John Seely Brown’s MacVicar Lecture
John Seely Brown gave the 2010 MacVicar Lecture at MIT on Wednesday, March 10. I’ve had the opportunity to hear JSB talk a number of times through my work in Open Education, and also talk with him in detail about our projects in the past.
Here are some observations I made during his talk that I think are relevant for our projects and approach to innovation:
Fail, fail…fail fast in order to get it right. (In surfing, in learning, etc.)
A kid who has an epiphany, has it for life. It never leaves them.
How do develop a gut feeling for the system you’re working with?
–John Seely Brown
Design: Perhaps Engineers should follow the Architects’ Lead?
JSB also talked about the difference between architects and engineers. He described the studio model with it’s “crits”, critiques by the faculty (expert) and peers. In a design course taught by architects, with both architecture and engineering students, the students will often redefine or refine the problem. Something about the nature of architecture education leads to unique and often out of the box solutions/designs. The same course, taught by engineers, tends to lead to similar solutions–the engineering students stick to the given problem statement.
I’m reminded of a class project from my undergraduate days. At UC Berkeley there was a two course design sequence 102AB. In 102B, we had a visiting professor that gave us an unusual, and unique class project. We were asked to design a system to explore a pie shaped region in a rainforest. The course focused on gears, mechanical design, and so on.
Simliar to the story JSB told at the MacVicar lecture, most of the students in the class designed mechanical systems that used all of the things we learned in class. My project partner, Erin, came up with a quite innovative solution–using water counterweights and pulleys to move an cab through the pie shaped region. To be fair, I was concerned that we’d get docked on our score because we weren’t really using any of the “engineering” we were learning in the class. However, of course, things turned out all right–we got a good score (probably an A if I remember correctly). And we had an innovative and unusual solution to the problem–we created a “design”.
(As a further aside, I was able to revisit the design to build a mockup in a subsequent class. We were able to scale down the model and demonstrate that indeed, the design was workable.)
