MET Open House (MIT Future Fest)

Learn how a robot can be prompted to build a chair

Presented by Alexander Kyaw

Location: MET Room 1401

Discover a new AI-driven robotic assembly system that turns users' prompts into prefabricated parts -- opening up computer-aided design to non-experts and speeding up the prototyping process.

WellSpace - Reimagine Your Home Environment

Presented by WellSpace

Location: MET Room 1401

Live demonstration of the beta version of WellSpace - an interior design app that helps residents reconfigure their home for improved wellbeing. WellSpace scans your space, analyzes it against research-backed design principles, and delivers instant layout suggestions with curated product picks. Visitors can test out the app and redesign rooms based on their unique preferences and see them come to life.

Community Is...

Presented by Gearóid Dolan aka screaMachine

Location: The MET hallway

This project uses two-sided, see-through, low-res, hand-made LED screens to present video works submitted by the MIT community, separated by scrolling text messages that read ""Community Is"" followed by words like:
Participation
Relationships
Togetherness
Connection
The screens form a two-sided wall, with different content on each side.

DUCTS AND LADDERS

Presented by Bodies of Work (BoW)

Location: The MET main lobby

Ducts and Ladders is a human-scale, snakes-and-ladders-inspired game exploring how we can adapt our homes to stay cool during increasingly frequent heatwaves. By rolling the dice and moving along a temperature scale, participants encounter climatic events and architectural interventions, gradually making their way toward a more habitable future.

Waving, waving

Presented by Yanyi Liu

Location: The MET hallway

Suspended at a threshold between entrance, corridor, and stair, the curtain mediates light, sight, and movement. Projected footage of curtains from my family home in China overlaps with the present space, weaving together here and there, past and present.

With new galleries and public spaces, the MET creates new opportunities for the School of Architecture and Planning to share its work with the wider community. Its inaugural exhibitions bring together work from across SA+P and MIT.

Occupancy

Presented by the MET Commons, Occupancy is the inaugural all-school exhibition at the MET. Organized around five themes — Ongoing Relations | Footprints | Labor and Trades | Migratory Desires | Polymaths — it explores what it means to move in, take up space, and become neighbors.
Curation: Caroline Jones, Mehves Lelic, the MET Commons

Polymaths

MAD’s contribution to Occupancy, Polymaths features original work from faculty and students across MIT, ranging from inflatable metal to 3D-printed furniture. During the Open House, visitors can meet featured designers and hear about their work and process.

Curation: Mateo Fernandez, John Ochsendorf, Nia Rich, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, MIT MAD

Location: MET Room 1306

Explore the vast array of discovery taking place at the School of Architecture + Planning (SA+P) in an engaging poster and research session.

Scrap to Charm: Upcycled Handstitching

Presented by MIT Gala

Location: MET Room 1101

Hand stitch second hand sourced fabric, beads and other accessories to make patches, key chains, bookmarks, and other small charms with MIT’s creative fashion community. In a time of mass textile production, slow down with us as we give existing materials another life.

Synergy: Power in Place

Presented by Priyanka Salunkhe, Renzo Marsino Moreno

Location: MET Room 1401

Synergy is a design company incubated in MIT DesignX. We design, test, and deploy next-generation transmission towers that are cost-efficient, high-performing, and community-approved. More broadly, we work with utility companies and governments to design human-centered energy infrastructures.

VISIBLE, a data-driven tool for local governments

Presented by VISIBLE

Location: MET Room 1401

VISIBLE is a data-driven platform that empowers urban planners to make better decisions for informal settlements. It compiles, analyzes, and forecasts scattered, fragmented data into a single, decision-ready view of the territory, helping planners understand conditions on the ground, anticipate risks, and design more equitable, resilient interventions where they're needed most.

Below the Surface: What Belongs in Our Vision of the Future?

Presented by Amanda Dian Widyasti Kusumawardani

Location: MET Room 1402

What belongs in the futures we are designing?

Below the Surface turns our gaze toward Indonesia’s underwater worlds, asking visitors to consider a future shaped not only by what humanity creates, but also by what we choose to preserve, and by the lives with whom we share it.

Every 7x7 Binary Grid

Presented by Yufeng Zhao, Future Sketches Group

Location: MET Room 1402

A browsable map of all 562,949,953,421,312 possible 7x7 grids—the system behind the Media Lab's group logos. Draw any pattern on an iPad and the canvas flies to its exact coordinates. Your doodle was already there waiting to be found.

Learn Urban Sketching TODAY!

Presented by Marcelo Remond-Miyoshi

Location: MET Room 1402

In this program, I will lead my guests/visitors through a short tutorial on how to urban sketch. It will be simple and concise, showing that knowing some fundamentals can take you a long way, even if you have no experience. I will also bring prints of my own sketches, showing the progression of my method, along with some examples of my work.

Project PLACEIFY: Computing the Intangible City

Presented by Rohit Sanatani

Location: MET Room 1306

Participatory demo of project PLACEIFY - a set of computational tools for evaluating intangible experiential qualities in urban spaces. Qualities such as perceived beauty, safety, vibrancy etc. are communicated using sets of exemplars, and computer-vision models are used to construct “experience maps” of cities based on street-level imagery.

Creative Thinking for Time and Space

Presented by Rosa Weinberg, Diane Brancazio, Stuart Candy

Location: MET Room 1119

Drop-in between 10:00-11:00 to participate in a “top secret” workshop with Edgerton Lab's Diane Brancazio inspired by a 1950s MIT creative engineering course or between 11:30-12:45 for a crash course in futures thinking with futurist Stuart Candy. Open to everyone, adults and families alike!

These workshops are based on materials from Day of Design, a day for educators -- happening this year on October 28 -- and also a set of fun and engaging workshops for middle and high schoolers.

We’ll be bringing adapted versions of our free, open-source workshops to the Met open house.

PLIX LLM-Algorithm Arcade

Presented by Ada Ren-Mitchell

Location: MET Room 1402

Play and adapt familiar games to learn the FUNdamentals of artificial intelligence. Join us to build a sentence together using magnet words, and vote on the next word each time.

TERRITORIO - A Latin American Urban Policy Association

Presented by TERRITORIO | Pietro Chiri

Location: MET Room 1307

[ Part I ] Latin America Urban Fieldwork: Student Internship Reflections ― Panel where SA+P students share firsthand experiences from summer internships across Latin America, reflecting on local planning practice, field observations, and how MIT training translated to regional contexts.

[ Part II ] Hybrid Territorios: A Latin American Urban Fabric Collage ― Collage activity where participants creatively combine satellite imagery from diverse Latin American cities to explore how history, geography, informality, and social forces shape distinct urban fabrics."

Make a Mini-Game with OctoStudio

Presented by the Lifelong Kindergarten group, MIT Media Lab

Location: MET Room 1402

Create your own mini-game using OctoStudio, a free creative coding app made by the inventors of Scratch at the MIT Media Lab. Start with your favorite animal, emoji, or other character. Snap together coding blocks to make your character come to life. Tilt, shake, and jump to interact with your creations. Customize with your own photos, drawings, sounds, craft materials, and more!

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More highlights: D-Lab Maize Raise, urban sketching, algorithmic arcade, make a mini-game or algorithm... and more.

Create Your Own Data Tapestry: Behind the Scenes of DISTANCE UNKNOWN

Presented by Ashley Louie, Research Associate at Civic Data Design Lab and Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism

Location: MET Room 1119

Learn how to weave paper money into a tapestry and get behind the scenes of creating an interactive data visualization! Money, craftsmanship, and household survey data tell migrants’ stories featured in the interactive exhibition, DISTANCE UNKNOWN: The Risks and Opportunities of Migration in the Americas.

Expanding the SA+P Archive

Presented by Zoë Fahy, Brandon Ndikumana, Rachel Gottfried, Reb Leu

Location: MET Room 1307

What piece of local urbanist history should all students know? Come share your stories, knowledge and vision for the future of our department and city. Browse artifacts from diverse efforts to shape the city and learn from each other’s histories. This archive will play an important role in informing our future!

Circles of Trust, Networks of Insight: Tooling for Community Sensemaking

Presented by Marina Rakhilin, MSW

Location: MET Room 1406

What does it take for a community to listen to its constituents? realtalk@MIT leverages prototypes and protocols to help make those connections visible: bringing together people in circles of trust, surfacing patterns across individual experiences, and creating new ways for a community to see—and make sense of—itself.