Technology and Social Change 2018

– What’s the full scope of the problem?

During my undergrad, I had created a one of its kind Indian language word building game ‘AKSHARIT’. Unlike English which has a 26 letter set, Hindi and most other Indian languages have ~40 consonants and ~15 vowels (used like diacritic marks in French), leading to ~600 possible letters. Thus, if one were to make an exact replica of the Scrabble boardgame for Indian languages, one would need around 4000 tiles and the playing board would be bigger than a double bed. I overcame this issue by an innovative tile design, that used transparent tiles for the diacritic marks, these could be placed atop the opaque consonant tiles to form all the different letter combinations. Using these the game could be played using only 130 tiles versus 4000 earlier.

Using these tiles as building blocks, a bevy of language learning games could now be created for younger learners, thus making the traditionally dry subject of learning the Hindi language a much more fun and engaging experience for children. We created both physical and digital versions of our language learning games.

– Who’s affected?

Children ages 4-10 year olds, especially the ones studying in more traditional government schools located in tier-2 and tier 3 cities of India, where still much of the instruction is limited to students attending lectures passively and relying just on textbooks to learn the subject matter.

– Who’s best positioned to address the problem?

Most attempts made at creating language learning fun are either made by teachers themselves or by professional game and app developers. Quite often games and activities created by language teachers are not really as fun and engaging, whereas games made by game and app developers although more fun but often lack measurable learning outcomes. To solve this issue, we had a team of three people with one game designer, a language teacher and an educator turned app developer.

– What are predictable consequences of the proposed solution?

The game was initially piloted in over 1000 schools. Subsequently pre and post tests conducted showed promising results in improving language learning outcomes for young learners. Currently the game is being used in 3000 schools. Each game box had a pre-stamped post card in it, using which teachers could share there feedback about the game back to us. We received 750 such postcards back, with promising feedback and also qualitative anecdotes from teachers regarding the positive effect of the game in their classrooms.

I will write about a small project I did on assistive technology, since bigger projects I’ve worked on were more about overcoming technical challenges rather than addressing a social issue. Even through a technical problem, such as improving running time of an algorithm, does influence society (e.g. What solutions are now made viable through this improvement in performance?), I think it’s more beneficial to look at a focused case for this critique exercise.

Through this project, I wanted to provide learning and socializing environment complementary to traditional classroom for children with autism. Many children with autism show high motivation in their fields of interest and starkly low interest in other areas. They often have high sensitivity and many social interactions considered norms in American culture (e.g. eye contact) tend to cause stress. As a result, teachers often characterize children with autism as being distracted, unmotivated in topics outside their interests, and having issues with social interactions.

As one way to help alleviate this problem, my project partner and I built a two-player math game that is highly customizable to fit each child’s field of interest and endorses indirect social interactions through cooperative play. People affected by this problem include children with autism (with enormous variations within this category), parents and family, teachers, and children without autism. At the time, we had input from the first three groups, but did not think about how this may affect other children in the classroom or how the classroom dynamics might be affected if this game and device were to be incorporated into the classroom.

I think the best people to tackle this problem would be a group of teachers from specialized schools that teach only children with autism, teachers that teach a mix of children with and without autism, parents of children with autism, children and adults with autism, education theory specialist, child psychologist, and education policy/law maker. My partner and I were too focused on the problem of alleviating the symptom of children with autism not being integrated into classroom, we did not consider solutions to bigger questions such as what type of classroom structure is suitable, or is it desirable for children with autism to conform to social norms (i.e. is this really a problem to begin with).

The game was designed as an alternative classroom activity. We ran only behavioral studies and the game was not actually implemented in a classroom, but some predictable consequences are: if used as an alternative classroom activity for children with autism, the game may create a sense of division between children with autism and without autism as they participate in separate activities. Also since the game is played on a tablet, it may create some fixation with or dependency on the device, which may steer children away from human-to-human interactions and have them prefer interactions with the device.

In 2016, I spent 6 months in Nairobi, Kenya working with a social enterprise called Sanergy (coincidentally founded at MIT). Sanergy as a whole is aiming to solve the sanitation crisis in the world today, with over 2 billion people lacking access to adequate sanitation facilities. This population is diverse and widespread, spanning from Brazil to India, rural settings to urban slums. Governments and relief organizations haven’t been able to solve the problem at scale, and historically sanitation has been considered a public group so participation from the private section has been limited.

Sanergy is trying to solve this problem by using a two-pronged approach. On one side, their non-profit arm has created a novel, waterless toilet that’s sold at low cost to customers in Nairobi who lack access to clean sanitation facilities. Those individuals are also able to treat the toilets as a business, charging a small per use fee and are subsequently incentivized to keep the toilet clean and operational. On the other side, Sanergy’s for profit arm collects the waste and uses novel methods to process the waste into byproducts to sell to the market. Its current products are fertilizer and animal feed, with other products in the pipeline as well.

I think a social enterprise like Sanergy well poised to solve this problem, because the problem intrinsically requires emotional motivation that comes with a mission driven organization, coupled with the innovation engine that comes from the private sector. To support this hypothesis, one can look back at attempts by the public sector or private sector in a silo. For example, India’s government has launched several campaigns to install toilets in slums and rural areas to decrease open defecation rates. The cost per toilet is much higher than what Sanergy can produce today, and most fall out of use after a period of time (however, the latest campaign in partnership with the Gates foundation shows promise). On the private site, a Japanese company called Lixil made a wildly successful low-cost toilet called SaTo which has sold over a million units thus far. The scale and impact of the toilet is irrefutable, but I believe SaTo misses the human element in its implementation. It sells the product through a network of vendors and distributors, but what happens with the product after it’s bought is not their concern. Solving this problem doesn’t just require innovation in design, but large-scale behavioral change as well.

The most obvious challenge with Sanergy’s approach, which they are well aware of, is scaling across regions and countries. The infrastructure required and regulatory hurdles faced with each expansion are significant, and even the disciplined expansion within Nairobi has been a challenge. According to the UN, inadequate sanitation affects over 2.3 billion in the world today. Solving at this scale requires a model that can be replicated efficiently and rapidly. If Sanergy can solve this challenge, I believe the model could very well be a critical part of the final answer in solving the global crisis.

I think that Lawrence Lessig makes a strong argument for the agency architecture has in establishing social norms, and in its ability to be utilized as an extension of law to bypass an otherwise formal legislative process. The example of Robert Moses utilizing bridge dimensions as a mechanism to inhibit African Americans the access to public beaches, because of their reliance on public transportation, clearly demonstrates the ability for the built environment to be manipulated for the wrong reason. This considered, how then is a designer/architect/urban planner, with no bad intentions, to operate knowingly, given the potential agency for either greater good, or greater harm as a result of an executed contribution to the built environment. As a graduate student in the architecture department, we often have to struggle with these very questions. I want to talk about two different conceptual projects, both executed during a design studio while at MIT. Both also, executed during the “core” sequence, which can be alternatively described as a set of foundational design studios within the Masters curriculum. The projects, proposed designs for a YMCA in the Bronx, and a “sustainable” winery for a drought ridden Valle de Guadalupe of northern Mexico, where the majority of the countries wine (a process that consumes a lot of water) is produced.

I like these projects for this particular discussion, because they both required consideration of existing cultural norms, socio-economic parameters, and in the case of the project in Mexico, consideration for the environmental consequences and potentials of the proposed design. In both these project there are similar issues, issues that I think are inherent in the production of architecture. Namely, that in a semesters time, we are hard pressed to be able to become experts on either Mexican wine culture, or the particularities of the economic and political struggles in the Bronx. We probably aren’t the best positioned to address some of these issues at large. That said, we are best positioned to design, propose, and execute an architecture, yet our architecture is intrinsically linked with all of these other issues.

Our studio courses are additionally constrained by the determinate length of each semester, as well as the pedagogical agenda of the department, as well as the regulations set forth by those bodies that accredit the professional degree program. Yet even in professional practice, architects and urban planners have to negotiate projects that require consideration of issues/problems that far exceed the capabilities of the designer, but also require a constructed thing that can only be executed by this very same person. So as a designer how am I to begin to negotiate a design, and its potential impact. In both of these academic projects, the class was able to draw from outside experts, in addition to undergoing a period of collective research and investigation. We had representatives from the New York YMCA, who gave us inside knowledge on the functions, and needs a neighborhood “Y,” and for the project in Mexico, we met with wine makers, toured facilities, and had lectures by experts on the water shortage crisis. In both cases, much of this was a part of scheduled travel, where we were able to be on site.

For both of these projects, there was no “concrete” consequence, a building was not constructed as a result of the studio project. What it did offer, was alternative design solutions that were later shared with the expert representatives of each project. The New York Y for example, was hoping to collect the body of “design research” as a way of expanding their views of what their future YMCA facilities could be. These projects have taught me a lot about what I don’t know, and on this issue of never ending lack of expertise as it relates to the inevitable context of real life architecture projects. What I have been able to take from this is the following, that we can always collaborate with experts outside of our immediate disciplinary bubble, and in fact, we really need to in order to propose design solutions that are both informed and sensitive to the very context they are being proposed for.

Hey all!

I’m Adam, a 2nd year master’s student at the Media Lab, with the Fluid Interfaces Group. My background is neuroscience, working across dyslexia, schizophrenia, meditation and sleep. I’ve seen the intermingling of power, authority of ‘objectivity’, notions of normalcy, and tech or science based interventions on people. I haven’t explore the ethics of science in this space, of defining and modulating personhood with science and tech, in any formal educational space. I work with a bunch of people across the lab on Dream Control–which already calls to mind several situations of control which are decently dystopic. I’m here to explore how science and tech get deployed, and to be a bit better.

adam

Hi all! I’m William and I just graduated from my undergrad at MIT and am now doing the one year Master’s in Engineering program in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. Although I do enjoy technology and the sciences, I am also really into the social sciences and analyzing human behavior. I am currently conducting research at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) into exploring how we can quantify the willingness of electric vehicles owners to enroll in smart charging programs for their cars.

I have always been a tech enthusiast- I am an avid reader of macrumors.com and occasionally visit engadget.com for leisure. I decided to take this class because I am interested in becoming more aware of how technology can negative effects in people’s lives and how to best avoid these. I want to take the class so I can become a more aware person in this respect. In addition, I reviewed the topics of discussion of the class, all of which seem very interesting. I also hope to learn from the experiences of the other students in the class, which all seem to hail from unique and very interesting roots.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I was in high school when I first heard this quote from Arthur Clarke, but it accurately captured how I felt at the onset of the technological revolution we were experiencing in the 2000s. To me, seeing the first iPod or talking to someone across the world over Skype made my eyes light up like magic does for others. Ever since then, I’ve been the stereotypical technologist, obsessing over every new technology from the incremental smartphone to the revolutionary autonomous car.

However, college brought for me a different connection, this time more emotional than intellectual. I worked with Engineers Without Borders and other social impact organizations, both locally and internationally, and found that this gave my career a meaning I hadn’t found before. My own life had been the subject of great fortune, moving from India to Alabama thanks to my parents and finding my way to a institution like Rice University where I could grow and learn. Of course, even with my subsequent work in the developing world I’ve had a minimal impact in the grand scheme. However, in a slightly selfish way I recognize that this path fulfills and energizes me more than any of my previous jobs.

So, how do I reconcile this emotional prerogative towards social impact with the intellectual drive towards cutting edge technology? I find myself spending much of my free time reading, learning, and thinking about new technologies and how I would implement or improve on them. However, I’ve worked in the tech sector both as a consultant and a manager and haven’t found the day to day fulfillment I did in social impact, although I was more excited about the product I was working on. This is the question I’m hoping to answer in this class – how do I reconcile these two differences to craft a career that is both fulfilling, yet intellectually satiating with my love of technology.

I love how Salman Rushdie puts it: to understand a life you need to swallow the world. A multitude of things have brought me to where I am today. I grew up as a child of two immigrants, moving around Canada and the US as our family found its footing. Questions about assimilation, socioeconomic mobility, and how identity shapes access to opportunities left an imprint on me pretty early in my life.

I started off in the chemistry lab- fascinated by how interactions in our brain – say the blocking of an enzyme – could have profound implications on sense of self, agency, and action. I took these aspirations to university, where I began to pursue an interest in understanding and influencing brain chemistry. But other experiences kept rubbing against this – including a collaboration with a community organizations in Harlem and reading about contexts of inequity in the US and across the world – pushed me to shift my focus to trying to understand, and hopefully shape some of those structures.

This interest took me from a Public Defenders Office in the Bronx to Egypt where I worked on higher education reform issues during the Arab Spring. After a military coup in 2013, I spent a year in DC researching political reform issues from a comparative lens – with the aim of bringing different discourses of reform into contact with one another (cutting across regional, disciplinary, and thematic boundaries).

I shifted my focus again in late 2014 to join the founding team of a startup pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

I joined the Media Lab this year to take a step back from the hustle of building an institution – to explore in greater depth how people learn – and how we can democratize the means for creation so that more young people can become creators, not consumers – of not just technology, but the systems and environments we’re immersed in.

I’m Lauren, and I’m from the Social Machines group in the Media Lab. What drew me to the Media Lab is the same thing that draws me to the tech and social change space.

Prior to coming here, I had been working at a startup. I loved the challenge of the work I was doing, but hated the capitalism of it. Why were we building a recommended system for products? I strived to work on projects that not only were technically challenging, but that also brought happiness to peoples’ lives. Perhaps someone seeing the perfect dress recommended to them would bring a brief smile, but it wasn’t the level I was hoping for.

Fast forward a few months later, and Deb Roy had reached out to interview me to join his lab in the Media Lab. I was thrilled to hear about the real-world impacts that his lab’s work was focused on.

As I’m thinking about what I want to do beyond the master’s. I’m wanting to do something even more human-touch than I currently am. Watching my grandmother grow old, virtually alone as her husband had died many years prior, and watching her go through phases of depression and loneliness in her last few years, I’m hoping to eventually work in the loneliness in elderly area. But I want to do so in a way that does not have unintended negative consequences. Looking forward to exploring this dream through out this class.

My name is Kofi and I grew up navigating multiple worlds, traversing between the hallowed halls of New York’s elitist private schools and the survival-oriented streets of the Bronx. My parents were as deeply committed to excellence as they were to the social justice movements they participated in, so, between independent assignments, planning meetings and demonstrations, my school week never ended. From an early age, I learned how to synthesize my experiences at the welfare office with class ski trips, and to maintain my friendships with trust fund kids, veteran organizers and the corner store crowd that never seemed to have anywhere else to be. Translating people and cultures became a joyful experience, so I soon expanded my neighborhood to include Harlem, El Barrio, and the Village,  but Brooklyn and Queens remained exotic locations across the international border known as the East River. I am eternally grateful to my parents because they let me explore and instilled in me a lasting desire to both serve my community and always pursue knowledge. Eventually, I even moved to Brooklyn.

Soon after college I had the privilege of traveling through the entertainment industry from Senegal to Ghana, India to South Africa, Brazil to the Dominican Republic, and I was deeply impacted by the shared experience of so many young children in these vastly different cultures and landscapes: bright faces and sharp minds missing hours of schooling to work in fields or trash heaps, fetching water or collecting firewood for hours, and when school work was finally undertaken, the lucky ones working beneath naked, flickering light bulbs if not by candlelight or kerosene. Why? The birth lottery, or, as Xavier de Souza Briggs describes it, the geography of opportunity. These experiences caused me to reorient my goals and compelled me to return to graduate school to pursue skill sets that would allow me to contribute to finding “solutions” in the context of global poverty. I wanted to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, to understand rapid urbanization, as well as the barriers to rural development.

This brought me to MIT to study Urban Planning and eventually to D-Lab where I began to work closely with Amy Smith on a curriculum that challenges traditional approaches to “development” where people living in poverty are relegated to being passive recipients of technological solutions and, instead, to encourage and enable people living in poverty to become creators of technology solutions. A theme of amplifying the voices of people who are generally excluded from the processes that affect them the most emerged, and I threw myself into developing a curriculum that introduces design thinking to people without any formal education, then invites them to contribute their knowledge and skills to defining a problem and, in about three days, making a prototype. This curriculum, called Creative Capacity Building, was the basis of my thesis and was developed in post-conflict Uganda; folks around the world have been trying it and refining it over the last 8 years in settings ranging from refugee camps to classrooms to community-based maker spaces.  Most recently, I have begun translating elements of this curriculum for use in local afterschool programs in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and Roxbury, Massachusetts. But this curriculum is no panacea—pursuing it has opened serious questions for me about the limits of this work in terms of generating sustainable social and economic change.

These projects have marked me with a burning passion for the transformative possibilities of hands-on, experiential learning that invites young people to explore their own creativity, insights, and knowledge as valid sources for creating solutions to real-world problems. Watching students in small rural villages in Uganda find the same joy and excitement as students in rural Mississippi when they turn their own concepts into functional three-dimensional representations revealed what appears to be the universal power and potential of making. Far beyond the practical skills learned of using computers, machines or tools, which are also important, the most powerful aspect of this work to me is the visible self-confidence and expressions of pride, optimism, and possibility among participants—some kind of magic can happen when a person begins to view themselves as a change agent, as someone who can solve problems, offer solutions, rally support and move their community forward.

In addition to continuing at D-Lab, I’m now a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Education exploring the intersection of learning through creative problem-solving and the pedagogies and policies that can address the inequities in access that correspond with the geography of educational opportunity. In other words, I’ve come to think of technology creation by everyday people, not just specialized engineers, as a powerful lever that I would like to see democratized through educational practices that emphasize the critical thinking, collaboration, and cross-cultural communication skills that are essential for learners, workers and social change agents in the 21^st century. Simultaneously, I see through my work with young adults in Mississippi that access to these types of strategies and resources is constrained by the complex impacts of racial segregation, suburban sprawl and rural underinvestment on education policy and practice. What brings me to this class are my wonderings about whether technology can be effectively and equitably used as a lever for ensuring that every learner experiences the magic of making, regardless of whether their school is in a rural or an urban area, in a moneyed or unmoneyed school, in the U.S. or around the world.

Before starting my MBA at MIT Sloan last fall I worked as a strategy consultant exclusively serving technology and telecommunications clients. Although I flirted with an early career in non-profits and international development, working close to the technology industry was, in many ways, an inevitability for me.

As a hopeless technophile and unapologetic geek from before I can even remember, it was not long before my love for consuming and using technology was converted into a fascination for the powers behind the curtain. As I edged closer to the beginning of my professional life, I believed strongly that technology was quite possibly the single greatest multiplier of individual human effort, and thus the best path for creating lasting impact.

My time in consulting allowed me to keep close to ambitious technological solutions and their enablers, but it also soon became the source of a great internal struggle. As I reflected on the world that we (the consultants) and our clients (technology companies) were trying to build, it was difficult to escape some bitter truths.

As my wife (who conveniently happens to be pursuing a PhD on the impact of digital technologies on labor markets) is always quick to remind me, the Management Consulting industry has been a fundamental enabler of the short-sighted, modular, techno-solutionism that is at the core of this course. Consultants have historically taken a very narrow definition of operational and strategic efficiency; pursuing it as an end in itself with little regard for its eventual human cost.

The “objective” pursuit of metrics and optimization has allowed for a conscious disassociation of design choices from any eventual negative consequences. From the pursuit of better ad click-through rates at Facebook leading to lax data standards and manipulation, to Amazon and UPS’s use of draconian measures of productivity taking a significant toll on their employees’ psychological and physical well-being.

In addition, the push for “technology adoption” today is presented essentially as virtue (not much unlike the push for capitalism and free markets not too long ago). But for me, “technology adoption” is simply a term for developing and using more scientifically sophisticated ways of doing things. As an abstract concept it is effectively neutral; what differentiates the good from the bad is the nature of its implementation. But by talking about “technology” in this generalized way we force a categorization of people into being either techno-skeptics or techno-idealists. In reality, the critiques of most “skeptics” are rooted in the specific context and nuances of a specific implementation.

Engaging with these shades of cynicism, however, has not dampened my belief that technology can, and should be a positive change agent in the world. But it has helped me appreciate that the path to success is far more complicated than simply “making the best tech”. What problem you choose to solve (and how you formulate it) is often far more important than simply solving it.

Like many of my classmates, I too am looking for a path to the “valley beyond” through this course. I do not expect any easy answers or frameworks, but at the very least I hope to leave equipped with the ability to both articulate my concerns and evangelize the need for greater empathy and responsibility in technology design choices and decisions.

I had just graduated college and felt like I had hit the first-job jackpot: I was moving down to Washington, DC to work at a policy research organization. While the topic area, health policy, would take me away from my undergraduate interest of urban policy, I was promised an exciting position conducting policy simulation of a wide range of health insurance policies. Moreover, the Affordable Care Act was about to be implemented, the data on health policy was about to get much more interesting, and I was excited to expand my knowledge of statistics and coding.

My first year on the job was fantastic. I was able to make immediate impact on the microsimulation model by restructuring its underlying framework to better match that of the ACA, and began to see papers that I co-authored affecting meaningful change in policy decision-making. It was exciting to be able to conduct what-if analysis for a range of proposed national, state, and local policies, to be able to look into a crystal ball to see the next great solution to expand access to affordable health insurance. I felt excited to harness quantitative tools to improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

Around that time, an external organization that had spun off from the president’s campaign analytics team came to our office to give a lunch presentation on their work. They had developed an extensive methodology to identify those who were most likely to be uninsured so that enrollment assistants could provide targeted support to those newly eligible for Medicaid and subsidized plans. Although these populations were the least likely to show up in traditional survey data sets, the organization had augmented that data with a range of individual-level proprietary data on what struck me as incredibly personal and sensitive things- like consumption patterns, voting registration, and financial wellbeing. However, they also seemed to be using these tools for good, so I tried not to think too hard about the creepiness of the detailed data they were using.

A couple years later, the Democrats had suffered a major defeat in the midterms, having lost a significant number of seats due to politically-motivated redistricting, also known as gerrymandering. When I heard about the proprietary data sets and geospatial tools used by Republicans to “pack” and “crack” liberal voters in critical swing states in such a way as to dilute the value of their vote, I felt sick to my stomach. It sounded very similar to the procedure used to identify uninsured citizens and, to some extent, the work I had done on the microsimulation model in my first job. By this time, I had moved back into research on urban policy, but this example of using GIS and data for disenfranchisement spurred something in me to more thoughtfully understand how data was being used to make policy decisions, especially when that analysis is done at the national-level.

I noticed that data could be used for bad. Data could be used for progressive governance, too. But, either way, as long as the rise of data threatened the extent to which policymakers looked to their electorate over data, I could see the democratic process begin to wither. This experience pushed me to ultimately come to MIT to understand how data-driven policymaking can be more inclusive a the communities it is meant to be representing.

Greetings all –

I’m a first-year master’s student in the Media Lab, Civic Media. I grew up in Singapore before leaving for Norway at 16. Since, I have lived, studied, and worked in 6 countries across the globe. In several of these places, I worked with NGOs on topics ranging from health and sanitation, to peace and conflict, and community development.

After getting a degree in Anthropology, I returned to Singapore where I worked for a tech policy consultancy. I became unsettled by the discrepancies between tech development and societal transformation; technology was (and is) developing faster than it is bettering communities and I needed to find a way to narrow the gap. I began looking for ways in which the worlds of technology and social change intersected. What I found was either tech giants profiting at the expense of societal ills, or social change organizations struggling to find resources to “digitize” their processes.

For the past year, I have been working as a design ethnographer. Having lived and worked with vulnerable communities, I am (in part) convinced that some of life’s most complex problems require lo-fi (if not, no-fi) solutions. And perhaps it starts with sitting a little more with the problems and observing the everyday; listening to the seemingly mundane to uncover the silences of human relationships and the interplay of technology and humanity.

Nonetheless, I believe that tech has a role to play in building a better world. My hope is that our conversations in class will pierce into new portals of reimagining the old; to uncover tools to assess technology’s role in meaningfully addressing any problem.

My name is Zaria Smalls and I study a special concentration called Design Engineering and Social Change — a major where I focus on how technology has previously inhibited or promoted social change and how future design processes can be intentional in that change. I can’t give a clear explanation of how I got to my special concentration because it wasn’t until very recently that I could vocalize what I cared about but I can highlight the moments where I got my first glimpse into this world.

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I first began my academic career at Harvard as an electrical engineer. I didn’t mind the math courses; I loved the hands on work and project aspects and found electricity kind of cool. Then the upper-level course began and I got into the theory of electrical engineering and intermediately knew that I absolutely hated it. I personally knew, I would need to change what I studied to enjoy my last two years at Harvard. In my sophomore fall, I decided to take a design class just to change the pace of what my classes were. It was there that I actually found myself enjoying the work and excited to learn again. This particular class highlighted human centered design — the concept that you should always design to the needs of the target community — something that seemed so incredibly obvious and revolutionary for me. This is the moment where I began to form the words to describe what I am interested in.

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Later in my sophomore year, I attended the class for all sophomore students planning to pursue engineering degrees. This course was meant to teach students about the future job market, ethics and resources within the engineering school. The last section of this course, every student was asked to examine the data of a hypothetical car to determine whether to enter said car into a race. The data showed at what points the car engine would combust in relation to weather. None of the data was conclusive. However, we did know that not entering the race would theoretically cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we did enter the race, we had the potential of winning millions. With this information, each student was asked to make a decision — do we or do we not enter the race. The obvious answer to me was no because there was a chance that our engine would combust and the potential that someone could get hurt or die. This thoughts had not apparently crossed the mind of all my peers; I was astonished to watch as some of peers advocating for racing and never even considered the possibility that anyone could get hurt. The data was later revealed to be the same as that of the Challenger.

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I still can’t tell you exactly how I learned about human factors work, design impact, user experience and really critically understanding how technology has radically shaped our society but I started by putting together this concentration. The experience about are the moments that made me think the most about what technology could and should be. From there, I decided to put together a special concentration that: analyzes how past technologies have impacted society, teaches the technical background of electrical engineering and finally use hands-on design classes to critically think of and practice the design process to build socially conscious technological solutions.

The interesting part to me is that if I were to look back on my life thus far, I would see that technology and social change has always been what I cared about. I grew up deeply caring about social justice. I have been a First-Year Urban Program leader for four years, where I spend my time teaching and talking to first-year students about how to engage with social justice issues in the Boston area. I’ve continually looked at mobility access a priority by working in Sao Paulo, Brazil on public transportation access, wheelchair design for those without upper-body mobility and discussing transportation deserts within from my own home of NYC. The businesses and technologies I have always found most interesting and innovative have tackled issues around economic, racial and/or climate injustice. So my focus has always been about how technology has failed under-served communities. It has always been how technology is inherently political and to ignore the power in which technology has to shape our world around us from a social standpoint would be an injustice to ourselves. I just couldn’t find the words until recently.

I’m a third year student in the Masters of Architecture program here at MIT, which means I am now taking my 13th architecture studio (add 4 years undergraduate and count one studio per semester). Architecture and technology, I think, have a very complicated relationship–a lot of architects would like to claim that good buildings are technological advances, although often I think those claims are a slippery slope into a dissolution of definitions.

But, since even the earliest cathedrals, technology has been very closely tied to major movements in design history. This is probably most apparent in the case of Modernism and mass production, but it caries also clearly into more contemporary work, like Zaha Hadid’s parametric wonders and today’s crazy digital mash-ups. Technology is so clearly embodied in aesthetics, and then, often, aesthetics are rationalized as they might relate to social change. Or maybe social change comes first–and the technology to produce it subsequently enforces a particular aesthetic. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg question; in some cases it seems the chicken came first, and in other cases I am certain it is the egg.

Maybe it’s just an unlucky semester, but I find myself doubting more and more often the effectiveness of architectural technologies to spur social change. I think more often than not I am convinced that technologies are filling first the aesthetic agenda, and claiming a social agenda only to convince investors of their designs. But I want to turn this criticism into something productive; I want to learn to judge better in my own work when technologies might be helpful to the communities they serve, versus when the excitement that comes from novelty actually shrouds or exacerbates more important problems.

I’m a 3rd year PhD student here in the responsive environments group of the lab.  When I reflect on the meaningful experiences I’ve had in my life — from deeply engaged conversation, to flowing immersion with my work, to concerts and theatre that have touched me deeply — I see a lot of similarities in the structure behind those experiences.  I chase those experiences.  I covet them.  I also think those experiences are under threat in a world where eyeballs are a direct proxy for money.  To compete and succeed, tech companies are all but forced to addict us to their products, harnessing our cognitive biases against us.  This is the world of the attention economy.

I want to fix this.  I know that my technology is working against me quite successfully —  I obsessively check my email; I rarely leave a moment unfilled. I carry the subtle weight of an always-connected society with me in all of my daily experiences.  Fortunately, we have the ability to reclaim the subconscious behavioral tricks being used to pull us toward automatic micro-behaviors we *don’t* choose and *don’t* control, and repurpose them to prime us for deeply engaged experiences with people and tasks that we *do*.  Technology has matured to a point where deep quantified self and deep ubiquitous computing can make this world a reality.

I believe in this future.  And while I’m confident I can make substantial progress on the tech, I’m equally interested in tackling the questions of the marketplace.  The technology doesn’t matter if it doesn’t change lives.  How do we find the most effective places to make a difference?  What are the limits of selling carrots in a chocolate-bar world?  How can we take back the power over our tools and our tech, instead of continuing the tenuous, pathological march in reverse?

Since the outset of my journalism career — a roller coaster ride that began nearly in concert with the first iPod landing on store shelves in October 2001 — I have lived life with one foot stuck in analog reality and the other planted in a digital future.

Journalism, particularly the newspaper kind, is steeped in tradition. We follow tried-and-true reporting and ethical standards, believe in the importance of an engaged free press to democracy and often (at least in the newsroom) focus more on our service to society than on fiscal models. And that’s where technology has taken its toll.

I spent the past decade and a half working in newsrooms packed with talented journalists who produce a timeless work product, but continually fall victim to outdated and clumsy delivery methods.

The fact is, the newspaper industry took a similar, albeit much more severe, drubbing from digital advancement than the music industry. Much of that beating was the result of institutional inertia multiplied by flailing into misguided attempts to catch a train that already chugged away from the station. Those missteps, a number of continued self-defeating new practices born from ill-conceived technologies and ongoing failure to create user-centric delivery of our industry’s most important product, triggered a 50 percent drop in newsroom employment during the past 15 years. That means half as many people are asking the questions that ensure a healthy democracy and educated electorate.

In the early days of my career, the basics — did I catch a typo or rewrite a headline — kept me awake at night. Today, I find myself staring toward a darkened ceiling at 4 a.m. wondering if we will find the technology that will ensure the future of journalism before there is nothing left to save.

Hi all! My name is Sebastian and I am a first-year graduate student in the Sculpting Evolution group at the Media Lab. My background is in biochemistry and our group works to engineer self-replicating systems using biology. Perhaps the most relevant of these for this class is the gene drive, which can allow an engineered trait or characteristic to spread hereditarily across an entire population — locally or globally.

As you might imagine, ‘self-replicating technology’ seems like a technofix just waiting for its blockbuster dystopian debut. The same innovation that could drastically reduce the incidence of vector-borne diseases like dengue, Zika, chikungunya, Lyme, and malaria may, in the wrong hands, also lead to super-virulent bioweapons…..

So, as we develop these technologies, we try to acknowledge just how thin the tightrope we walk above the pit of unintended consequences truly is. For me, this class seemed like a valuable opportunity to learn how to engage in this work responsibly.

Hi everyone,

I’m a third year master of architecture student. Being at MIT there has been constant discussion in regards to “Tech.” Similar, as someone in the architecture, and more broadly design, disciplines, the social consequences and potentials of our work have always been critical, and a topic of disciplinary discussion. In architecture we are always trying to consider “social space” and quite literally the spaces in which life and social exchanges happen. Architecture, when compared to many other disciplines, say tech or web based platforms, is very slow moving. It’s much harder to change what may be seen as “typical” or “standard” construction processes, and integration of new technologies is often slow. That being the case, there is still a degree of urgency in the need to rethink, innovate, and augment architectural strategies with the fast paced progression of “tech.” Spaces of the future, have at times been questions in both professional and academic settings for architectural production.  I think that architecture is a form of cultural production, and is inherent in the thinking of the physical “social space.” Thus I think it super interesting to consider technologies agency in architecture specifically, and in social space generally. I hope to begin to question both the new and ordinary in regards to tech and its potential consequences.

I’m a first year MAS student in Lifelong Kindergarten and my background is in Mechanical Engineering. I’m Kenyan and I grew up, lived, studied in Kenya up until 2 months ago when I moved to Boston to attend MIT.

My introduction to the tech and social change space was in my first year as an undergraduate student at the University of Nairobi, when a friend introduced me to a local makerspace situated within the institution. The makerspace was a Fab Lab, which I later came to know was birthed at MIT. As a member of the Fab Lab, I was exposed to young and talented students who worked hard to design and develop low-tech solutions to challenges faced in their local communities despite financial and resource constraints. During this time, I gained skills in human-centered design and digital fabrication and also developed low-cost, technological solutions in energy, education and healthcare for communities in Kenya.

These experiences inspired me to create the Mekatilili Program, which is an educational initiative that facilitates interactive workshops focused on Human-Centered Design and basic engineering concepts to improve technical expertise, nurture innovation and to promote social cohesion among the youth in Africa. In each session of the program, participants are prompted to utilize user-centered design to tackle challenges in their communities. They have been able to generate ideas like: a device to solve environmental issues caused by sewage and waste, an app to improve trash collection and management, improve road safety, solar powered systems and much more. We have reached over 250 young people (mostly young girls and women), whose average age ranges from 14 – 25 years.

I have been fortunate to travel to different countries in Africa and I have witnessed first-hand the effects of economic and technological deprivation in Africa, e.g. inadequate healthcare services, poor infrastructure and improper distribution channels for critical information and resources.  Therefore, my hope is to spearhead activities and programs that stimulate the growth of Research and Development (R&D) in Africa, through appropriate technological innovation to create social impact.