest speaker Bob Jones shares how to present venture essentials. My primary topic is Team & Organizational issues, our special guest speakers (mostly MIT alums, all entrepreneurs) cover the essentials everyone ought to know about new venturing, including how to identify customers, pitch a concept, raise money, model financials, deal with legalities, negotiate with people, and holistically integrate this all together.

Sessions are evenings over the next two weeks Tue, Wed, and Thurs nights 1/21-1/30 from 6-9p in 10-250 -- i.e. in our prime MIT lecture hall under the iconic Great Dome. Folks can choose whether to attend all sessions, plus doing the (useful) written homework assignment, and registering For Credit (3 Units, Pass/Fail for 15.393 online via Websis) or to come for any (or all) nights and simply participate as a Listener. All MIT affiliates and colleagues -- including students, faculty, staff, post-docs, alums, spouses, relatives, and friends -- are welcome on a space-available basis with priority for registered full-time undergrad and grad students. We also continue to welcome students from our sister schools in Boston-metro (e.g. Wellesley, Harvard, BU, Tufts, etc) as well as Members of the MIT Enterprise Forum network. Those interested, please simply join us at 6pm in our MIT 10-250 classroom.

Imagining MIT 2020 ~ A Model Microcosm of Regeneration & Vitality

Fantastic brainstorming chat tonight at the Muddy Charles Pub -- about MIT as a model microcosm of global regeneration & vitality -- with Jason Jay, Jeff McAulay, Chris Kempes, and Karl Ruping (plus a brief visit from Nol Brown & friends). Curiously, this built conceptually on a discussion I had with both Jason Jay and Elsa Olivetti nearly half-year ago on the Campus as a Living Learning Lab. And this was quite relevant to recent news coverage of university-area regeneration initiatives. It also riffed on my opinion-piece (following a wonderful workshop hosted by Jason and Professor Rebecca Henderson at the start of February), entitled MIT 2020: Imagining the Institute as a LEED Campus.

MIT Global Ventures ~ Emergent Newcos 2019!

Great to see all 29 final projects in our MIT Global+Development Ventures class this past Fall 2019, a joint-offering between MIT D-Lab, MIT Sloan School of Management, and MIT Media Arts & Sciences in the School of Architecture & Planning! My MIT Media Lab co-instructors Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Ramesh Raskar, and I are all keen to see where our students will take their projects next. Many have received MIT Sandbox support, others are Legatum Fellows or have Legatum Voyager grants over IAP/January 2020, most are entering MIT IDEAS and/or MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Accelerate & Launch phases, and a few are engaging up-river in Harvard's President Innovation Challenge! And, of course, there's many more things to do beyond grant-seeking and contests, most especially actually founding, financing, and building these newcos! Here they are alphabetically...

1. 1Room ~ Kenyan Affordable Personalized Learning System
2. AiBaobao ~ Chinese Active Parenting Solutions
3. Aqua ~ Argentinian Digital Banking
4. AZEKI ~ African Designer Brand & Operational Solutions
5. Co.Mig ~ Venezuelan Migrant Integration & Employment
6. CON-DE ~ Architectural Material Reuse Solutions
7. Corpus Law ~ Digital Accessible Legal Info
8. CorruptionMonitor ~ Citizen Reporting Solutions
9. Experimental Fund ~ Fast Harvard Student Project Funding
10. Green Source ~ African Local Sustainble Fair Palm Oil 
11. GRIA ~ African Snack Foods
12. IT VC for EAC ~ East African ICT Investment Fund
13. KAAN ~ Latam Retired Expat Co-Living Communities
14. Kinderoo ~ Affordable Distributed Day Care Services
15. mBody ~ Pakistani Girls Body Literacy
16. Medical Records ~ Ownership & Transportability
17. Molo ~ Cote d'Ivoire Pay-as-you-go LPG
18. MYLA ~ Make Your Life Awesome Virtual Personal Assistant
19. Mylea ~ Sustainable Fashion Materials
20. OneBeat ~ Social Exercise Engagement
21. Pandar ~ African Smallholder Farmer Informatics
22. RateMonk ~ Indian Online Academic Ratings & Informatics
23. Red Feather ~ Canadian Indigenous Certification & Products
24. RISE ~ Colombian Rural Innovations for Solidarity Economies
25. Salut ~ Brazilian Integrated Healthcare Services 
26. TABIGO ~ Chinese Social Travel Planner
27. Text4Health ~ Anonymous Sexual Health Services
28. TOWARDS ~ Presentation Speech & Performance Coaching
29. Wala ~ Ghanaian Blood Supply Solutions

Greening MIT ~ Walking The Talk in a Living Lab

I just sat through the Greening MIT kickoff of the Energy Futures Week. Lots of effort around personal behavior modification. David Chandler wrote a nice review of the kickoff titled Going Green Saves MIT Green. While I'm a big fan of Walking The Talk and getting practical and tactical things done, I really do hope that this MIT initiative is just the beginning of a larger visioning exercise. We need to make a truly serious commitment to doing something transformative in energy, environment, and sustainability. Something like I wrote about in both my MIT 2020 and Energy is Not Enough pieces. I'm also pleased to see Jason Jay taking a real leadership role in catalyzing action towards Greening MIT, something we've talked about for a couple years now. Indeed, one of my first blog posts was after Jason and I, together with Elsa Olivetti, had a wonderful discussion about the prospects for MIT as a Living Lab for learning about sustainability at scale, something we imagined as some kind of LEED Campus initiative (escalating on the LEED Buildings movement).

MIT's Regeneration Research Agenda ~ Vision?!

In an article entitled Colleges Teach 'Urban Development 101', the Wall Street Journal writes about Penn and other universities integrating campus & surrounding community design & development towards a larger regeneration agenda. Curiously, as I wrote in an Xconomy post entitled How Kendall Square Became Hip: MIT Pioneered University-Linked Business Parks, MIT was one of the first near-neighborhood regenerators, but we haven't leveraged these efforts in any coherent way beyond patchwork investments, nor has this been woven at MIT into a larger curriculum -- or, more importantly, a regeneration research agenda -- embracing economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, and overall societal vitality. We need a bold vision for what MIT 2020 could and should be like and an integrative strategy towards accomplishing this.

Planning Harvard ~ From 2020 to 2050 & Beyond

Given our interest at the Institute in thinking about what MIT 2020 might look like -- or rather, ought to be like -- it's good to see what our wealthy up-river "rival" has formally proposed to the powers-that-be in Boston. In the multi-decade master plan framework for Allston, Harvard University proposes a sustainable, interdisciplinary campus. The overview rendering of Harvard in 2050 has several compelling features, including tunneling the riverside roadways thus creating true pedestrian parks along the Charles. That's what we need in front of MIT -- to create Memorial Park by depressing Mem Drive underneath! Our own Little Big-Dig, only much cheaper and more effective!

AI for Impact ~ Spring 2020 @ MIT Media Lab

Together with colleagues Professors Alex "Sandy" Pentland and Ramesh Raskar, I'm co-teaching the AI for Impact seminar this Spring 2020 every Monday afternoon starting Feb 3rd from 2:30-4:30a in E14-633, the penthouse classroom on top of the MIT Media Lab! Our class goal is to bring computational, analytics, and AI techniques to bear on solving problems in the high impact realms of health & wellness, cities & sustainability, education & content, finance & commerce, and civics & governance across scales of action from each of us as individuals to embracing all of humanity, in both developed and emerging markets alike. 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.

Also known as "Media Ventures" and formerly also known as "Imaging Ventures", “AI Ventures”, and "Digital Anthropology", 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.

Inclusive Economies ~ Spring 2020 @ MIT D-Lab

Together with colleagues Kate Mytty and Libby McDonald, I'm co-teaching the Inclusive Economies seminar at MIT this Spring 2020 every Wed morning starting Feb 5th from 9:30-11:30a in N51-310, the D-Lab classroom area!

We explore how innovations and market mechanisms can benefit humanity by rallying impact investments, engaging participants cooperatively, boosting equity and resilience, and broadening prosperity. We look at market mechanisms for maximizing participation, choice, and growth; impact investing approaches which are socially responsible and include metrics that matter; cooperative and mutual ownership structures for shared gains; equitable citizen participation in basic and natural resource wealth; and the role of new technologies and methods towards boosting affordability, accessibility, and overall inclusive prosperity.

The New Sloan Building e62

It's exciting to see construction underway for the new MIT Sloan building e62 creating a new eastern gateway to campus. Over 200,000 square feet of space plus more than 400 car parking garage underneath. And with Charles River frontage. The building's not perfect, alas, lacking both a rooftop bar & grill and roofgarden function space (as I first suggested in 2001 when thinking about Sloan Futures), but at least it's a step in the direction of making MIT a LEED Campus by 2020.

Mass STEM ~ Business Leaders Unite @ MoS

I was pleased to be invited by Doug Banks of MassHighTech to attend the STEM Business Leaders Breakfast meeting yesterday at the Museum of Science. Orchestrated by JD Chesloff, the Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, and colleagues, this was a rallying event to unify business leaders from the Commonwealth around the agenda of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics -- STEM. Several speakers and a panel shared their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities. I was especially impressed with Iaonnis Miaoulis, President of the Museum of Science, for his rallying cry around Technology & Engineering in addition to Science & Math. The core of the gathering was advancing the agenda in Tapping Massachusetts' Potential, namely...

"...double the number of STEM bachelor degrees, with a special focus on currently underrepresented groups, and double the number of STEM teachers, grade 7 through 12, by 2020."

The recommendations include:

1. Rallying the Public to support STEM
2. Motivate kids and adults towards STEM careers
3. Improve K-12 STEM teaching

All sounds nice, but I can't help remember that the parts of my upbringing that inspired me towards engineering and coming to MIT had almost nothing to do with my teachers and my formal K-12 schooling. If anything, they were a waste of time (with, I must say, a handful of very important notable exceptions from among my elementary school and high school teachers). The overwhelmingly important things for me were my hobbies, parents who tolerated and even financially supported these hobbies, friendly neighbors, and a vacant lot across the street to play in. That kind of thing continued at MIT where the actually important things were chosen electives and extracurricular experiences. And, curiously enough, one of my driving reasons for creating Howtoons with Saul and Nick was to capture this DIY-beyond-classrooms ethos and share it with kids everywhere!

Stark HUD 2020 ~ Wearable PC Future-Promo

Thanks to VC technophile Brad Feld for spotting this Stark HUD 2020 dream-future-promo about wearable heads-up display and PC system. Feld's interested in investing in this arena, so those who are actually making it happen, drop a line... What's especially amazing to me is that it's taken so long for this PC infoglasses realm to blossom. Yours truly was working on wearables as an MIT undergrad using Private Eyes (this was even before the Media Lab folks turned this into a research theme). Anyways, since smartphones have boomed and ARE the consumer wearable PC, the time to add heads-up and build apps for this ecosystem is NOW.
P.S. Also important here are key enablers, including ring-mounted tracking devices for "hands-free" interactive control... And current generation best-of suppliers of infoglasses, e.g. Vuzix...

Future of Smart Cities ~ Inforights and Inclusion...

Thanks to MIT alumnus entreprener Saeed Arida for spotting The Battle for Control of Smart Cities by Greg Lindsay in Fast Company...

"Who will own the brains of smart cities -- citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. [...] Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.” Those are some of the conclusions of “The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion,” a 10-year forecast commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and published this morning by the Institute for the Future. [...] Befitting the Foundation’s focus on the world’s poorest and what it calls “smart globalization,” the report’s emphasis is on smartening up cities in the developing world -- cities that lack both data about their swelling populations and the tools needed to make sense of it." [...] Together, they highlight five “technologies that matter” for cities in 2020 [...] The report’s centerpiece is a map depicting how these technologies might be applied across 13 scenarios.."