In this discussion about rethinking the car MIT's Mitchell speaks some interesting words about design, the role of architects and the need to break out of the narrow furrows of special expertise ...

March 2010 • Metropolis Observed

A Complete Rethink

William Mitchell and the MIT Media Lab take on one of urban America’s hidden foes: the car.

How do we get away from this dinosaur thinking that impedes progress?

My designer’s bias comes in here. It’s important to get the technology and the policy right, but in the end, the way you break a logjam is by engaging people’s imagination, people’s desire, by creating things that they never thought of before. This is something that Apple has led the way in. So a crucial part of this will be to create sexy prototypes and convincing small-scale pilot projects in sympathetic environments.

I think this automobile project represents a real shift in approach. It’s about systems thinking, about how everything is related to everything else. How do you get designers—whether they’re car designers or architects or urban planners—to take this bigger-picture, more holistic approach?

One of the huge problems with design has been the way that the lines get broken up into these traditionally defined disciplines. You’re an architect or a graphic designer or a silicon-chip designer or an interaction designer, blah blah, blah. The big, important design issues just don’t fall in these categories anymore.

They sprawl in messy ways across them. We have architects, urban designers, economists, mechanical engineers, electrical geeks, and we put them together into an intense multidisciplinary design environment. And we do it in a way that’s different from the way that you’d organize a multidisciplinary team on an architectural project, where everyone has their role. We say, “Yes, you have expertise that you bring to the table, but it’s everyone’s responsibility to contribute to everything and educate the rest of the group as necessary on the issues that you know most about.” We knew nothing about battery technology when we started, but one of the great adventures of MIT is you can walk down the hall and find the world’s leading expert. The strategy is to go out, find what you need to know, and bring it back to the design project.

But isn’t MIT an exception here? It’s generally perceived as the epicenter of forward thinking. How do you get the rest of the country to adopt this model?

There are a lot of good universities. The model can be generalized, but design schools don’t want to do it. They drive me crazy: “We’re a unique culture.” That’s why I have a joint appointment in architecture and the Media Lab and a lot of activity in planning. But I do my work in the Media Lab because I couldn’t do it in the architecture department.

Why?

Because the identity of the architect is very important। Personally, I don’t care whether we call it architecture or if they call me an architect. I care about doing progressive, socially effective work. Wherever it takes me, I’ll go.

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20100317/a-complete-rethink