First Light at the Media Lab

I like to arrive early, when the MIT Media Lab is still waking up. At that hour the corridors are quiet, a few screens glow in empty rooms, and behind the glass walls of the labs the robots stand still, waiting for the day to begin. From the outside, a place made of so much glass and so much technology might look cold. It is not. There is a particular warmth here, and a natural light that comes in from every side and stays with you all day, shifting slowly as the hours pass, as if the building had been designed to remind you that there is a sky above all the machines.

The Media Lab describes itself as a place for ideas that need different kinds of minds. It is a slogan, of course, but after a few weeks here I have come to read it as a plain description of the corridors. Art, science, engineering and design are not neighbouring departments here. They share the same conversation, and the conversation is better for it. I have arrived at a good moment to see this. The Media Lab is turning forty, and the building has filled with artists, engineers, former students and dreamers of various kinds who came back to celebrate it. A few days earlier I was lucky enough to enjoy the MIT Future Fest, which felt like the same spirit spread across the whole campus.

I spend my days in the Lifelong Kindergarten group. The name is not a joke, or not only a joke. The idea, which Mitch Resnick has been refining for decades, is that the rest of school, and the rest of life, should look a little more like kindergarten: children building, imagining, playing, sharing what they make and starting again. Lately Mitch speaks of four Cs, four qualities he hopes this way of learning can help children cultivate: being creative, curious, caring and collaborative. What strikes me, from the inside, is that the group itself lives by those four words. They are not only a goal for children. They are the everyday culture of the place.

Working alongside Mitch and Natalie Rusk, I can see from very close how a deep care for children’s ideas can become a way of thinking and working. That same care runs through the rest of the Lifelong Kindergarten, among researchers and students who are busy with their own projects and still find a moment to stop in a corridor, answer a question, and make a newcomer feel at home. And there is a sense of freedom in the air that I keep admiring: the freedom to try things, to play with an idea before knowing where it leads, to leave something unfinished and return to it later.

I came here from the Universitat de Girona and the UdiGitalEdu research group, with a doctoral thesis about tekhnē, the Greek word that never separated art from technology. In my research I explore four of its dimensions: imagination, ethics, aesthetics and belonging. Here, among people who have spent decades designing tools for children to create with, they stop being concepts on a page and become something I can see in the projects around me. It is a rare privilege to share these ideas with people who know the subject so deeply, and to find in them such attentive and generous listeners.

Starting early also means finishing early. Around three, before leaving the Media Lab, I can call Fatemeh and Elna in Catalonia, where the evening is already falling, and hear about their day before they go to sleep, while mine is still bright. Then, on the way back to the house in Watertown where I am staying, I sometimes let myself get lost for a while. I stop at Harvard and wander through its art museum, standing in front of a Pollock or the three pairs of worn boots painted by Van Gogh. Or I step into Mount Auburn Cemetery, where the maples burn red and gold above the old stones, and the falling leaves seem to be covering the names of the dead with something brighter than oblivion.

Perhaps the greatest privilege of all is the simplest one: time to think. In a world where everything moves so fast, it seems that we only find that time when we step away, when our professional and family duties grow lighter for a while and the days open up a little. I did not expect to find it in a place where the future seems to be built at full speed. But here it is, in the early light, waiting for me every morning before the building wakes.