The Future of Making
This conversation with Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, focused (initially) on how the tools and methods we use to make things are evolving, and how those tools (and things) will change our personal lives, communities and economies.
Examples included modifying amino acids to create life forms that are completely immune to any existing viruses, as well as some others that can be found at madeinthefuture.co (a great site created by IDEO and the MIT Media Lab. Seriously, check it out and poke around). But the session soon turned more philosophical.
Both Brown and Ito both emphasized the value of learning by doing, as opposed to learning by or through instruction. (Ito offhandedly mentioned how he failed to graduate from college three times, and told a funny story about how he once tried to raise $600K from a company, but the company paid a consultant $3M for a feasibility study telling it not to invest the $600K.)
Likewise, the experts agreed that in evolving the technology we’ll use to make things, problems and mistakes will be inevitable. Therefore, the goal is not to avoid them, but rather to become resilient. By learning the best ways to respond to problems, we not only minimize the chance that any of them will become fatal; we (and what we make) become stronger in the process.
