Designing the User-Friendly City
What happens when a tech-minded entrepreneur is unexpectedly chosen to lead a big city government bureaucracy? Gabe Klein was an unconventional pick to head the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation when he was hired back in 2008, by then-mayor [...]
How to Grocery Shop in Shanghai
Another update from China. Thanks to the Great Firewall, I’m stuck in a Web 1.0 world of email and blogging. Our group spent the day conducting ethnographic interviews of food sellers and consumers in a wide variety of contexts. We [...]
Designing Urban Food Systems in Shanghai
I’ve joined the Media Lab’s Changing Places group for a week in China to design the future of sustainable cities in Shanghai. China presents enormous challenges and huge opportunities, all at a dizzying scale. 300 million Chinese, the population of [...]
Smarter Cities, Better Use of Resources?
If you’ve read a magazine or traveled through an airport in the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen ads for IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative. Today in our Post-Oil Shanghai course, we got to learn about some of the projects [...]
Smart Customization vs. Mass Production
Liveblog of Ryan C.C. Chin’s PhD thesis defense at MIT Media Lab Ryan came to MIT in 1997, and got a Master’s in Architecture, and then at the Media Lab, before entering into the Lab’s Ph.D program. He took leave [...]
Get the gunk out
Day 2: Environmental Working Group – Americans are gradually waking up to the chemical bath that is their daily existence, and EWG is their greatest ally. EWG helps you find out about the nasty stuff in your moisturizers, toothpaste, deodarant, [...]
Rise, clear-eyed and alert
Al Gore just spoke to a packed Daughters of the American Revolution hall and challenged America to use 100% renewable energy by 2018. It was a good speech (Full speech text here) and it’s an audacious goal. Gore argues that [...]
