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.

INTRODUCTION

In their 2016 book, Are We Human, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley write that design has gone viral. It has so infiltrated everything, so much so that the single word ‘design’ can be used for all sorts of things. You have designer handbags and designer hotels. Designers are talking about designing peace treaties and civil structures. There are academic programs in biological design or social innovation design. Design has become somehow even harder to define.

When everything is design, is nothing. And for those of us who identify as designers, who have trained in design, what does it mean to call yourself a designer today? How do we encourage other people to see the value in design in their own work?

My guest today is John Ochsendorf, who is the founding director of the Morningside Academy for Design, a new interdisciplinary hub at MIT, that is thinking deeply about all of these questions. The Morningside Academy for Design or “MAD” as they call it, celebrates the transformative power of design by bringing together science, engineering, architecture and planning to create a student-focused environment where design can be a catalyst for positive change. A goal John tells me is that MAD can help every MIT student graduate with a design portfolio.

I've been following MAD since they launched a little over two years ago and wanted to get John on the show to talk about what they are trying to do there and how they are thinking about design in this current moment. In many ways, they are thinking through these big questions on the ground at MIT. How do you promote design without being self-serving? What does it mean to connect design into your own unique body of research? Where does design fit into the world's biggest problems?

John's background though is actually in engineering. He's had a dual faculty appointment at MIT in both Civil Engineering and Architecture since 2002. From 2017 to 2020, he served as the Director of the American Academy in Rome. In addition to his work at MAD, we talk about his background in engineering and how that influences how he thinks about design.

We talk about how his time in Rome influences his research and his work today, and why design's trouble in defining itself might actually be a really good thing. I very much enjoyed this conversation and admire deeply what John and the team at MAD are trying to do. I hope you find this conversation as interesting as I did.

Scratching the Surface is supported by listeners like you. If you like what we're doing here, please consider supporting us. Over the summer, we launched a new open access monthly newsletter that's filled with design news, updates on previous guests, book roundups, and more. You can head over to our website to sign up and get Scratching the Surface in your inbox every month. Thank you, as always, for listening, and here is my conversation with John Ochsendorf.

Like Eran Egozy, who did music and computer science and then invented a video game called Guitar Hero, that brought a lot of joy to people and got some people up off the couch. And so there are many different flavors, many different avenues through design. So that's one example.

Another one you mentioned is our graduate fellowship for design. So we have students across all of MIT who think of themselves as designers, who use design as a fundamental approach to their work, to their research, whether they're masters or PhD students. But they don't always — sometimes they're a fish out of water, depending on what department they're in.

So we give about 10 of these a year, and these are just gold-plated, fully funded scholarships for designers. And the simple idea is we want to promote students to be risk-takers, to pursue their passions. And one of the best ways to do that for a graduate student is to just fund them, and get out of their way.

So we're helping to build a community of designers, but these designers are working on everything from traditional fields of design, like architecture or industrial design, to more novel fields around international development or public policy. And currently, we're getting about 100 applications from the internal MIT community for these 10 fellowships. They're very competitive.

And our hope, longer-term, is they'll continue to be a beacon to attract talented students who want to improve the world through design. So those are two examples where we're really student-facing.

And then we're doing other things like small maker grants for students who have a design idea and want to try it out. And here's $500. They want to 3D print chocolate. Go for it. You'll probably fail.

That's nice. I like the idea of that.

Or if someone says, I made a cool lamp, and I want to teach other students how to make variations on this lamp, we'll give them $1,000 to teach a little lamp design class. And so the point is really trying to empower students across a broad range of design disciplines to get their hands on things, to make things, and also to build community.

At the same time, we are not usurping design at MIT. I mean, design has a rich and strong history here, just to name a few obvious points. We have North America's first professional School of Architecture at MIT. We have the Media Lab, which for more than 40 years has been bringing some pretty radical approaches to design in different disciplines and media arts and technology.

And so in many cases, we are just trying to help connect and elevate these. We are trying to help students see that you don't necessarily have to do a PhD at the Media Lab or get a Master of Architecture in Architecture to be exposed to design and to begin to think of yourself as a designer and to develop that skill set, and start to share it with the world. So it's pretty ambitious, but if we succeed within a few decades, our hope is that MIT will be attracting more and more creative students and that more and more of those students will go out in the world identifying first and foremost as designers, whatever discipline they're in.

You said a couple interesting things in there that I want to pull out and hear you talk a little bit more about. But I almost feel like I want to ask you a foundation question first, which is, how do you — maybe you can answer this, you as John or you as MAD, define design? When you're talking about these students in other programs who maybe identify as designers without knowing that they're designers.

The reason I'm asking that question is sometimes I feel like design is this hyper-object now where it's so big and means everything. How do you start to make those definitions?

This is critical and of course, if design is everything, then it runs the risk of being nothing. You can imagine we're having lots of internal conversations at MIT about this exact question. Is someone who works in biotech, who's designing at the scale of molecules or cells and thinking about living organisms or… is the design Moderna's vaccine to combat COVID, are they designers? Of course, they're designers on some level.

The short answer to your question is that we're creating a big tent where we want people, if someone calls themself a designer, they're welcome. We're not going to be exclusive and say, you think you're a designer, but actually, I don't see your degree.

To be perfectly honest, I'm trained as an engineer and anthropologist, and design comes naturally to me, but I don't have design degrees with capital Ds after my name. Yet, the value of design is so obvious for learning, for student outcomes, as well as for translating ideas into action in the world. I'll say something a little bit cheeky back to you, which is that

Our concern is that that's too exclusionary. Many of our design colleagues are comfortable living with ambiguity. You know… define art.

Well, I mean, I agree with you, and I am, as we were talking about before we hit record, I'm very pro-expansive definitions of design. As you're saying that, it's making me wonder if the real question that I'm asking, I'm thinking about this in real time with you right now. Maybe the question is, why has, I'm curious if you have thoughts on this, why has design become the word, like why is that the word that has been able to sort of embody these expansive practices and processes?

Because you could imagine a Morningside Academy for Engineering that's saying that Moderna vaccine is a type of engineering, maybe, but there's something flexible and valuable about that word. And I'm wondering why, I don't know, do you have thoughts on that?

I do. I mean, the first thing I have to do is give massive credit to our founding donor. And I should say we were created by a truly generous and transformative gift from the Morningside Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the T.H. Chan family. And you may have heard that name T.H. Chan, because more than a decade ago, they gave Harvard the very prescient gift of funding the School of Public Health. A decade before the pandemic, they said public health is important and not funded. So why is the Morningside Foundation supporting design at MIT? And why now?

I'll ask you and our audience another question. What does it mean to be educated today? And in an age of AI, in an age of wicked problems, from climate change to income and racial inequality, how are we going to train agile thinkers to address these challenging problems?

And there's been a huge rush towards STEM fields, and particularly opening up the STEM fields as we must to groups that have not been traditionally well-represented in STEM fields. And the notion that all we expand STEM to STEAM by adding the A,

And so I think design is both, I think now is the time, and I don't think we're talking about design thinking that was a kind of corporate buzz a decade ago. We're really talking about at the core level, what does it mean to be educated today?

And maybe a generation ago, we could say, well, if you can derive the area of a circle, and if you can cite a few works of Shakespeare, and if you can tell me the capital of Peru, and if I ask you to write a paper on the economic history of the Han Dynasty, you can do that in a few weeks, and then you're an educated person. Everything I just mentioned, AI can do in a fraction of a second.

And it's not that AI questions everything, but it's more about how do we create agile thinkers? And so, for the scale of the problems that we face in the world, wicked complex problems, we think every student today should have some exposure to tackling challenges in the world through design.

At one of the events, I was watching some clips of some MAD events on YouTube. And one of them, you said, one of your goals is you could imagine that every MIT student graduates with a design portfolio, that that in some way would be more helpful and more informative than the bulleted CV or resume. And I want to connect that idea to something you said earlier, where you're not trying to usurp design from where design already exists in MIT.

And I think there's an interesting, there's potential for an interesting tension between thinking about design as colonizing versus democratizing. You know, thinking about design as these domains of knowledge that then go into these other industries and say, we know how to do this because we're designers, versus what I think you're talking about a little bit, which is sort of democratizing design, not in a reductive design thinking way where you just follow these steps, but creating new ways of thinking or new processes. And how do you think about that generally, but also how do you think about that at MAD, where you are not just promotion of design that's already happening, but actually democratizing the design that already exists there in some way?

Well, I really appreciate that, Jarrett, because you put it beautifully, and that is exactly what we're trying to do, is democratize it and open up the tent and say, everyone can participate. A key step in this direction, which was really formative for us was about eight years ago, we created a design minor. And I have to credit my colleague, Meejin Yoon, who's now Dean at Cornell.

When she was Head of Architecture, she helped to really pioneer this vision of a design minor. And it quickly became one of those popular minors at MIT. It's six courses.

Are you a full-fledged designer after taking six courses with different tracks? No. Do you have enough to be dangerous so that if you're in a traditional field and you've done a little bit of design and you have a design minor, you bring something new to the table?

And Kurt Vonnegut said to me when I was an undergraduate that if you wanted to find good writers, don't go to the English departments.

Right.

And so it's not to say if you want good designers, don't go to the design departments. But MIT has always had a tradition of innovative design happening in unusual ways. And we can think about Muriel Cooper. We can think about the development of 3D printing. These are combinations of different disciplines coming together in unique ways that are also uniquely MIT. So we would be crazy to stifle that. We want to democratize it, as you say, and welcome more people to the party.

You saw exactly where I was taking this conversation to, because I think what sometimes can happen in these conversations is what I refer to a lot as the designer-savior complex, where it's just that design can solve any problem, and design alone can solve any problem. And what I think is really important that I want to underscore here, because I want to make sure it doesn't get lost, is that you're talking about design not living and working independently, but in collaboration with other disciplines, professions, bodies of knowledge. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.

And I'm asking the question selfishly, almost from the other side, where I'm teaching design students who are looking at these massive problems, knowing that design alone can't solve them, and they don't know how to insert themselves into these other industries. How to say like, hey, I have this set of skills. And so could you sort of just talk about how you're thinking about where design overlaps, where design comes in, how you see those fitting together?

This is great. And I think fundamentally, we'd like our students to be both analytical, MIT students are known for being analytical, but also synthetic thinkers, right? Asking more complex questions, making connections that others might not have made.

You can think of it a bit as left brain, right brain. But I actually think, in my case, it was engineering plus anthropology. And design was interwoven through my own formation and education. This was a Cornell undergrad where I designed my own major that combined structural engineering and anthropology and studied traditional ways of building. So I'm a big believer in students charting their own path.

So our naming of the First-Year Learning Community as DesignPlus is really aspirational. And this was backing up and sharing a little bit of history. In the first winter of the pandemic and the fall and winter of 2020, we created a task force with 20 leading designers from across MIT.

And we said, what should we do? And we wrote a very short white paper that said, here's some things we should do. And one of the things we came out with was a hallmark of design at MIT was precisely Design Plus.

Actually, I credit Mitch Resnick at the Media Lab, who's the Lego Chair of Lifelong Kindergarten. How's that for a named Chair?

I love that.

And he developed Scratch, this peer-to-peer programming language, visual programming language. And so Mitch said: “a hallmark of design at MIT is Design Plus. It's design plus other disciplines.”

It's not siloed design. And so in naming our First-Year Learning Community that, it's aspirational that we want more students to say, hey, I'm really interested in materials and the microstructure of materials. But if you add design to that, it supercharges.

It becomes, you have something that other people don't.

I think that's really well said. I think that's a nice... I'm curious to hear… I want to talk a little bit more about you specifically and how you got into all of this. And so you mentioned already, you come from an engineering background and anthropology. You were in fifth grade when a teacher assigned you a paper on the Inca Empire in Peru that you sort of have credited as your introduction to these fields.

I'm curious, you've studied engineering, you've worked as an engineer, you've taught in engineering and in architecture. Where did the word design come in for you? I think about that fifth grade teacher and that assignment on the Inca Empire, that could have been an intro to design also. But where did that word come into how you think about your work and what you could do with your work?

You've really done your homework, Jarrett. Well, first of all, I want to lift up that fifth grade teacher. Her name was Nicole Balt. Let's celebrate those teachers who see something in a kid and give them a little bit extra. She did that for me.

But I will say that I had some design exposure through high school, whether it was in shop class, I grew up in rural West Virginia, I worked a lot with my hands. We were always building and designing things, but there wasn't a word for it. There's not a single professional architecture school in the state of West Virginia.

Oh, I didn't know that.

But growing up as I did in a working class family, there were many things that were a mystery to me. And in my first semester at Cornell, I took an exceptional class taught by a wonderful professor who began with design projects. And she was teaching introduction to structures, but she would do things like, okay, here are two sheets of paper. Next week, we're going to load test your short column. It needs to be four inches high, and you can only use two sheets of paper and Elmer's glue. Come up with the design.

And of course, while I was doing that paper folding exercise in her class, I was doing traditional engineering classes that had calculus and physics, and every problem had one answer. And with enough work, you could get the one answer and get a check mark next to it. It's very satisfying.

But with my background, with no AP classes from my rural high school, I was frankly getting my butt kicked by kids from Bronx Science. And so those design exercises that were hands-on, making and building, they're the reason I'm an engineer. And I credit her, Mary Cinsolone, to lift up another teacher with giving open-ended design exercises.

So I do that in my teaching today at MIT. I've done it for more than 20 years for students from both architecture and engineering backgrounds. We design, we build models, we test them. And I think a lot of learning happens in that. Of course, there are incredible learning outcomes. You have to try to invent something new and explain the world and explain this behavior.

But also, I am deeply disillusioned with STEM education today that's giving problem after problem with a single answer. I have MIT graduates who come to me 10 years later and say, your class was the only class where I made something with my hands. And that's heartbreaking.

I could go on and on about this, but the short answer is:

You're speaking my language, John. I could talk to you. The rest of this conversation could be about that answer that you just gave. I have two specific questions. The first one is I want to connect this idea of Design Plus to your own life and your own career, and I'm wondering how your education in engineering shapes your interest in design, or how you think about design. How does design add to the work that you are already doing, and then how does the work you are already doing influence these larger questions of design that we're asking?

This is something that I could and probably should dig deeper into and maybe try to write an essay about. The short answer is even the most highly constrained problem you can imagine has infinite solutions. Get a human to the moon safely and back. The Russians came up with a totally different approach than the Apollo program.

And in my case, spanning a canyon from A to B in the Andes Mountains, in my engineering curriculum, I was taught there are a couple of ways to do this, and here's how you calculate them. Well, there are four communities in what is rural Peru today, who've been rebuilding the same bridge for 700 years, weaving it out of local grass, speaking in their native language Quechua.

And this is design innovation, of course, centuries old. It's evolved over time, but when I was in the process of developing as a student between engineering and anthropology, and anthropology was teaching me the value of culture and different approaches to similar problems, effectively that is design for me. It's about asking new questions, it's about what are the important parameters, and it's about who benefits.

And so to discover design, I needed the engineering plus anthropology. And I would say in my case, it's really always been about history and culture is my design plus. And what I'm designing, what I'm mostly working in is both education, but also structures.

And, you know, I could go on and on about historic structural solutions that we no longer understand or celebrate or appreciate, like a spiraling Guastavino tile staircase that is brittle ceramic, but the building code won't let you do it today. And Rafael Guastavino Jr., an immigrant with a fifth grade education, built stairs that are still standing today in, you know, a thousand buildings across the US.

So there's a lot there to unpack, but in my case, it was definitely true that traditional engineering education was not cutting it for me. I could not exist in a world where every problem had one answer.

I want to be very careful how I ask this question because I don't want this to be reductive and I don't want to paint these fields with a broad brush. But in my experience teaching design at a variety of institutions, to a variety of students, primarily graphic design, but I'll occasionally have the industrial design student or the animation student or something. I'm constantly struck by a sense of inferiority amongst designers that I think comes from what we talked about earlier, this hard to define what it is you actually do, how you sort of describe your process or talk about the multitude of options that something could take.

Add to that increasing technological change that creates a fear of whether these skills are even needed. And what I see happening, and here's where I want to be careful with this analogy, what I see happening is this move to try to make the design fields more like engineering, to create a set of processes, to create a structure. I think that's what design thinking did, not to keep banging on about that, but you walk through these steps and then you get a solution.

And that feels wrong to me, to sort of take away, in my view, what makes design, design, to make it something like engineering, which is also valuable for another set of reasons. I'm not trying to put one over the other, but I'm wondering how you think about that overlap, or as somebody who, in many ways, is straddling both of these worlds and is talking about the value of both of them, how you, if that resonates with you, I guess, and also how you think about it.

It definitely resonates. And maybe the analogy I would draw is to food and cooking and the slow food movement.

Like that ripe tomato in mid-August that I got at the farmer's market yesterday, you know, or the ones in my yard didn't turn out great this year, so I had to go to the farmer's market. And, you know, there aren't shortcuts to becoming a designer. You know, it truly does take time, and it's thoughtful, and it's understandable that some of our students struggle with an inferiority complex.

I would also add, students right now, our students arriving on campus this week, they're born in 2006. Now, I don't know about you, but I remember 2006. And these kids were born right after September 11th, essentially. They came of age in the global financial crisis. Their parents may have lost a job or a house.

And then, just as they were starting to become cognizant of the world, their world got shut down with COVID. And the reason I share this in relation to today's students is that that also makes them risk-averse, and they're seeking safe harbor and a sure bet. And often that feels like computer science or a STEM field because I just want to be able to support my family because I saw how my parents couldn't support us.

And, you know, as someone who grew up poor and was on welfare at times, you know, I know that pain of having the car broken down on the side of the road. And I think being a designer is also about taking risks. You know, as my friend who's a writer said, if you can think of anything else that you can do other than be a writer, do that because it is hard work and it's a struggle.

Yeah. I've definitely said that to my students about design sometimes.

Design is the same, you know, no shortcuts. And so I think of it as a spectrum. And you know, for that student who's a design minor and they take six classes and they develop a portfolio, that's an entrée into a world. Who knows what they'll do. They may become a mayor and bring thoughtful redesign to public policy because of that exposure as an undergraduate.

I want to change the subject as we head into the end because I want to talk about the American Academy in Rome, where you were a recipient of the Rome Prize. You were the first engineer to get that prize. Is that right?

That's what they say.

Okay. And then you were later, you served as the director from 2017 to 2020. I'm going to ask you a really dumb question first, but what does it mean to be the director of the American Academy of Rome? What was your role? What did you do?

Well, in some ways, it's a kind of ambassador for the arts and the humanities in Rome. So there's an outward facing role in the city of Rome and in Italy. But more than anything, I'm a convener of a community, of an intellectual and creative community.

So I thought of it in some ways as the best job in the world, because every day at lunch and dinner, I'd sit down to a beautiful meal, and the person next to me could be an archeologist, excavating papyrus scrolls at Pompeii, or could be the director of the Whitney Museum, and just have the most fabulous, wide-ranging conversations. And so my role as director was, like anyone with responsibility, was to make everyone feel welcome, but also to help chart a path into the future for the institution, a 125-year-old institution, and do it in a way that came in under budget. But it's a very special place.

If you haven't been there, I highly encourage you learn more about it. The American Academy in Rome was set up essentially as a think tank for the arts and humanities. But design disciplines have always had a very strong seat at the table.

I was actually a Rome Prize recipient in the field of historic preservation, which is also a design discipline, but not often thought of, whether we think about historic districts and downtowns or a historic building, that's a creative design discipline. So anyway, the American Academy in Rome is, I could go on and on and on, but just think of it as a lunch table where looking down the table, there are 100 people and they're among the most creative and wonderful people you could ever hope to talk to. And then everyone convenes for meals, but then they go back to their studio and they write, or they paint, or they draw, or they go walking in the city. And so it's just a very, very special place. Have you visited yet? It should be on the bucket list.

It's on there, John. Don't worry. I'm curious, though. It's interesting to hear you describe it like that. And I'm wondering, I want to specifically talk about your time as director, where your role is to convene, to organize, to make people feel welcome, to set up these structures for these types of things to happen. Being in that position, not going, as opposed to being there as a fellow, being in that position, how did that experience shape or change your own research, your own work?

Well, the first thing they say about Rome is “non basta una vita,” that one lifetime is not enough for Rome. So I was refilling my tank. I was learning every day. I was filling notebooks with ideas. We go on walks, we go on study tours, we have weekly lectures. I helped to program our public programming events and exhibitions.

So it was frankly like being a student again, just as an academic, you're always a student. So that's very, very special and energizing. At the same time, I took it as a design challenge.

What should that institution be in the coming 125 years? So we did things like put solar panels on the roof and tried to develop a climate action plan. We addressed our dude wall that was hanging over the bar, which were the white male fellows from the 1920s with pencil thin mustaches, some of whom went on to design Confederate monuments.

And everywhere you look, there's a design challenge. And in a way, the challenge there was, how do you design a vibrant community? And it already has one, so I didn't need to design it, but there's some tweaks. And then when I got back to MIT, I looked around and I said, wow, we need to make MIT a bit more like the American Academy in Rome, because it's just very special.

Well, that was exactly what my next question was, because it seems like that experience had to have shaped how you're approaching your role as leading MAD. And I'm wondering what relationships you see there, how you see what you're doing now is maybe building off of that previous work?

It definitely did. And I've never talked about this publicly or put this in the record anywhere before, so I appreciate the pointed question. And it's absolutely true that it shaped my thinking.

And I got back to MIT, I'm a 50% hire in two schools. I straddle two schools at MIT, the School of Engineering and the School of Architecture and Planning. And those two deans said, welcome back to campus. It's COVID, we want to put you to work. What's the future of design at MIT? And that was how we convened the task force.

And let's put it this way, it's better than some other administrative positions, because the administration is not particularly fun. But essentially, there were many things we took in a positive way of building community.

Our fellowship program, we gather around meals, we share ideas, we have inspirational speakers. We take inspiration from the past. We're in a constant dialogue with the past as designers. And so there are many things we learned from it.

There are some things very, very different. We're inside a dominant technical university at MIT. And for the record, I did not put the A in MAD, this word Academy, which has some different connotations, and in some ways does feel like an 18th or 19th century word.

But it speaks to our aspirations that we're a place of convening of ideas. And the acronym MAD suggests we're here to shake things up a little bit.

I have two more questions. And the first one builds off of what you were just saying there about shaking things up a little bit. And you had mentioned earlier that you convened these leading designers at MIT to imagine, and you got this money, imagine what this thing could be. And now you've been operating for a couple of years. You did all of this planning, now you've been operating for a couple of years. How has it changed from that original conception? Or what have you been able to do that was just not on your radar when you came back from Rome in the middle of a pandemic?

Well, this is great to reflect on because we are just about two and a half years since we announced and about two years since we launched. So we are in a constant state of evolution.

Maybe I should say that in my 25 years in higher ed, I've seen a lot of initiatives that come with a splashy bit of funding and they create a splash and you look 10 years later and there's not much left. Unfortunately, I've seen this across MIT quite a bit. Directing the American Academy in Rome, a long-standing institution with an endowment, with different activities, it really gave me perspective on the need to build a foundation, a stable foundation for the future for any operation.

So I'm actually very, very proud that our donor agreed to structure our gift as a design challenge. We got a $100 million gift to support design. What do you do with that? How do you structure it? Well, we structured it. We put 60% in endowment. So that will generate a stable revenue stream for perpetuity, that we're going to be able to support those graduate design fellows. So no matter what happens, that will happen for perpetuity. And it will grow.

And then we took 30% of the gift and put it into capital cost for a new building, which will be a design hub for the whole campus. And it will be a home to Architecture and Planning, but will also be a convener for designers across campus. And then the 10%, the remaining 10%, we used to launch in these first five years.

So we didn't have to wait for five years for the endowment returns to kick in. So again, you know, financial planning and design of your budget isn't seen as a creative field. But I'm adamant that this was really, really important to create both a stable base as well as room for growth in the future.

What I did not anticipate happening is that because we are doing exciting things and people see us as student-facing, lots of organizations across campus have been wanting to join MAD. So we've doubled or tripled in size in a couple of years just by people saying, hey, we really align with your mission here. That's been exciting, but it also is like, well, you know from the startup world. When you're doubling every year, it makes a very dynamic space. So it's fun and we are continuing to stay true to our mission of student-facing, but we're growing in a way that I almost didn't anticipate.

We're bringing in a lot of other resources, external and internal, in support of design because people see it as necessary for the future of the university.

I love that. My last question is maybe an easier one than the rest of the questions that I've been asking you. But what I really appreciate about you and what I think is really evident in this conversation is that your interests are broad, but you are also a deep thinker and really thoughtful in how you approach all these things. And I'm really curious, what is top of mind for you right now? What is occupying your interests? What areas are you studying? Just sort of where's your head right now?

Well, you've stumped me, Jarrett.

I thought this would be an easier [question].

The honest truth is I'm having a great time. I'm about 50 percent of my time in administration, and I'm about 50 percent of my time in teaching and research. I feel like as an administrator, I'm able to open doors and make things happen for others and for students, and that's exciting.

But full-time administration, as I did in Rome, even in a spectacular place like Rome and the American Academy in Rome, is a drag. You often are facing long-standing, unresolvable issues that can't be resolved. They can only be managed.

In some ways, of course, I'm creating problems for the future with what we're building right now with MAD. Our successors will say, damn it, why did they set it up this way? But so I'm thinking about how we can grow sustainably.

And also to your earlier question about how we define design, as different units come to us and say, hey, we love what MAD is doing. We want to be part of the MAD umbrella or constellation. Can we join forces with you?

It's also forcing us to take a careful look at what aligns, what doesn't align so well.

So if I'm really blunt with you, I will give you the honest answer.

Number one, helping my students discover meaningful research topics for their master's and PhD students in the coming years, because that's, I think, the greatest legacy of any teacher and educator, especially in research. Number two, creating a vibrant classroom setting where everyone feels welcomed, and we constantly are creating environments that upend the traditional notion of the classroom authority at the front of the room, dispensing wisdom. We're in an age of YouTube, we're in an age, our students are competing for attention, and we need to create a dynamic classroom environment where they feel it's worthy of their time and their investment, frankly.

So those are things I'm thinking about as a researcher, as an educator. I'm thinking about the planet at many different scales, and of course, democracy at this moment in time, and I'm working on the pollinators, feeding the pollinators in my back garden.

I love it.

At different levels, local, native plantings. And like any parent, I'm thinking about whether my daughter's ankle is going to be okay for soccer tryouts this week. And so my mind is all over the place, like everybody's, but I do find that embracing design, as we are doing now at MIT, is helping to bring order to my life and to thinking about our mission and how we're trying to create new opportunities and design for students everywhere.

I think that's such a nice way to end this. John, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciated this conversation.

Well, I was thrilled to be invited and it's great to get to know you. And I look forward to continuing the conversation. So thanks so much for having me.