In his Scratching the Surface podcast, Jarrett Fuller discusses with MIT MAD's founding director John Ochsendorf how does MAD strive to spread design across the MIT campus, the relationship between design and engineering, and why it’s a good thing that it is so hard to define design.

Scratching the Surface is a podcast featuring wide-ranging, in-depth conversations with designers, architects, writers, academics, artists, and theorists about how design shapes culture. Its host, Jarrett Fuller, is a designer, writer, educator, and podcaster. He is an assistant professor of graphic and experience design at North Carolina State University and runs twenty-six, a multidisciplinary design and editorial studio.

John Ochsendorf is an engineer, educator, and designer. He’s the founding director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) and has faculty appointments in the departments of architecture and civil engineering at MIT. From 2017-2020, he served as the director of the American Academy in Rome.