Population decline often goes hand-in-hand with economic stagnation in rural areas — and the two reinforce each other in a cycle. Can digital technologies advance equitable innovation and, at the same time, preserve cultural heritage in shrinking regions?

A new open-access book, edited by MIT Vice Provost and Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) Professor Brent D. Ryan PhD ’02, Carmelo Ignaccolo PhD ’24 of Rutgers University, and Giovanna Fossa of the Politecnico di Milano, explores the transformative power of community-centered technologies in the rural areas of Italy.

“Small Town Renaissance: Bridging Technology, Heritage and Planning in Shrinking Italy” (Springer Nature, 2025) investigates the future of small towns through empirical analyses of cellphone data, bold urban design visions, collaborative digital platforms for small businesses, and territorial strategies for remote work. The work examines how technology may open up these regions to new economic opportunities. The book shares data-driven scholarly work on shrinking towns, economic development, and digital innovation from multiple planning scholars and practitioners, several of whom traveled to Italy in fall 2022 as part of a DUSP practicum taught by Ryan and Ignaccolo, and sponsored by MISTI Italy and Fondazione Rocca, in collaboration with Liminal.

“What began as a hands-on MIT practicum grew into a transatlantic book collaboration uniting scholars in design, planning, heritage, law, and telecommunications to explore how technology can sustain local economies and culture,” says Ignaccolo.

Now an assistant professor of city planning at Rutgers University’s E.J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Ignaccolo says the book provides concrete and actionable strategies to support shrinking regions in leveraging cultural heritage and smart technologies to strengthen opportunities and local economies.

“Depopulation linked to demographic change is reshaping communities worldwide,” says Ryan. “Italy is among the hardest hit, and the United States is heading in the same direction. This project offered students a chance to harness technology and innovation to imagine bold responses to this growing challenge.”

The researchers note that similar struggles also exist in rural communities across Germany, Spain, Japan, and Korea. The book provides policymakers, urban planners, designers, tech innovators, and heritage advocates with fresh insights and actionable strategies to shape the future of rural development in the digital age. The book and chapters can be downloaded for free through most university libraries via open access.

By Maria Iacobo | School of Architecture and Planning

Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are tried-and-true tools used to design many of the physical objects we use each day. But CAD software requires extensive expertise to master, and many tools incorporate such a high level of detail they don’t lend themselves to brainstorming or rapid prototyping.

In an effort to make design faster and more accessible for non-experts, researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an AI-driven robotic assembly system that allows people to build physical objects by simply describing them in words.

Their system uses a generative AI model to build a 3D representation of an object’s geometry based on the user’s prompt. Then, a second generative AI model reasons about the desired object and figures out where different components should go, according to the object’s function and geometry.

The system can automatically build the object from a set of prefabricated parts using robotic assembly. It can also iterate on the design based on feedback from the user.

The researchers used this end-to-end system to fabricate furniture, including chairs and shelves, from two types of premade components. The components can be disassembled and reassembled at will, reducing the amount of waste generated through the fabrication process.

They evaluated these designs through a user study and found that more than 90 percent of participants preferred the objects made by their AI-driven system, as compared to different approaches.

While this work is an initial demonstration, the framework could be especially useful for rapid prototyping complex objects like aerospace components and architectural objects. In the longer term, it could be used in homes to fabricate furniture or other objects locally, without the need to have bulky products shipped from a central facility.

“Sooner or later, we want to be able to communicate and talk to a robot and AI system the same way we talk to each other to make things together. Our system is a first step toward enabling that future,” says lead author Alex Kyaw, a graduate student in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Architecture.

Kyaw is joined on the paper by Richa Gupta, an MIT architecture graduate student; Faez Ahmed, associate professor of mechanical engineering; Lawrence Sass, professor and chair of the Computation Group in the Department of Architecture; senior author Randall Davis, an EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); as well as others at Google Deepmind and Autodesk Research. The paper was recently presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Generating a multicomponent design

While generative AI models are good at generating 3D representations, known as meshes, from text prompts, most do not produce uniform representations of an object’s geometry that have the component-level details needed for robotic assembly.

Separating these meshes into components is challenging for a model because assigning components depends on the geometry and functionality of the object and its parts.

The researchers tackled these challenges using a vision-language model (VLM), a powerful generative AI model that has been pre-trained to understand images and text. They task the VLM with figuring out how two types of prefabricated parts, structural components and panel components, should fit together to form an object.

“There are many ways we can put panels on a physical object, but the robot needs to see the geometry and reason over that geometry to make a decision about it. By serving as both the eyes and brain of the robot, the VLM enables the robot to do this,” Kyaw says.

A user prompts the system with text, perhaps by typing “make me a chair,” and gives it an AI-generated image of a chair to start.

Then, the VLM reasons about the chair and determines where panel components go on top of structural components, based on the functionality of many example objects it has seen before. For instance, the model can determine that the seat and backrest should have panels to have surfaces for someone sitting and leaning on the chair.

It outputs this information as text, such as “seat” or “backrest.” Each surface of the chair is then labeled with numbers, and the information is fed back to the VLM.

Then the VLM chooses the labels that correspond to the geometric parts of the chair that should receive panels on the 3D mesh to complete the design.

Human-AI co-design

The user remains in the loop throughout this process and can refine the design by giving the model a new prompt, such as “only use panels on the backrest, not the seat.”

“The design space is very big, so we narrow it down through user feedback. We believe this is the best way to do it because people have different preferences, and building an idealized model for everyone would be impossible,” Kyaw says.

“The human‑in‑the‑loop process allows the users to steer the AI‑generated designs and have a sense of ownership in the final result,” adds Gupta.

Once the 3D mesh is finalized, a robotic assembly system builds the object using prefabricated parts. These reusable parts can be disassembled and reassembled into different configurations.

The researchers compared the results of their method with an algorithm that places panels on all horizontal surfaces that are facing up, and an algorithm that places panels randomly. In a user study, more than 90 percent of individuals preferred the designs made by their system.

They also asked the VLM to explain why it chose to put panels in those areas.

“We learned that the vision language model is able to understand some degree of the functional aspects of a chair, like leaning and sitting, to understand why it is placing panels on the seat and backrest. It isn’t just randomly spitting out these assignments,” Kyaw says.

In the future, the researchers want to enhance their system to handle more complex and nuanced user prompts, such as a table made out of glass and metal. In addition, they want to incorporate additional prefabricated components, such as gears, hinges, or other moving parts, so objects could have more functionality.

“Our hope is to drastically lower the barrier of access to design tools. We have shown that we can use generative AI and robotics to turn ideas into physical objects in a fast, accessible, and sustainable manner,” says Davis.

By Adam Zewe | MIT News

As an undergraduate majoring in architecture, Dong Nyung Lee ’21 wasn’t sure how to respond when friends asked him what the study of architecture was about.

“I was always confused about how to describe it myself,” he says with a laugh. “I would tell them that it wasn’t just about a building, or a city, or a community. It’s a balance across different scales, and it has to touch everything all at once.”

As a graduate student enrolled in a design studio course last spring — 4.154 (Territory as Interior) — Lee and his classmates had to design a building that would serve a specific community in a specific location. The course, says Lee, gave him clarity as to “what architecture is all about.”

Designed by Roi Salgueiro Barrio, a lecturer in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Department of Architecture, the coursework combines ecological principles, architectural design, urban economics, and social considerations to address real-world problems in marginalized or degraded areas.

“When we build, we always impact economies, mostly by the different types of technologies we use and their dependence on different types of labor and materials,” says Salgueiro Barrio. “The intention here was to think at both levels: the activities that can be accommodated, and how we can actually build something.”

Research first

Students were tasked with repurposing an abandoned fishing industry building on the Barbanza Peninsula in Galicia, Spain, and proposing a new economic activity for the building that would help regenerate the local economy. Working in groups, they researched the region’s material resources and fiscal sectors and designed detailed maps. This approach to constructing a building was new for Vincent Jackow a master’s student in architecture.

“Normally in architecture, we work at the scale of one-to-100 meters,” he says. But this process allowed me to connect the dots between what the region offered and what could be built to support the economy.”

The aim of revitalizing this area is also a goal of Fundación RIA (RIA), a nonprofit think tank established by Pritzker Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield. RIA generates research and territorial planning with the goal of long-term sustainability of the built and natural environment in the Galicia region. During their spring break in March, the students traveled to Galicia, met with Chipperfield, business owners, fishermen, and farmers, and explored a variety of sites. They also consulted with the owner of the building they were to repurpose.

Returning to MIT, the students constructed nine detailed models. Master’s student Aleks Banaś says she took the studio because it required her to explore the variety of scales in an architectural project from territorial analysis to building detail, all while keeping the socio-economic aspect of design decisions in mind.

“I’m interested in how architecture can support local economies,” says Banaś. “Visiting Galicia was very special because of the communities we interacted with. We were no longer looking at articles and maps of the region; we were learning about day-to-day life. A lot of people shared with us the value of their work, which is not economically feasible.”

Banaś was impressed by the region’s strong maritime history and the generations of craftspeople working on timber boat-making. Inspired by the collective spirit of the region, she designed “House of Sea,” transforming the former cannery into a hub for community gathering and seafront activities. The reimagined building would accommodate a variety of functions including a boat-building workshop for the Ribeira carpenters’ association, a restaurant, and a large, covered section for local events such as the annual barnacle festival.

“I wanted to demonstrate how we can create space for an alternative economy that can host and support these skills and traditions,” says Banaś.

Jackow’s building — “La Nueva Cordelería,” or “New Rope Making” — was a facility using hemp to produce rope and hempcrete blocks (a construction material). The production of both “is very on-trend in the E.U.” and provides an alternative to petrochemical-based ropes for the region’s marine uses, says Jackow. The building would serve as a cultural hub, incorporating a café, worker housing, and offices. Even its very structure would also make use of the rope by joining timber with knots allowing the interior spaces to be redesigned.

Lee’s building was designed to engage with the forestry and agricultural industries.

“What intrigued me was that Galicia is heavily dependent on pulp production and wood harvesting,” he says. “I wanted to give value to the post-harvest residue.”

Lee designed a biochar plant using some of the concrete and terra cotta blocks on site. Biochar is made by heating the harvested wood residue through pyrolysis — thermal decomposition in an environment with little oxygen. The resulting biochar would be used by farmers for soil enhancement.

“The work demonstrated an understanding of the local resources and using them to benefit the revitalization of the area,” says Salgueiro Barrio, who was pleased with the results.

RIA was so impressed with the work that they held an exhibition at their gallery in Santiago de Compostela in August and September to highlight the importance of connecting academic research with the territory through student projects. Banaś interned with RIA over the summer working on multiple projects, including the plan and design for the exhibition. The challenge here, she says, was to design an exhibition of academic work for a general audience. The final presentation included maps, drawings, and photographs by the students.

For Lee, the course was more meaningful than any he has taken to date. Moving between the different scales of the project illustrated, for him, “the biggest challenge for a designer and an architect. Architecture is universal, and very specific. Keeping those dualities in focus was the biggest challenge and the most interesting part of this project. It hit at the core of what architecture is.”

By Maria Iacobo | MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Older buildings let thousands of dollars-worth of energy go to waste each year through leaky roofs, old windows, and insufficient insulation. But even as building owners face mounting pressure to comply with stricter energy codes, making smart decisions about how to invest in efficiency is a major challenge.

Lamarr.AI, born in part from MIT research, is making the process of finding ways to improve the energy efficiency of buildings as easy as clicking a button. When customers order a building review, it triggers a coordinated symphony of drones, thermal and visible-range cameras, and artificial intelligence designed to identify problems and quantify the impact of potential upgrades. Lamarr.AI’s technology also assesses structural conditions, creates detailed 3D models of buildings, and recommends retrofits. The solution is already being used by leading organizations across facilities management as well as by architecture, engineering, and construction firms.

“We identify the root cause of the anomalies we find,” says CEO and co-founder Tarek Rakha PhD ’15. “Our platform doesn’t just say, ‘This is a hot spot and this is a cold spot.’ It specifies ‘This is infiltration or exfiltration. This is missing insulation. This is water intrusion.’ The detected anomalies are also mapped to a 3D model of the building, and there are deeper analytics, such as the cost of each retrofit and the return on investment.”

To date, the company estimates its platform has helped clients across health care, higher education, and multifamily housing avoid over $3 million in unnecessary construction and retrofit costs by recommending targeted interventions over costly full-system replacements, while improving energy performance and extending asset life. For building owners managing portfolios worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Lamarr.AI’s approach represents a fundamental shift from reactive maintenance to strategic asset management.

The founders, who also include MIT Professor John Fernández and Research Scientist Norhan Bayomi SM ’17, PhD ’21, are thrilled to see their technology accelerating the transition to more energy-efficient and higher-performing buildings.

“Reducing carbon emissions in buildings gets you the greatest return on investment in terms of climate interventions, but what has been needed are the technologies and tools to help the real estate and construction sectors make the right decisions in a timely and economical way,” Fernández says.

Automating building scans

Bayomi and Rakha completed their PhDs in the MIT Department of Architecture’s Building Technology Program. For her thesis, Bayomi developed technology to detect features of building exteriors and classify thermal anomalies through scans of buildings, with a specific focus on the impact of heat waves on low-income communities. Bayomi and her collaborators eventually deployed the system to detect air leaks as part of a partnership with a community in New York City.

After graduating MIT, Rakha became an assistant professor at Syracuse University. In 2015, together with fellow Syracuse University Professor Senem Velipasalar, he began developing his concept for drone-based building analytics — an idea that later received support through a grant from New York State’s Department of Economic Development. In 2019, Bayomi and Fernández joined the project, and the team received a $1.8 million research award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“The technology is like giving a building an MRI using drones, infrared imaging, visible light imaging, and proprietary AI that we developed through computer vision technology, along with large language models for report generation,” Rakha explains.

“When we started the research, we saw firsthand how vulnerable communities were suffering from inefficient buildings, but couldn’t afford comprehensive diagnostics,” Bayomi says. “We knew that if we could automate this process and reduce costs while improving accuracy, we’d unlock a massive market. Now we’re seeing demand from everyone, from municipal buildings to major institutional portfolios.”

Lamarr.AI was officially founded in 2021 to commercialize the technology, and the founders wasted no time tapping into MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. First, they received a small seed grant from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund. In 2022, they won the MITdesignX prize and were semifinalists in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The founders named the company after Hedy Lamarr, the famous actress and inventor of a patented technology that became the basis for many modern secure communications.

Current methods for detecting air leaks in buildings utilize fan pressurizers or smoke. Contractors or building engineers may also spot-check buildings with handheld infrared cameras to manually identify temperature differences across individual walls, windows, and ductwork.

Lamarr.AI’s system can perform building inspections far more quickly. Building managers can order the company’s scans online and select when they’d like the drone to fly. Lamarr.AI partners with drone companies worldwide to fly off-the-shelf drones around buildings, providing them with flight plans and specifications for success. Images are then uploaded onto Lamarr.AI’s platform for automated analysis.

“As an example, a survey of a 180,000-square-foot building like the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which we scanned, produces around 2,000 images,” Fernández says. “For someone to go through those manually would take a couple of weeks. Our models autonomously analyze those images in a few seconds.”

After the analysis, Lamarr.AI’s platform generates a report that includes the suspected root cause of every weak point found, an estimated cost to correct that problem, and its estimated return on investment using advanced building energy simulations.

“We knew if we were able to quickly, inexpensively, and accurately survey the thermal envelope of buildings and understand their performance, we would be addressing a huge need in the real estate, building construction, and built environment sectors,” Fernández explains. “Thermal anomalies are a huge cause of unwanted heat loss, and more than 45 percent of construction defects are tied to envelope failures.”

The ability to operate at scale is especially attractive to building owners and operators, who often manage large portfolios of buildings across multiple campuses.

“We see Lamarr.AI becoming the premier solution for building portfolio diagnostics and prognosis across the globe, where every building can be equipped not just for the climate crisis, but also to minimize energy losses and be more efficient, safer, and sustainable,” Rakha says.

Building science for everyone

Lamarr.AI has worked with building operators across the U.S. as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates.

In June, Lamarr.AI partnered with the City of Detroit, with support from Newlab and Michigan Central, to inspect three municipal buildings to identify areas for improvement. Across two of the buildings, the system identified more than 460 problems like insulation gaps and water leaks. The findings were presented in a report that also utilized energy simulations to demonstrate that upgrades, such as window replacements and targeted weatherization, could reduce HVAC energy use by up to 22 percent.

The entire process took a few days. The founders note that it was the first building inspection drone flight to utilize an off-site operator, an approach that further enhances the scalability of their platform. It also helps further reduce costs, which could make building scans available to a broader swath of people around the world.

“We’re democratizing access to very high-value building science expertise that previously cost tens of thousands per audit,” Bayomi says. “Our platform makes advanced diagnostics affordable enough for routine use, not just one-time assessments. The bigger vision is automated, regular building health monitoring that keeps facilities teams informed in real-time, enabling proactive decisions rather than reactive crisis management. When building intelligence becomes continuous and accessible, operators can optimize performance systematically rather than waiting for problems to emerge.”

By Zach Winn | MIT News

Before the thrill of victory; before the agony of defeat; before the gold medalist’s national anthem plays, there is the Olympic torch. A symbol of unity, friendship, and the spirit of competition, the torch links today’s Olympic Games to its heritage in ancient Greece.

The torch for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games and Paralympic Games was designed by Carlo Ratti, a professor of the practice for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the director of the Senseable City Lab in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

A native of Turin, Italy, and a respected designer and architect worldwide, Ratti’s work and that of his firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, has been featured at various international expositions such as the French Pavilion at the Osaka Expo (World’s Fair) in 2025 and the Italian Pavilion at the Dubai Expo in 2020. Their design for The Cloud, a 400-foot tall spherical structure that would serve as a unique observation deck, was a finalist for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, but ultimately not built.

Ratti relishes the opportunity to participate in these events.

“You can push the boundaries more at these [venues] because you are building something that is temporary,” says Ratti. “They allow for more creativity, so it’s a good moment to experiment.”

Play video

Essential — The Torch of Milano Cortina 2026 — Making Of
Video: Milano Cortina 2026

Based on his previous work, Ratti was invited to design the torch by the Olympic organizers. He approached the project much as he instructs his students working in his lab.

“It is about what the object or the design is to convey,” Ratti says. “How it can touch people, how it can relate to people, how it can transmit emotions. That’s the most important thing.”

To Ratti, the fundamental aspect of the torch is the flame. A few months before the games begin, the torch is lit in Olympia, Greece, using a parabolic mirror reflecting the sun’s rays. In ancient Greece, the flame was considered “sacred,” and was to remain lit throughout the competition. Ratti, familiar with the history of the Olympic torch, is less impressed with designs that he deems overwrought. Many torches added superfluous ornamentation to its exterior much like cars are designed around their engines, he says. Instead, he decided to strip away everything that wasn’t essential to the flame itself.

What is “essential”

“Essential” — the official name for the 2026 Winter Olympic torch — was designed to perform regardless of the weather, wind, or altitude it would encounter on its journey from Olympia to Milan. The process took three years with many designs created, considered, and discussed with the local and global Olympic committees and Olympic sponsor Versalis. And, as with Ratti’s work at MIT, researchers and engineers collaborated in the effort.

“Each design pushed the boundaries in different directions, but all of them with the key principle to put the flame at the center,” says Ratti who wanted the torch to embody “an ethos of frugality.”

At the core of Ratti’s torch is a high-performance burner powered by bio-GPL produced by energy company ENI from 100 percent renewable feedstocks. Furthermore, the torch can be recharged 10 times. In previous years, torches were used only once. This allowed for a 10-fold reduction in the number of torches created.

Also unique to this torch is its internal mechanism, which is visible via a vertical opening along its side, allowing audiences to see the burner in action. This reinforces the desire to keep the emphasis on the flame instead of the object.

In keeping with the requisite for minimalism and sustainability, the torch is primarily composed of recycled aluminum. It is the lightest torch created for the Olympics, weighing just under 2.5 pounds. The body is finished with a PVD coating that is heat resistant, letting it shift colors by reflecting the environments — such as the mountains and the city lights — through which it is carried. The Olympic torch is a blue-green shade, while the Paralympic torch is gold.

The torch won an honorable mention in Italy’s most prestigious industrial design award, the Compasso d’Oro.

The Olympic Relay

The torch relay is considered an event itself, drawing thousands as it is carried to the host city by hundreds of volunteers. Its journey for the 2026 Olympics started in late November and, after visiting cities across Greece, will have covered all 110 Italian provinces before arriving in Milan for the opening ceremony on Feb. 6.

Ratti carried the torch for a portion of its journey through Turin in mid-January — another joyful invitation to this quadrennial event. He says winter sports are his favorite; he grew up skiing where these games are being held, and has since skied around the world — from Utah to the Himalayas.

In addition to a highly sustainable torch, there was another statement Ratti wanted to make: He wanted to showcase the Italy of today and of the future. It is the same issue he confronted as the curator of the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective: an architecture exhibition, but infused with technology for the future.”

“When people think about Italy, they often think about the past, from ancient Romans to the Renaissance or Baroque period,” he says. “Italy does indeed have a significant past. But the reality is that it is also the second-largest industrial powerhouse in Europe and is leading in innovation and tech in many fields. So, the 2026 torch aims to combine both past and future. It draws on Italian design from the past, but also on future-forward technologies.”

“There should be some kind of architectural design always translating into form some kind of ethical principles or ideals. It’s not just about a physical thing. Ultimately, it’s about the human dimension. That applies to the work we do at MIT or the Olympic torch.”

By Maria Iacobo

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab have developed an antenna — about the size of a fine grain of sand — that can be injected into the body to wirelessly power deep-tissue medical implants, such as pacemakers in cardiac patients and neuromodulators in people suffering from epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

“This is the next major step in miniaturizing deep-tissue implants,” says Baju Joy, a PhD student in the Media Lab’s Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. “It enables battery-free implants that can be placed with a needle, instead of major surgery.”

A paper detailing this work was published in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Joy is joined on the paper by lead author Yubin Cai, PhD student at the Media Lab; Benoît X. E. Desbiolles and Viktor Schell, former MIT postdocs; Shubham Yadav, an MIT PhD student in media arts and sciences; David C. Bono, an instructor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Associate Professor at the Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group.

Deep-tissue implants are currently powered either with a several-centimeters-long battery that is surgically implanted in the body, requiring periodic replacement, or with a surgically placed magnetic coil, also of a centimeter-scale size, that can harvest power wirelessly. The coil method functions only at high frequencies, which can cause tissue heating, limiting how much power can be safely delivered to the implant when miniaturized to sub-millimeter sizes.

“After that limit, you start damaging the cells,” says Joy.

As is stated in the team’s IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation paper, “developing an antenna at ultra-small dimensions (less then 500 micrometers) which can operate efficiently in the low-frequency band is challenging.”

The 200-micrometer antenna — developed through research led by Sarkar — operates at low frequencies (109 kHz) thanks to a novel technology in which a magnetostrictive film, which deforms when a magnetic field is applied, is laminated with a piezoelectric film, which converts deformation to electric charge. When an alternating magnetic field is applied, magnetic domains within the magnetostrictive film contort it in the same way that a piece of fabric interwoven with pieces of metal would contort if subjected to a strong magnet. The mechanical strain in the magnetostrictive layer causes the piezoelectric layer to generate electric charges across electrodes placed above and below.

“We are leveraging this mechanical vibration to convert the magnetic field to an electric field,” Joy says.

Sarkar says the newly developed antenna delivers four to five orders of magnitude more power than implantable antennas of similar size that rely on metallic coils and operate in the GHz frequency range.

“Our technology has the potential to introduce a new avenue for minimally invasive bioelectric devices that can operate wirelessly deep within the human body,” she says.

The magnetic field that activates the antenna is provided by a device similar to a rechargeable wireless cell phone charger, and is small enough to be applied to the skin as a stick-on patch or slipped into a pocket close to the skin surface.

Because the antenna is fabricated with the same technology as a microchip, it can be easily integrated with already-existing microelectronics.

“These electronics and electrodes can be easily made to be much smaller than the antenna itself, and they would be integrated with the antenna during nanofabrication,” Joy says, adding that the researchers’ work leverages 50 years of research and development applied to making transistors and other electronics smaller and smaller. “The other components can be tiny, and the entire system can be placed with a needle injection.”

Manufacture of the antennas could be easily scaled up, the researchers say, and multiple antennas and implants could be injected to treat large areas of the body.

Another possible application of this antenna, in addition to pacemaking and neuromodulation, is glucose sensing in the body. Circuits with an optical sensor for detecting glucose already exist, but the process would benefit greatly with a wireless power supply that can be non-invasively integrated inside of the body.

“That’s just one example,” Joy says. “We can leverage all these other techniques that are also developed using the same fabrication methods, and then just integrate them easily to the antenna.”

By Michaela Jarvis | MIT Media Lab

Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core part of her life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through high school.

“For most of my life, writing and playing music was the clearest way I had to express myself,” says Lecamwasam. “I was a really shy and anxious kid, and I struggled with speaking up for myself. Over time, composing and performing music became central to both how I communicated and to how I managed my own mental health.”

Along with equipping her with valuable skills and experiences, she credits her passion for music as the catalyst for her interest in neuroscience.

“I got to see firsthand not only the ways that audiences reacted to music, but also how much value music had for musicians,” she says. “That close connection between making music and feeling well is what first pushed me to ask why music has such a powerful hold on us, and eventually led me to study the science behind it.”

Lecamwasam earned a bachelor’s degree in 2021 from Wellesley College, where she studied neuroscience — specifically in the Systems and Computational Neuroscience track — and also music. During her first semester, she took a class in songwriting that she says made her more aware of the connections between music and emotions. While studying at Wellesley, she participated in the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for three years. Working in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences lab of Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, she focused primarily on classifying consciousness in anesthetized patients and training brain-computer interface-enabled prosthetics using reinforcement learning.

“I still had a really deep love for music, which I was pursuing in parallel to all of my neuroscience work, but I really wanted to try to find a way to combine both of those things in grad school,” says Lecamwasam. Brown recommended that she look into the graduate programs at the MIT Media Lab within the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), which turned out to be an ideal fit.

“One thing I really love about where I am is that I get to be both an artist and a scientist,” says Lecamwasam. “That was something that was important to me when I was picking a graduate program. I wanted to make sure that I was going to be able to do work that was really rigorous, validated, and important, but also get to do cool, creative explorations and actually put the research that I was doing into practice in different ways.”

Exploring the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of music

Informed by her years of neuroscience research as an undergraduate and her passion for music, Lecamwasam focused her graduate research on harnessing the emotional potency of music into scalable, non-pharmacological mental health tools. Her master’s thesis focused on “pharmamusicology,” looking at how music might positively affect the physiology and psychology of those with anxiety.

The overarching theme of Lecamwasam’s research is exploring the various impacts of music and affective computing — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Now in the third year of her doctoral program in the Opera of the Future group, she is currently investigating the impact of large-scale live music and concert experiences on the mental health and well-being of both audience members and performers. She is also working to clinically validate music listening, composition, and performance as health interventions, in combination with psychotherapy and pharmaceutical interventions.

Her recent work, in collaboration with Professor Anna Huang’s Human-AI Resonance Lab, assesses the emotional resonance of AI-generated music compared to human-composed music; the aim is to identify more ethical applications of emotion-sensitive music generation and recommendation that preserve human creativity and agency, and can also be used as health interventions. She has co-led a wellness and music workshop at the Wellbeing Summit in Bilbao, Spain, and has presented her work at the 2023 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany and the 2024 Audio Mostly conference in Milan, Italy.

Lecamwasam has collaborated with organizations near and far to implement real-world applications of her research. She worked with Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute on its Well-Being Concerts and is currently partnering on a study assessing the impact of lullaby writing on perinatal health with the North Shore Lullaby Project in Massachusetts, an offshoot of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. Her main international collaboration is with a company called Myndstream, working on projects comparing the emotional resonance of AI-generated music to human-composed music and thinking of clinical and real-world applications. She is also working on a project with the companies PixMob and Empatica (an MIT Media Lab spinoff), centered on assessing the impact of interactive lighting and large-scale live music experiences on emotional resonance in stadium and arena settings.

Building community

“Kimy combines a deep love for — and sophisticated knowledge of — music with scientific curiosity and rigor in ways that represent the Media Lab/MAS spirit at its best,” says Professor Tod Machover, Lecamwasam’s research advisor, Media Lab faculty director, and director of the Opera of the Future group. “She has long believed that music is one of the most powerful and effective ways to create personalized interventions to help stabilize emotional distress and promote empathy and connection. It is this same desire to establish sane, safe, and sustaining environments for work and play that has led Kimy to become one of the most effective and devoted community-builders at the lab.”

Lecamwasam has participated in the SOS (Students Offering Support) program in MAS for a few years, which assists students from a variety of life experiences and backgrounds during the process of applying to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She will soon be the first MAS peer mentor as part of a new initiative through which she will establish and coordinate programs including a “buddy system,” pairing incoming master’s students with PhD students as a way to help them transition into graduate student life at MIT. She is also part of the Media Lab’s Studcom, a student-run organization that promotes, facilitates, and creates experiences meant to bring the community together.

“I think everything that I have gotten to do has been so supported by the friends I’ve made in my lab and department, as well as across departments,” says Lecamwasam. “I think everyone is just really excited about the work that they do and so supportive of one another. It makes it so that even when things are challenging or difficult, I’m motivated to do this work and be a part of this community.”

By Stefanie Koperniak | Office of Graduate Education

Placing a lit candle in a window to welcome friends and strangers is an old Irish tradition that took on greater significance when Mary Robinson was elected president of Ireland in 1990. At the time, Robinson placed a lamp in Áras an Uachtaráin — the official residence of Ireland’s presidents — noting that the Irish diaspora and all others are always welcome in Ireland. Decades later, a lit lamp remains in a window in Áras an Uachtaráin.

The symbolism of Robinson’s lamp was shared by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), at the school’s graduation ceremony in May, where Robinson addressed the class of 2025. To replicate the generous intentions of Robinson’s lamp and commemorate her visit to MIT, Sarkis commissioned a unique lantern as a gift for Robinson. He commissioned an identical one for his office, which is in the front portico of MIT at 77 Massachusetts Ave.

“The lamp will welcome all citizens of the world to MIT,” says Sarkis.

Video: MIT Design Intelligence Lab

No ordinary lantern

The bespoke lantern was created by Marcelo Coelho SM ’08, PhD ’12, director of the Design Intelligence Lab and associate professor of the practice in the Department of Architecture.

One of several projects in the Geoletric research at the Design Intelligence Lab, the lantern showcases the use of geopolymers as a sustainable material alternative for embedded computers and consumer electronics.

“The materials that we use to make computers have a negative impact on climate, so we’re rethinking how we make products with embedded electronics — such as a lamp or lantern — from a climate perspective,” says Coelho.

Consumer electronics rely on materials that are high in carbon emissions and difficult to recycle. As the demand for embedded computing increases, so too does the need for alternative materials that have a reduced environmental impact while supporting electronic functionality.

The Geolectric lantern advances the formulation and application of geopolymers — a class of inorganic materials that form covalently bonded, non-crystalline networks. Unlike traditional ceramics, geopolymers do not require high-temperature firing, allowing electronic components to be embedded seamlessly during production.

Geopolymers are similar to ceramics, but have a lower carbon footprint and present a sustainable alternative for consumer electronics, product design, and architecture. The minerals Coelho uses to make the geopolymers — aluminum silicate and sodium silicate — are those regularly used to make ceramics.

“Geopolymers aren’t particularly new, but are becoming more popular,” says Coelho. “They have high strength in both tension and compression, superior durability, fire resistance, and thermal insulation. Compared to concrete, geopolymers don’t release carbon dioxide. Compared to ceramics, you don’t have to worry about firing them. What’s even more interesting is that they can be made from industrial byproducts and waste materials, contributing to a circular economy and reducing waste.”

The lantern is embedded with custom electronics that serve as a proximity and touch sensor. When a hand is placed over the top, light shines down the glass tubes.

The timeless design of the Geoelectric lantern — minimalist, composed of natural materials — belies its future-forward function. Coelho’s academic background is in fine arts and computer science. Much of his work, he says, “bridges these two worlds.”

Working at the Design Intelligence Lab with Coelho on the lanterns are Jacob Payne, a graduate architecture student, and Jean-Baptiste Labrune, a research affiliate.

A light for MIT

A few weeks before commencement, Sarkis saw the Geoelectric lantern in Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts and Culture in Venice, Italy. The exhibition, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition, featured the work of 40 MIT architecture faculty.

The sustainability feature of Geolectric is the key reason Sarkis regarded the lantern as the perfect gift for Robinson. After her career in politics, Robinson founded the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice, an international center addressing the impacts of climate change on marginalized communities.

The third iteration of Geolectric for Sarkis’ office is currently underway. While the lantern was a technical prototype and an opportunity to showcase his lab’s research, Coelho — an immigrant from Brazil — was profoundly touched by how Sarkis created the perfect symbolism to both embody the welcoming spirit of the school and honor President Robinson.

“When the world feels most fragile, we need to urgently find sustainable and resilient solutions for our built environment. It’s in the darkest times when we need light the most,” says Coelho.

By Maria Iacobo | School of Architecture and Planning

An excerpt from the new book Designing the X: Shaping an Unknown Future — Foreword and Chapter 1

Foreword
by Mauro Porcini
President & Chief Designer Officer | Samsung

Design is not a job. It is not a tool or a strategy. Design is a way of being in the world.

It is how we choose to see — with empathy. How we choose to listen — with curiosity. How we choose to act — with imagination, courage, and care.

When I first encountered the ideas behind Designing the X, I didn’t just read them. I recognized them. They resonated deeply, not because they were familiar, but because they revealed something I had always felt.

This book speaks to the designer in all of us — not only the one who sits in front of a screen sketching icons or products, but anyone who wakes up each morning and tries to make something better. A conversation. A company. A society. A culture. A future.

Design is not just a discipline. It is a way of seeing — and of feeling — the world. It is how we respond to complexity not with fear, but with an open mind. It is how we move from reaction to intention, from function to meaning, from isolation to co-creation.

Designing the X was conceived in that fragile and fertile space between ambiguity and action. It emerged from conversations across continents and disciplines, among designers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists who shared a single belief: that design has the power not just to solve problems, but to reveal them; not just to improve systems, but to reimagine them; not just to answer questions, but to ask better ones.

The “X” in the title is deliberate. It represents the unknown — the emergent, the unformed, the space of possibility. It is the variable that can only be defined through experience, through process, and through synthesis.

That “X” is both a mystery and a promise. It stands for the space where our intuition begins. It is the blank canvas, the leap of faith, the trembling silence before the music starts. And it is in that space that the beauty of design — and the truth of humanity — comes alive.

I’ve spent my life exploring this mystery. From a small town in Italy, drawing with passion in the margins of notebooks, to boardrooms in St. Paul, New York and Seoul, leading global teams across brands and borders — I’ve seen firsthand what design can do when it’s guided not by ego, but by purpose. When it becomes a dialogue, not a monologue. When it welcomes diversity and contradiction and still finds harmony.

Designing the X captures this beautifully. In that sense, this book is not a map. It is a compass. It doesn’t offer a single path forward — it offers a way to navigate the future.

We live in an era of supercomplexity — where the pace of change is accelerating beyond the reach of any single method, model, or mindset. Traditional disciplines, even when combined, often fall short in addressing the entangled crises of our time: environmental collapse, social fragmentation, technological disruption, and economic inequality. In the face of these challenges, design offers something essential: a means to think and act in conditions where cause and effect are opaque, where the outcome is uncertain, and where the stakeholders are many.

Design invites us to engage the full spectrum of human experience — rational and emotional, analytical and intuitive, scientific and poetic. It demands that we hold paradoxes without resolving them too quickly. It asks us to remain open, adaptive, and humble. And it insists that we do so together.

The future cannot be designed in isolation. It must be co-created.

This is the deeper argument of Designing the X. Drawing from decades of work across industries, cultures, and academic institutions, the authors propose a vision of design not as a set of tools, but as a mindset: a human capacity for synthesis, meaning-making, and transformation.

In this vision, the designer is not a solitary genius. The designer is a conductor — a guide, a translator, a connector of humans and ideas. They are “people in love with people”, as I like to call them. With care and sensitivity, the design conductor orchestrates the voices of many: users, stakeholders, scientists, business leaders, artists, policymakers, citizens. They do not impose harmony; they make space for discord and diversity to coexist productively. They give form to dialogue. They turn friction into fuel.

The process of design, as this book reveals, is not linear. It is fluid, recursive, embodied. Like a vortex, it gathers insight, energy, and tension as it moves. At its best, it is both grounded and visionary — capable of engaging reality as it is while imagining what it might become.

Designing the X takes us on a journey through this process. It offers frameworks grounded in practice and illustrated through case studies that span the globe — from urban innovation and affordable housing to sustainable development and speculative futures. It introduces us to polymathic teams and radical thinkers. And it reminds us that design is not about perfection. It is about progress. It is about participating in the ongoing evolution of the world around us.

What makes this book so timely — and timeless — is that it does not celebrate design as an isolated act of creativity. Instead, it positions design as an integrative force, one that can bridge the artificial boundaries between disciplines, between people, and between present and future.

Design is not just a response to crisis. It is a rehearsal for what comes next.

In that spirit, this book invites us to reframe design as a form of hope — active, critical, and courageous. It is hope not as wishful thinking, but as intentional action in the face of uncertainty. Hope as strategy. Hope as infrastructure. Hope as method.

There is, of course, an urgency to this invitation. We are living through a moment of profound transition — cultural, technological, ecological. The stakes are high. But the authors of Designing the X do not succumb to despair. Nor do they fall into naïve optimism. They choose what I would call “creative optimism” — a belief that we can and must imagine alternatives, not in spite of complexity, but because of it.

They remind us that design is not neutral. It always reflects choices — about who is included, what is valued, and what future we are building toward. Design can be extractive or regenerative, exclusionary or inclusive. Which is why ethics, empathy, and equity must be at the core of any design process.

The book makes a strong case for design literacy — for bringing design into education, into leadership, into systems thinking. Not because everyone should be a designer in the traditional sense, but because everyone is already shaping the world around them in ways big and small. If we are all participants in shaping the future, then we all need the tools and mindsets to do so wisely.

Above all, Designing the X is a celebration of plurality. It honors complexity without collapsing it. It respects expertise without fetishizing it. And it elevates the lived experience of people — users, communities, collaborators — as vital sources of insight and innovation.

This is a deeply generous book. It gives us language to describe what many of us have long felt: that design is not a luxury, not an afterthought, not the “last step” in innovation. It is the connective tissue — the means by which ideas become actions, and actions become impact.

It is a book that dares to ask big questions, while offering practical pathways forward. It does not offer quick fixes or silver bullets. Instead, it gives us a richer, deeper understanding of what it means to design in an age of complexity, change, and interconnectedness.

To read this book is to be reminded of something essential: that we are all designers, whether we call ourselves that or not. That every choice we make — what to build, what to change, what to protect — is a design decision. And that the future is not written. It is designed.

To the quiet leaders and bold visionaries,

To the strategists, artists, engineers, and activists,

To the rebels who lead with love,

To the teams who argue, laugh, and create together,

To the teens drawing spaceships on their notebook,

To my daughter and son, and their generation, who already design their days with wonder — This book is for you.

And if you, like me, believe that ideas are seeds and design is how we help them grow — then welcome. You are exactly where you need to be.

Mauro Porcini, an Italian designer and innovation leader, is the author of The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People. Prior to joining Samsung, he served as the first Chief Design Officer at 3M and at PepsiCo. He has received multiple awards, and his work has been featured in numerous books and articles on design and innovation around the world. More information at www.mauro-porcini.com.

1 Designing the X

No model or mathematical formula alone can capture the complexity of our world with all its emotional, cultural, and human variables that are impossible to measure. Hence, we must design.

We had gathered in Iceland to develop the ideas for Designing the X: a group of strategic designers, practicing across fields including city planning, entrepreneurship, education, management, and public health, linked by a shared intuition that design held the key to engaging the challenges of our time.

All around us, we saw those challenges played out at scale — from economic disparity and mass migration to rising sea levels and extreme weather events. We had come together to connect the dots between our different areas of practice: to look deeper into the design process by investigating how design acts as a vehicle for innovation and taps into the full scope of our human capabilities.

After months of research and an intensive week of discussion, we were ready to take a break. On the invitation of our co-author Sigurdur Thorsteinsson, we traveled to the Blue Lagoon, the globally renowned natural hot spring located on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

Heated by turbulent forces deep underground and harnessed to generate clean energy before entering the lagoon, the milky-blue waters are recognized for their healing properties. Set within an ink-black landscape of ancient lava, underwater the rock is coated with a white, porcelain-like finish of minerals. It’s mesmerizing, conjuring associations of an otherworldly paradise — all too easy to forget that we are submerged within a volatile living landscape.

As we drifted calmly in the azure waters, the sky suddenly blazed red, reflecting the flames of a nearby eruption. Beyond the lagoon’s protective walls, glowing yellow-orange lava flowed freely on its way to the sea, threatening to obstruct the only route of escape.

Wondering whether it was time to panic, we turned to Sigurdur for reassurance. He responded with bemused Icelandic calm:

“We are playing chess with nature.”

Since that day in midsummer, we’ve come to view the Blue Lagoon as the perfect expression of contemporary conditions of life on Earth. Enmeshed within the play of nature, there is no retreat or escape. Each day, we wake up to a world that’s shifting beneath our feet, where the ground feels less stable, where the rules are constantly changing.

Each one of us is living in a situation where the old certainties have crumbled, replaced by a web of complex interconnections that cannot be fully comprehended. The climate and the economy — the very systems our species depends upon — are intertwined and impossible to untangle. We’re left to navigate an unpredictable terrain where the stakes are higher and the outcomes more uncertain than ever before.

The Challenge of Supercomplexity

How and why did such “supercomplex” systems emerge? They are surely not a product of human intention. Few people could envision living and working, let alone swimming, amidst a volcanic eruption. Yet for Icelanders, volcanoes have become part of life, just as they were for the early Viking settlers. In Norse mythology, eruptions signaled the wrath of Surtr — a giant who summoned rivers of fire from deep within the Earth to clear the land of wayward humans (Lindow, 2002). Today, across the world, we are witnessing a comparable unstoppable flow: No one could have foreseen the complex interplay of data, algorithms, and multiple human systems that are reshaping our daily lives in subtle yet increasingly profound ways.

The condition we refer to as “supercomplexity” extends beyond measurement and formulas. It involves dynamic physical, behavioral, economic, and environmental factors in which the logic of cause and effect is not always clear or observable, and the relationships between the parts and the whole are constantly shifting (Barnett, 2000). Supercomplex systems are opaque, leading to problems characterized by:

Impenetrability — where should the problem-solving process begin?

Uncertainty — how do parts of the system relate, or not, in space and time?

Fluid emergences — in which solutions are not bound by predetermined rules but evolve from within the problem-solving process itself.

Supercomplexity is accelerating in every aspect of life. This is not, as some have argued, merely the perspective of each new generation; our current situation can be likened to the exponential accumulation of human knowledge, estimated by IBM to be doubling at this point every 12 hours (Schilling, 2013). Such acceleration is beautifully visualized in Barrett Lyon’s Opte Project, which seeks to accurately map the growth of the internet in real time. As revealed in Lyon’s timelapse video, each complication springs from its predecessor in a never-ending accumulation of change, prompting psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) to question: “Is life becoming too complex for survival?”

At this moment of increasing doubt and rising panic, there is a source of equanimity in Sigurdur’s observation: “We are playing chess with nature.” The condition of supercomplexity should not be unexpected. Increasing complexity has been a function of our universe from its first moment of existence as an explosion of unformed energy through the appearance of atoms, elements, stars, galaxies, planets, living organisms, and the intricacies of human consciousness. Each stage of emergence, instigated by imbalances between a system and its environment, is marked by a leap in complexity, which drives the universe to ever-greater levels of interconnection.

This growing net of relations has generated what we know as life on our planet. However, increasing complexity is also characteristic of what we experience as crisis. As the climate warms and human population continues to consume, the habitable space and resources available to support life on Earth are now critically out of balance. Among many daunting statistics, global wildlife populations have declined nearly 73% on average in just a few decades, with a shocking 95% decline across Latin America (World Wildlife Fund, 2024). In many human populations, we see advancing scarcity of food and water, health crises, displacement, and unchecked urbanization, which pose problems at a scale of unprecedented complexity. For example, the population of Africa is predicted to double by 2050, adding 1 billion people to urban areas (African Development Bank, 2023) — a staggering increase led by the city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is expected to reach 35 million people in the coming decades (Wahba & Ranarifidy, 2018).

The Why of Design

What will it take to regain equilibrium and intentionally engage supercomplexity? What methods are best suited to supporting the balance of life on the planet?

In this book, we argue that conventional approaches to understanding and problem-solving fall short of these goals. Despite the hype around AI and new predictive technologies, the accumulation and analysis of ever more data are not sufficient to tackle the challenges ahead. At a time when the analytic paradigm favored by scientists and technologists is relied upon to solve the world’s problems, we propose that design can act to synthesize new approaches, as well as transform and advance the capabilities of many disciplines. Indeed, by providing a crucial missing piece of the puzzle, we believe that design is essential to the quest for a more sustainable and equitable future.

The team behind Designing the X has arrived at this shared conviction through diverse routes: from designing large-scale, technology-enabled urban environments, to building successful ventures centered on social impact, to radically rethinking the way we produce and use consumer products. This broad compendium of experience and knowledge has been supplemented by insights coming from physics, neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy, among other fields, as well as 67 interviews with global thought leaders and practitioners about the role and practice of design.

These dialogues have deepened our understanding of the inner mechanisms and intuitive discoveries of the design process and how that process can be applied to engage supercomplexity. The voices of our interviewees are present throughout the book, appearing as quotations that direct the flow of the text. As we introduce our distinct argument and set of tools to engage supercomplexity, it is important to note that our thinking also builds upon a strong foundation established by other scholars and design practitioners. Books such as Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World by Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown (2018), Design for a Better World by Don Norman (2025), and Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation by Kevin G. Bethune (2024), among others, set a precedent when it comes to articulating a broader scope for design in society.

Designing the X presents a new take on the “why,” based on a deep investigation of exactly how design acts as a vehicle for innovation. Our argument is rooted in an in-depth exploration of what design is, how it originates, and its role in shaping the human condition. This informs our proposal (in Chapter 6) for where design fits within the currently dominant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, especially when it comes to education.

By prospecting for ideas, information, and shared patterns of thinking across different areas of knowledge, it became apparent that design is central to contemporary thinking, revealing both the deep origins of the practice and its power to shape the future in sync with other disciplines. We are indebted to a range of sources in addition to our interviews, broadening our outlook to areas far beyond typical design discourse — from theoretical physics and neuroscience to linguistics and philosophy.

In opening a conversation about the positive role of design in remaking the many realities we each experience, we have raised to the surface what is already present in the zeitgeist. This multiplicity is modeled in the book by the interviews, our perspectives from practice and teaching, and ideas and insights from many different angles. Together, these represent the ethos of synthesis, which serves as a guiding theme and organizing principle of the book.

In Pursuit of the X

At its root, design can be understood as a method of synthesis — an innate human ability that relies upon intuition, prediction, and the facts of the present moment to envision an alternative future state and develop pathways to attain it. Design involves inventing new wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, revealing problem-solving opportunities that are not available to analytic methods of reasoning that deal with the parts alone. The difference between the sum of the parts and the greater whole is the “X” in our title.

This process of synthesis can be compared to the reaction between two poisonous elements: sodium (a reactive metal) and chlorine (a corrosive gas). When combined, the two react to produce a new compound: table salt, the mineral of life.

In this case, the transformation from two separate elements to a new and distinct whole can easily be understood in terms of elemental chemistry. However, in design, the apparent “leap” from an assortment of parts to a greater whole — the holistic and contextual re-weaving of conditions so that the problem could not exist — has not yet been investigated in depth.

Too often, the X is credited to the mysterious “magic” of creativity — a mythology that serves to lionize the designer in the public imagination yet belittle their role when it comes to addressing real-world problems. We believe it is time for a closer look “under the hood” of the design process, with the goal of identifying a set of design principles and strategies that can be applied by innovators in any field.

Designing the X requires embracing the uncertainty of entering the unknown; it is only by leaving the security of the known present that we can identify a path forward into an envisioned future. By living in pursuit of the X and applying the know-how of design, we open ourselves to the opportunities latent within supercomplex situations — discoveries made possible by innovating within the fluid medium of the design process itself.

Our approach is indicative of a shift in consciousness occurring across multiple fields of practice. It has become increasingly clear to many, whether philosophers or artists, sociologists or scientists, that something is missing in our current view of reality: an exclusion of the less measurable human factors that shape much of what is perceived, and therefore, what can be conceived as possible (Deacon, 2012, p. 108). It is time to expand the aperture.

To understand the context of this shift, it’s worth taking a step back to the 17th century, when the Eurocentric frame of perception became increasingly dominated by analytic thinking, in which beliefs are tested on the basis of physical evidence that can be observed, measured, and applied to form conclusions. These new methods of thinking made way for the scientific discoveries of Copernicus and Newton, and the process of deduction that led Descartes to his famous pronouncement of certainty: cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”

Thinking, specifically the capacity for inferential reasoning, was posited as the primary form of knowledge and sole means of identifying facts — in this case, as proof of Descartes’ own existence. The mind, dualistically divorced from the body, would henceforth be the primary engine for a new approach to problem-solving: the interrogation of apparent “reality” to decode the verifiable “facts” of how the world functions, breaking down experience into ever more detailed, ever simpler units in the hope of disclosing a fundamental set of causes and effects. By such reasoning, a whole cannot be more than the sum of its parts; human beings are separate from the world they observe, and there is no possibility of accessing the X.

It is important to note that the formulation of the scientific method had a precedent in the work of non-Western scholars and can be traced back to ancient China (Needham, 1995) and the mathematical discoveries that shaped the culture of the Islamic world (Al-Khalili, 2011). However, it was in Europe that analytic thinking became a dogma of sorts, understood as the source of agency for effecting change in the world (Shapin, 2018). With the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, the attempt to decode the secrets of nature and apply those laws for human gain became the environmental endgame. Advancing via multiple technological discoveries through to the present day, this trajectory of apparent progress has led to unprecedented and often beneficial changes in living conditions, but with deep, unforeseen consequences: the destruction of our habitat on Earth.

A Balancing Act

Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Social and ecological problems have reached a breaking point. What’s more, these problems are too intractable to resolve by conventional means, and the position of analysis as the primary means of truth-seeking and problem-solving is no longer so stable. All it takes is a recalibration of scale to recognize that what we rationalize as “reality” is only a partial placeholder. At the level of subatomic particles, the laws of classical physics no longer apply; this is a realm where cause and effect are seemingly divorced, the future can influence the past, and matter can fundamentally change depending upon how — or if — it is observed (Baclawski, 2018). The method of analytic reasoning has become its own undoing, rationally revealing itself to be unreasonable.

Unreasonable, that is, if analytic reasoning (enshrined by the scientific method) is accepted as the sole arbiter of truth (the “real”) at the expense of other approaches to knowledge. The assimilation of quantum mechanics as part of our everyday understanding of the world will inevitably produce vertigo, but it can also be a new way of finding our feet. No longer standing on solid ground, but moving in a medium that is far more interesting and changeable than any framework of truth we might wish to impose upon it.

Perhaps the test of a radical worldview is how quickly it becomes “common sense.” Certain distinctions are proving to be insufficient — east and west, black and white, male and female, to name just a few of the binaries that no longer fit the world in which we live. Likewise the integration of methods of analysis and synthesis, of mathematical and human truths, of quantum mechanics and sensed experience, does not require a feat of mental gymnastics. To expand the aperture simply means to open the mind and to see as we are able.

This observation is echoed by Andrea Moro, professor of linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Pavia, Italy:

The opposition between humanism and science was functional to the emancipation of science from theology. But now I think the terms “humanism” and “science” are an obstacle to understanding reality. It seems to me that those terms divide what seems to be more united than ever. There can’t be a real distinction between the human and what is real. And so we have a new challenge: to abandon this dichotomy — humanistic and scientific — and reconcile them methodologically, epistemologically. We have to use all tools to understand reality (Eberly, 2022).

Scratch the surface of neurobiology, and it becomes apparent that this balancing act between analysis and synthesis is innate to the human brain. It has long been understood that brain function is divided into two interdependent hemispheres: while the right hemisphere forms a holistic picture of our place in the world by attending to context, connections, intuitions, and emotions, the left hemisphere sees the world as constructed of isolated, unchanging elements and quantifiable facts that can be measured and categorized. The right hemisphere is open to the implicit, while the left focuses purely on the tangible and explicit. Furthermore, while the right hemisphere of the brain sees the synthesis of both modes of sense-making, the left is unaware of the right and is therefore entirely confident of its own analytically driven conclusions (McGilchrist, 2019).

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist argues that human culture has veered toward overvaluing the functions of the left hemisphere, a tendency that has moved in cycles across time and has become increasingly dominant since the scientific revolution in the 17th century. This imbalance has had profound and damaging effects, arguably laying the groundwork for the current ecological crisis. In technologically advanced, urban-centric societies, there is an inclination to view our species as separate from nature and the planet as inanimate matter, reduced to an accretion of resources to extract for our own ends.

Indeed, it is our own end — the demise of our species, among the many extinctions due to ecological disruption — that we risk approaching due to left-brain dependence. Unreceptive to information that is not present and provable, the left hemisphere lacks the capacity to envision possibilities beyond what it can see. It is therefore doomed to repeat the same errors, trapped in a closed box of disembodied abstractions and analytic segmentation (Nielsen et al., 2013).

To confront supercomplex problems, our human challenge is to restore the balance between these distinct but complementary ways of understanding the world: the analytic and instrumental, alongside the synthetic and intuitive. This is where design fits in, the missing puzzle piece that enables us to complete our picture of the world and what is possible within it.

How?

1. Design differs profoundly from analysis in that it accepts human intuition, visions, emotions, and beliefs as equal in value to known facts.

2. Design pushes for an in-depth understanding of the interconnected context in which problems and solutions emerge, requiring the involvement of stakeholders. This differs from analytic reasoning, which attempts to isolate the essence of a problem within a simplified, reductive model.

3. Design deals with synthesizing new systems in the context of an envisioned future, rather than trying to dissect existing systems to understand reality in the present.

These and other relationships assert the potential of design to make way for more powerful methods of predicting and producing outcomes. Rather than seeking to replace the dominant forms of knowledge represented by science and technology, design serves to synthesize new knowledge while opening alternative pathways for innovative problem-solving.

Finding Your Flow

Designing the X guides the reader through a series of strategies for innovators to advance their problem-solving capacity — both at the level of envisioning the unprecedented and taking the steps to translate that vision into reality.

The structure of the book has a sequential flow. However, the reader may wish to take any path that captures their interest, even starting at the center and cycling outward.

In Chapter 2: Design in Time, we reflect on the history of design as a fundamental human ability and an active force in changing the trajectory of human culture. It is important to recognize that good design is far more than an aesthetic strategy that serves to fuel consumerism. The emotional resonance and sensual appeal that design brings to an everyday object might equally be applied to ideas, events, and causes, transforming human perceptions and introducing new ways of thinking and acting. As such, design plays a “predictive” role in conditioning the possibilities for future innovation. This capacity — intangible as it is powerful — has been overlooked and underestimated. From shaping tools to give them meaning and power over nature, to inventing new forms of sustainable cities, design has a history of producing alternate realities.

Expanding upon a concept borrowed from the Italian legacy of design, Chapter 3: Progettare outlines the principles that serve to transform a vision into tangible reality. Contrary to the popular myth of the designer as a maverick “creative” who conjures “pies-in-the sky” from thin air, the practice of design is grounded and strategic. To plan (“progettare”) is always to work in relation to a future that has not yet occurred, and designers are distinguished by a high tolerance for navigating uncertainty. We argue that this is not an elusive superpower, but an aptitude developed by having access to certain key strategies for directly addressing complexity and working through the unknown. Informed by recurrent themes revealed in our research, we propose a set of engagement principles that provide effective touchpoints for anyone seeking to address supercomplex problems.

Chapter 4: Flow with Complexity dives deeper into the design process and methodologies, mapping the concurrent cycles that create conditions for the emergence of a design solution. We liken this process to a vortex, a natural phenomenon that emerges when a flow (whether of air, water, or thought) is interrupted. A vortex is not a singular entity but a dynamic event, in which each move determines the next, taking different shapes and directions as the flow is maintained. Novel approaches emerge from the form of the process itself, and one may enter the vortex at any point or scale of the problem. To arrive at desirable outcomes, we apply certain methods to generate and constrain choices as we move with accelerating speed down the vortex. The objective is not necessarily to optimize a single correct answer. Instead, the vortex feeds the dynamics of emergence; it frames a reality in which desirable outcomes are probable and therefore predictable.

Who are those that navigate the vortex? Chapter 5: The Collective and the Conductor describes the orchestration of an inclusive and “polymathic” design process, one that takes care to integrate the multiple different perspectives required for addressing supercomplexity. Led by an experienced “design conductor” who manages and guides the process forward, the design team includes not only professional designers and experts from multiple fields of knowledge, but also stakeholders who can be considered experts in the context. These diverse team members play a crucial role, both as an important source for facts and ideas and as decision makers and sculptors of the process. Today, it has become something of a cliché for designers to assert an anti-didactic, non-prescriptive approach to problem-solving, reflecting a cultural shift away from the 20th-century “design master” and toward an ideal of ground-up design involving stakeholder engagement. However, the proof is in practice. Our view is not based on the “morality of the moment,” but a pragmatic recognition of how consensus solutions are reached.

Chapter 6: The Path Forward explores the implications of incorporating design education across all disciplines, fostering and developing the innate capacity of the mind to synthesize new realities. In the current STEM-oriented education system, the sciences and mathematics have been of primary importance. However, this overemphasis on analytic reasoning limits the toolkit for tackling future challenges, equipping the next generation with only part of what is needed to negotiate an increasingly supercomplex world. In contrast, design engages the whole, just as a whirlpool engages a stream. The process of intertwining analysis with synthesis produces a balanced and context-driven approach to living and acting in this world — ultimately, allowing that world to evolve into the place we envision and aspire to.

The Optimism of Experience

The framework above has been developed in the spirit of “creative optimism.” As a group of educators and design practitioners, we believe it is possible to apply the full scope of our capacities as human beings to cocreate better futures.

This conviction is grounded in experience. We have seen our insights played out at the level of industry and academia. Throughout the book, we draw on our industry experience and our work at the MITdesignX program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Design Group Italia (DGI), and insights from our colleagues at the Design School at Politecnico di Milan.

MITdesignX operates in the context of one of the world’s leading scientific institutions known for innovation and new thinking. As an experiential learning program founded in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and based at the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, the program is dedicated to accelerating innovation in design and the human environment, engaging participants working across MIT in disciplines as diverse as bioengineering and art. Working with polymathic teams, many linked to the sciences, we have witnessed how synthesis and original thinking emerge through the design process. Projects ranging from tackling urban migration in India, to curbing opioid addiction in the United States, to developing cities more resilient to climate change, demonstrate the synergetic power of science, technology, and design working together.

Design Group Italia, headquartered in Milan, is one of the largest multidisciplinary design studios in Italy. Their mission is to shape the future through data-driven research and design, creating physical and digital solutions that drive meaningful change.

Politecnico di Milano’s School of Design is a leading center of design research in Europe, and its students and faculty have become international figures in the construction of contemporary design culture. The school blends Italian design heritage with innovation, offering programs in product and fashion design as well as digital and interaction design.

Learning From Our World

When we reflect upon the conditions of the world in the 21st century, it is astounding to recognize that everything we encounter has been shaped by human intervention (consciously or unconsciously) — in other words, designed. As a fundamental human ability, design is positioned at the nexus of human existence and our environmental context on the planet, bringing together all disciplines and phenomena of human culture. As such, we consider design to be a fundamental way of transforming the world. In fact, that transformation is always occurring, and the power of design is evident everywhere — for better or worse.

Working backward from an envisioned future and forward from the present, within the vortex of design we can choreograph a path between current conditions and an ambitious future outcome, whether or not that outcome is possible in the present. Finding the way forward amid diverse and often conflicting perspectives requires optimism and grit. Our primary motivation has been to demystify and reposition the act of design in the context of challenges that defy conventional paths of reasoning. Rather than claiming that design has all the answers, we assemble ideas and evidence about why and how design can be used to shape our emerging world.

We encourage readers to begin anywhere in the book, charting an individual path through narrative explications, informed opinions, and case studies. You are encouraged to synthesize your own thoughts and conclusions; to imagine, to question, and to allow new possibilities to emerge. To experience what for us has become the key lesson of our research: to flow with, rather than fight against, complexity.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 2025

Rising global temperatures affect human activity in many ways. Now, a new study illuminates an important dimension of the problem: Very hot days are associated with more negative moods, as shown by a large-scale look at social media postings.

Overall, the study examines 1.2 billion social media posts from 157 countries over the span of a year. The research finds that when the temperature rises above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 35 degrees Celsius, expressed sentiments become about 25 percent more negative in lower-income countries and about 8 percent more negative in better-off countries. Extreme heat affects people emotionally, not just physically.

“Our study reveals that rising temperatures don’t just threaten physical health or economic productivity — they also affect how people feel, every day, all over the world,” says Siqi Zheng, a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Center for Real Estate (CRE), and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “This work opens up a new frontier in understanding how climate stress is shaping human well-being at a planetary scale.”

The paper, “Unequal Impacts of Rising Temperatures on Global Human Sentiment,” is published today in the journal One Earth. The authors are Jianghao Wang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud SM ’22, a graduate of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; Juan Palacios, a visiting assistant professor at MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL) and an assistant professor Maastricht University; Yichun Fan, of SUL and Duke University; Devika Kakkar, of Harvard University; Nick Obradovich, of SUL and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa; and Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at CRE and DUSP. Zheng is also the faculty director of CRE and founded the Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019.

Social media as a window

To conduct the study, the researchers evaluated 1.2 billion posts from the social media platforms Twitter and Weibo, all of which appeared in 2019. They used a natural language processing technique called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to analyze 65 languages across the 157 countries in the study.

Each social media post was given a sentiment rating from 0.0 (for very negative posts) to 1.0 (for very positive posts). The posts were then aggregated geographically to 2,988 locations and evaluated in correlation with area weather. From this method, the researchers could then deduce the connection between extreme temperatures and expressed sentiment.

“Social media data provides us with an unprecedented window into human emotions across cultures and continents,” Wang says. “This approach allows us to measure emotional impacts of climate change at a scale that traditional surveys simply cannot achieve, giving us real-time insights into how temperature affects human sentiment worldwide.”

To assess the effects of temperatures on sentiment in higher-income and middle-to-lower-income settings, the scholars also used a World Bank cutoff level of gross national income per-capita annual income of $13,845, finding that in places with incomes below that, the effects of heat on mood were triple those found in economically more robust settings.

“Thanks to the global coverage of our data, we find that people in low- and middle-income countries experience sentiment declines from extreme heat that are three times greater than those in high-income countries,” Fan says. “This underscores the importance of incorporating adaptation into future climate impact projections.”

In the long run

Using long-term global climate models, and expecting some adaptation to heat, the researchers also produced a long-range estimate of the effects of extreme temperatures on sentiment by the year 2100. Extending the current findings to that time frame, they project a 2.3 percent worsening of people’s emotional well-being based on high temperatures alone by then — although that is a far-range projection.

“It’s clear now, with our present study adding to findings from prior studies, that weather alters sentiment on a global scale,” Obradovich says. “And as weather and climates change, helping individuals become more resilient to shocks to their emotional states will be an important component of overall societal adaptation.”

The researchers note that there are many nuances to the subject, and room for continued research in this area. For one thing, social media users are not likely to be a perfectly representative portion of the population, with young children and the elderly almost certainly using social media less than other people. However, as the researchers observe in the paper, the very young and elderly are probably particularly vulnerable to heat shocks, making the response to hot weather possible even larger than their study can capture.

The research is part of the Global Sentiment project led by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and the study’s dataset is publicly available. Zheng and other co-authors have previously investigated these dynamics using social media, although never before at this scale.

“We hope this resource helps researchers, policymakers, and communities better prepare for a warming world,” Zheng says.

The research was supported, in part, by Zheng’s chaired professorship research fund, and grants Wang received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

By: Peter Dizikes | MIT News