Good Work Project Report Series, Number 13

Interdisciplinary Research and Education:

Preliminary Perspectives from the MIT
Media Laboratory

Dan Dillon
January, 2001

Jeff Solomon, Series Editor

Project Zero
Harvard University

COPYRIGHT 2001. All Rights Reserved

 The Good Work Project
February 2001

Since 1995, three teams of investigators, under the direction of Howard Gardner, of
Harvard University, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, and William
Damon of Stanford University, have been researching the ways in which leading professionals
in a variety of domains carry out good work. “Good work” is used in a dual sense: 1) work
that is deemed to be of high quality and 2) work that is socially responsible. Through
intensive, face-to-face interviews, the researchers have investigated several domains, including
journalism, genetics, business, jazz music, theater, philanthropy, and higher education. Pilot
studies have been conducted of medicine and the rapidly emerging domain of “cyberlaw”,
with plans to explore these areas more fully in the future.

In addition to this central line of study, several other related lines of investigation have
been launched:

1. The Origins of Good Work project is an examination of teenagers who excel in

extracurricular activities.

2. The Dedicated Young Professionals Study focuses on those who have just begun (or will
soon begin) promising professional careers.

3. Good Work in Interdisciplinary Contexts. Pilot studies of new arts/science media and of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab have been completed. Plans are
underway to study interdisciplinary work at the pre-collegiate, college, and research
institution level.

4. The Role of Contemplative Practices investigates the ways in which

contemplation/meditation influence how professionals carry out work.

5. Encouraging Good Work in Journalism. This project, carried out in conjunction with the
Committee of Concerned Journalists, is currently developing a "traveling curriculum" for use
in newsrooms around the country.

6. Good Work as Transmitted through Lineages examines how the principle of doing good
work is passed down through continuous generations of teachers to students or from mentors
to less experienced professionals.

7. Good Work in Other Societies is a project spearheaded by colleagues at Denmark’s Royal

Danish School of Education that investigates good work in Denmark and Latvia. In the future,
additional international components will be added.

The Project expects to issue a variety of books, reports, and related documentation. The
present series, launched in early 2001, includes reports on several of the lines of research
mentioned above. For further information on the Good Work Project, contact Professor
Howard Gardner’s office at 617-496-4929, via email at hgasst@harvard.edu, or through regular
mail at 201 Larsen Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
 Papers On Good Work
February 2001

1. The Project on Good Work: A Description (April, 2000), Howard Gardner,

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, and William Damon.

2. The Ethical Responsibilities of Professionals (July, 1998), Howard Gardner

3. The Empirical Basis of Good Work: Methodological Considerations (June,

1997), Howard Gardner, Anne Gregory, Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, William
Damon, and Mimi Michaelson.

4. Good Work in Business (August, 2000), Kim Barberich and Howard Gardner.

5. Good Work Among Dedicated Young Professionals (July, 2000), Becca

Solomon, Greg Feldman, and Marcy LeLacheur.

6. Contemplation and Implications for Good Work in Teaching (August, 1998),

Laurinda Morway, Jeff Solomon, Mimi Michaelson, and Howard Gardner.

7. Good Work in a Complex World: A Cross Cultural Comparison (November,

1998), Hans Henrik Knoop and Howard Gardner.

8. Opportunities and Obstacles for Good Work in Medicine (August, 2000), Jeff
Solomon, Jennifer DiBara, Sara Simeone, and Dan Dillon.

9. New Media Art: A New Frontier or Continued Tradition? (January, 2001),

Kaley Middlebrooks.

10. The Origins of Good Work (April, 2000), Wendy Fischman and Grace Lam.

11. Good Work among Albert Schweitzer Fellows (April, 1999), Wendy
Fischman, Becca Solomon, and Deborah Shutte.

12. High Abilities and Excellence: A Cultural Perspective (2000), Jin Li

13. Interdisciplinary Research and Education: Preliminary Perspectives from the

MIT Media Laboratory (January, 2001), Dan Dillon.

14. Good Work in Cyberlaw (August, 2000), Evan Zullow.

15. Getting Kids, Parents, and Coaches on the Same Page (2000), Becca Solomon
and Howard Gardner.
 Acknowledgement

The Good Work Project is made possible by the generous support of:

The Bauman Foundation

The Carnegie Corporation
The Nathan Cummings Foundation
The J. Epstein Foundation
Fetzer Institute
The Ford Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation
Thomas E. Lee
The Jesse Phillips Foundation Fund
Louise and Claude Rosenberg Jr. Family Foundation
Ross Family Charitable Foundation
The Spencer Foundation
The John Templeton Foundation
I. Introduction

At universities and research institutions today, interdisciplinarity is a hot topic. A

number of areas of study boast of an interdisciplinary approach (e.g., cognitive

neuroscience, bioinformatics, and urban planning) and are attractive to large numbers

of young people, in part because these blended areas are frequently publicized as being

at the forefront of research and professional practice. Such disciplinary mixing seems

impressive, and surely some combinations of previously separate areas of study are

necessary for forward progress. However, the epistemological, educational, and

practical implications of combining disciplines have rarely been considered in depth.

Important questions that have not been addressed in sufficient detail include:

• Which components need to be in place for interdisciplinary approaches to

work?

• Which types of individuals are drawn to doing interdisciplinary work?

• How might the tensions between different disciplines (in terms of content,
methodology, and standards) be resolved?

• Which attitudes or skills does an interdisciplinary education develop in a

student and how do they differ from those developed in a single discipline?

• Which organizational structures facilitate interdisciplinary research, and

which structures hinder it?

As more academic and research programs espouse interdisciplinary approaches,

securing an answer to these questions becomes increasingly important.

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II. The Challenges of Combining Disciplines

The challenges associated with combining two or more disciplines are not obvious.

A good illustration of the subtle difficulties associated with interdisciplinary work

comes from the domain of cognitive neuroscience—the combination of cognitive

psychology and neuroscience. Today, cognitive neuroscience is a flourishing area of

study. However, for years cognitive psychology and neuroscience existed separately,

each with its own complement of practitioners, unique practices (e.g., reaction time

measures in cognitive psychology and cell recordings in neuroscience), and institutions.

Though the integration of the two disciplines is by no means complete (there still exists

a multitude of “strict” cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists), the challenges faced

(and successfully met) in creating the discipline of cognitive neuroscience illuminate the

difficulties that may be encountered in doing quality interdisciplinary work in general.

The key tension revolves around differing conceptions of mind and brain. Cognitive

psychologists attempt to study the mind. The discipline is based on the notion that

human beings engage in the mental manipulation of representational symbols, and

cognitive psychologists study these mental activities as distinct from neural functions.

Traditionally, at least, cognitive psychologists have not been interested in the brain. To

use a metaphor from computation, they study the software (thoughts, mental

processes—the mind) without much regard for the hardware (the brain).

For a neuroscientist, on the other hand, the notion of “mind” is likely to be a

contentious issue. Continuing with our computer metaphor, neuroscientists are

concerned with hardware—the brain. Dealing strictly with biological data, many

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neuroscientists are loath to posit a supra-physical structure—a mind—in order to

explain behavior. Indeed, for some neuroscientists the entire foundation upon which

cognitive psychology is built is suspect. Obviously, in order to “put together” cognitive

psychology and neuroscience the tensions which exist between each discipline must be

resolved; without some shift, the two, though topically similar, are at odds1.

Fortunately, in the case of cognitive neuroscience the gaps between each discipline

are now frequently bridged. Due largely to improved neuroimaging techniques, many

scientists have begun to couple behavioral measures (associated—at least for cognitive

psychologists—with the workings of the mind) with neural activity. For this growing

number of researchers, cognitive and neuroscientific efforts have become

complementary rather than irrelevant or even antagonistic to each other. While the

definition of mind continues to evolve, the discipline of cognitive neuroscience rests on

a solid intellectual foundation.2

The result of this happy confluence has been an outpouring of scientific work.

Studying the mind/brain from a variety of different perspectives has given researchers

new insights into topics such as memory, perception, and language use. As a

consequence, several journals and institutions devoted to cognitive neuroscience have

been created in the last several years and many are flourishing. Furthermore, an

increasing number of researchers who were initially trained in cognitive psychology or

1
For an informed discussion of this issue, see the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience interview with Martha Farah,
Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania
(available online at ccn.upenn.edu/pr/JOCN_interview.html).
2
See Gazzaniga, M. S., Ivry, R. B., Mangun, G. R., (1998). Cognitive neuroscience: the biology of the mind. New
York: Norton.

3
neuroscience (or related disciplines like linguistics or radiology) have acquired the

additional skills necessary to conduct cognitive neuroscientific work. In sum, the

formation of cognitive neuroscience has constituted a small (and very useful) scientific

revolution.

III. Our Project

At Project Zero, a basic research center at Harvard University’s Graduate School of

Education, we have completed several studies of the scholarly disciplines. With

interdisciplinary work growing dramatically in popularity and a number of

interdisciplinary endeavors reaching maturity, the time is right to begin a study on the

merits and weaknesses of interdisciplinary approaches to research and education.

Consequently, we are embarking on a large-scale study of several of the nation’s

leading interdisciplinary institutions. Our ultimate goal is to identify the components

consistently present in quality interdisciplinary efforts, so that more informed decisions

about educational and research practices can be made.

We began our work by investigating the MIT Media Lab. Over the course of several

months, we conducted semi-structured, one-to-two hour interviews with 13 Media Lab

professors, asking them about their backgrounds, the projects they are currently

involved in, and the institution as a whole. In this paper I summarize the findings from

this initial phase of the project.

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IV. The MIT Media Lab: Factors Crucial to its Foundation

The MIT Media Laboratory is a very unusual institution. It was founded by

architect Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner in 1980 to

explore the future of media and human-computer interactions. The Media Lab has

since blossomed into an organization with a worldwide reputation for attention-

grabbing invention. The lab now commands a yearly budget of over $30 million, nearly

all of which is the product of the lab’s extraordinarily successful model of corporate

sponsorship. Although change is definitely on the horizon3, the Media Lab will

probably remain an important intellectual resource for years to come.

Given the Media Lab’s special nature, it is worth asking a broad question before

moving on to more specific ones: What factors contributed to (or allowed for) its

establishment?

Three Keys to Success

Three environmental conditions stand out which helped the lab get started and

contributed to its interdisciplinary character: vision, support, and a lack of intra-

institutional competition.

First, the most obvious necessity for the Media Lab’s successful instantiation was a

desire for the kind of work it would do. Nicholas Negroponte filled this prerequisite

himself, with his vision of the future. In 1980, the computer, broadcast, and publishing

3
For an overview of the changes that may be in store for the lab, see Freedman, D. H. (2000). The Media Lab at a
Crossroads. Technology Review: MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, 103 (5) (available online at
www.technologyreview.com/magazine/sep00/freedman.asp).

5
industries were distinctly separate entities. Negroponte argued that by 2000 the three

would converge (as they indeed have), and he convinced a number of people in major

corporations that his vision was plausible. As a result, not only did Negroponte and

Wiesner begin to receive funding for their new institution, they also obtained a mandate

to work in an interdisciplinary fashion. In order to anticipate and streamline the merger

of the computer, broadcast, and publishing industries, it was necessary (at a minimum)

to bring members of each industry together to work on new technologies which would

help effect the oncoming shift. Ultimately, because the task of developing media

technologies for the future could be broadly construed and because the work produced

was considered by many to be interesting and important, the Media Lab attracted

researchers with varied backgrounds.

Second, in a recent interview with us Negroponte stressed that the presence of MIT

was absolutely crucial to the establishment of the Media Lab. In addition to being one

of the world’s foremost technical universities, MIT also has an entrepreneurial bent. As

a result, new initiatives like the Media Lab tend to be welcomed as opportunities for

growth, rather than frowned upon as breaks from tradition: Negroponte and Wiesner

were not impeded as they put together plans for their organization.

Furthermore, MIT is not a university with strong disciplinary boundaries.

Negroponte pointed out that this is evident even in the institution’s architecture. At

MIT, many departments are represented on the same hallway, rather than in different

buildings, so that in a few yards a student can walk from one department into the next.

Similarly, departments at MIT all share the same financial system; this differs from the

6
situation at many universities, where each department has its own financial methods.

Negroponte opined that simple facts like these foment open-mindedness at MIT—

students and faculty members who come there are willing to work across divides that

personnel at other institutions might regard as unbridgeable. Negroponte credited

some of the interdisciplinary success of the Media Lab to the prevailing attitude of

openness at MIT.

Third, Negroponte mentioned that the lack of several schools at MIT that might exist

in a more typical university—e.g., an art school or an education school—meant that the

Media Lab could begin exploring issues like film, art, and education without

encroaching on anyone else’s territory. The Media Lab encountered less intra-

institutional competition than it might have had it not been at MIT.

The Dynamic Duo

Negroponte is largely responsible for turning these three components into

foundations for the Media Lab’s success. His vision and ability to articulate with clarity

the lab’s value to society have been instrumental in the lab’s rise. Today, the Media Lab

is staffed with a large number of talented and hard working faculty members who

continue to build upon Negroponte’s ideas. As a consequence, it would be easy for an

outsider to overlook the importance of another person in the Media Lab’s good

fortunes: Jerome Wiesner.

When Nicholas Negroponte began laying the groundwork for the Media Lab he was

a young professor. He had founded the Architecture Machine group at MIT; the group

7
did important work that provided the foundation for much that was to follow at the

Media Lab, and Negroponte had big ideas for the future. As impressive as those ideas

were, the young professor’s budding enterprise benefited greatly from the gravitas

provided by Wiesner.

When the two men began their collaboration in the late 1970s, Wiesner was the past

president of MIT and a distinguished scientist; he had previously been dean of MIT's

School of Science, a leader at MIT's famous Radiation Laboratory, and a science advisor

to Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. However, Wiesner provided the Media Lab with

more than personal and intellectual heft. He had, in some ways, anticipated

Negroponte’s vision for the future of media some 20 years earlier.

In 1952 Wiesner became the director of MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics (RLE).

Thirty-five years later, commenting on the activities of RLE to Stewart Brand (author of

the popular 1987 book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT4), Wiesner said:

The Research Laboratory of Electronics was probably the most exciting

place in the world for anyone interested in communications. We were
doing research on neurophysiology, we were studying electrical noise
problems, we were doing coding, we were following Shannon’s work on
information theory, we were even thinking about computers (Brand, p.
134).

As evidenced by this quote, Wiesner was passionate about studying

communications, and he was clearly very comfortable with an interdisciplinary

approach. The Research Lab of Electronics was very successful, and in time Wiesner

4
Brand, Stewart, (1987). The Media Lab: inventing the future at MIT. New York: Viking.

8
attempted to parlay the RLE’s success into an even bigger venture – a Communications

Sciences Center at MIT. Though the idea was well-received, plans for the Center

eventually fell through. Shortly thereafter, Wiesner left academia for three years to

serve in President Kennedy’s administration.

Wiesner soon returned to MIT, and as the 1970s came to a close Wiesner saw another

opportunity to explore communications and the interactions between humans and

machines in Negroponte’s idea for the Media Lab. Wiesner joined Negroponte as a sort

of partner in establishing the institution, and his experience, insight, and practical

knowledge proved invaluable as the Media Lab took root.

Certainly the Media Lab benefited from a number of unique conditions which were

in place as it was created. In fact, Negroponte suggested to us that the lab could really

only have taken shape

1. at MIT;
2. in the early 1980s;
3. with a certain cast of characters.

We have reviewed MIT’s special contributions to the Media Lab’s existence above,

and the early ‘80s were an opportune time for the Media Lab in large part because the

personal computer industry was just beginning—this industry would open the doors

for the media convergence predicted by Negroponte. Also as noted above, Negroponte

and Wiesner were crucial to the Media Lab’s foundation. But what about the rest of the

initial members of the Media Lab? Who were they, and what made them unique?

Relatedly, what type of person does the Media Lab attract today?

9
V. The People of the Media Lab

The founding members of an organization play a critical role in its success or failure.

Consequently, it was surprising to hear Negroponte, as well as other Media Lab

professors we spoke with, refer to the early Media Lab as a “salon de refusé”. However,

according to Negroponte several of the Media Lab’s founding faculty—for example,

Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, and Negroponte himself—arrived there because they

were regarded as “misfits” in their home departments. Of course all the lab’s initial

faculty were talented, and many had already achieved great successes before coming to

work with Negroponte. By the time they reached the Media Lab, however, their ideas,

goals, and/or methods apparently diverged from existing norms at MIT.

Minsky, Papert, and other early Media Lab faculty went on to contribute greatly to

the institution and helped solidify its position as an important research laboratory.

Even as the lab grew more stable, however, its policy of hiring “renegades” never

changed. As Sandy Pentland, the Academic Head of the Media Lab, told us, “Most of

the people who are here are people who were not accepted by their more traditional

homes.” Negroponte pointed out that the first students and faculty who applied to

work at the Media Lab were unusual simply by virtue of their applications: when the

Media Lab was young and not well-known, an application implied a certain willingness

to take intellectual risks. Nowadays, of course, the Media Lab is well-established, but

its search for original thinking and individuality continues.

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 Negroponte described the mark of a successful Media Labber as a combination of

intelligence, extroversion, and open-mindedness. Accordingly, when he and other

faculty members evaluate candidates for admission to the lab’s graduate program they

do not rely solely on indicators of academic performance. Perhaps more than any other

institution in the United States, the Media Lab is in search of candidates who are well-

rounded in a special sense. Applicants’ chances of admission are significantly increased

if they have a varied and interesting list of extracurricular activities—playing in a rock

band, turning an avocation into an entrepreneurial pursuit, etc.—because in the mind of

Negroponte and other lab professors, how a person uses his or her unstructured time is

indicative of how passionate and curious a thinker and doer he or she is (and may be a

more accurate measure of their potential than performance in the classroom). Likewise,

extensive travel is a big positive on an applicant’s resume; Negroponte speculated that

seeing the world is likely to provide prospective members with the sense of perspective

and broad-mindedness the institution values.

In a more traditional research setting, this focus on extracurriculars over academics

would likely be considered exotic. After all, most graduate students are trained as

scholars, and academic performance as an undergraduate is likely to be more predictive

of success as a scholar than participation in a rock band. Success at the Media Lab,

however, seems to depend more on personality or cognitive style than on a specific area

of interest or even a unique technical ability. The Media Lab is not an organization

where groups of researchers from different disciplines pursue distinctly separate

agendas, using different skills, and then combine their results in the end. Instead, the

11
lab tends to be an open environment. Students move from research group to research

group, borrowing ideas from one project and applying them to another. Faculty

members, as well as students, work with corporate sponsors in an effort to locate and

solve problems which affect a broad range of industries and endeavors, rather than one

area in particular. As a consequence of this working style and the shifting arena of new

media technologies, the Media Lab puts a premium on researchers’ ability to move

laterally among research topics, guided by problems often discovered through

interpersonal interactions. This is not to suggest that Media Lab students and faculty

are not intelligent in a conventional sense; they are, usually exceptionally so. But the

Media Lab relies on much more than grades (or analogous measures for faculty

members) when making admissions decisions for students, and, as a consequence,

academic perfection is not necessarily the ticket to Media Lab admission or success.

To illustrate the differences between the lab and a more “normal” academic

environment, Negroponte told us the story of an excellent young Media Lab scientist

who ultimately ended up leaving the organization. This particular researcher did

marvelous scholarly work and was recognized throughout the university as

outstanding. However, he did not interact extensively with other Media Lab faculty,

students, or sponsors. Also, he preferred exploring a few ideas in depth as opposed to

working laterally, across several areas of inquiry. In short, he fit the traditional

definition of a scholar, working as an individual to push the boundaries of a single

scientific area.

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 As a result, though his work was exceptional, this researcher did not fit in at the

Media Lab. He eventually left (on good terms), and quickly obtained a tenured position

elsewhere at MIT, where he was welcomed as a great addition to another department.

Clearly, excellence in a scientific field and the skills that predict success in many parts of

academia (or industry) are not the only keys to success at the Media Lab. While

intelligence is critical, the Media Lab also relies heavily on researchers’ openness,

flexibility, and ability to work in teams, as opposed to their specialized skills or

propensity to doggedly pursue particular topics.

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VI. The Media Lab philosophy: Shifting Bodies of Knowledge

The movement across disciplinary boundaries that characterizes the Media Lab is

not unconsidered. Rather, it is part of a distinctive approach to research and education.

Sandy Pentland gave us an overview of the organization’s philosophy with respect to

the differences between disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.

Historically, Pentland observed, people confronting challenges have made

investigations, documented findings, and developed solutions. Occasionally the

accumulated knowledge was deemed important enough to be codified so that it could

be passed on and replicated with ease: the initial problem was set apart, along with its

solution, and regarded as a unique area of inquiry. Particularly important and

expansive topics that were so treated have become “the disciplines”—organized topics

of study that have served as the lynchpins of Western education for centuries.

In Pentland’s estimation, the codification necessary for the formation of a discipline

tends to generate an unnecessarily rigid mindset in disciplinary learners: many

disciplines come to be regarded as finished products, as subjects frozen in time. As

Pentland told us, with most disciplines “[I]t’s a static body of knowledge, or static in the

sense that the base is static—you may be able to add on to it. And the main, deep

problems are in some sense fixed forever. Not quite true, but that’s the general

attitude.”

According to Pentland, the result of such rigid codification is frequently constrained,

narrow work. Researchers and students revisit many of the same problems time and

14
time again, sometimes after the problems have been “largely solved or shown [to be]

irrelevant”, simply because they were important when the discipline was formed.

Accordingly, this type of disciplinary work (which involves refining existing concepts)

is often of little relevance outside the discipline. Pentland summed up his position on

the propensity of disciplinary study to become stale by saying, “And that’s what they

mean when they say ‘academic’ in the bad sense. . . . Irrelevant. Who cares?”.

The Media Lab proceeds in an altogether different way. Rather than adhering to the

issues as delineated by the disciplines, Pentland said, “our view is that there are good

basic science problems anywhere, in virtually anything. In fact, there’s too many to

choose from.” Consequently, while (for example) a biologist draws his or her

inspiration and focus from the relatively stable issues that comprise the problem space

biology addresses, a Media Lab researcher tackles problems that cross several

disciplinary boundaries. In addition, as noted above, researchers at the lab frequently

develop research topics as a result of conversations they have with corporate

sponsors—an additional source of intellectual input absent in most disciplinary settings.

Pentland described Media Lab personnel as working in this manner in order to solve

“deep problems that are shared among lots of different places”. To the extent that lab

researchers are successful in this goal, they can make practical contributions to society

and have an impact usually unavailable to discipline-based researchers.

This focus on synthetic, practically-relevant work infuses all the Media Lab’s

activities. One such activity is of particular interest to us: the lab’s educational

practices. The Media Lab is the only MIT laboratory that also confers academic degrees.

15
As a consequence, Media Lab researchers are not only doing interdisciplinary work;

they are also directly responsible for training their students to become interdisciplinary

workers. Thus, the lab provides an excellent chance to investigate interdisciplinary

education as well as research.

A caveat

Having discussed the general nature of our project, the foundation of the Media Lab,

the characteristics of its members, and the lab’s basic philosophy regarding the

disciplines, I now move to a more detailed review of research and education at the

Media Lab. Before I begin, I wish to point out that my colleagues and I did not carry

out a case study of the Media Lab. Accordingly, the point of this paper is not to assess

the quality or relevance of the Media Lab’s research projects or educational practices.

Instead, my goal is to investigate a few key questions with regard to the

interdisciplinary nature of the lab, questions whose answers can provide insight into

the basic challenges associated with an interdisciplinary institution.

One more point to note is that my colleagues and I did not interview current

students at the Media Lab, and thus can hardly claim to have obtained a comprehensive

picture of its educational program. Furthermore, because this is the first

interdisciplinary institution we have studied, it is not possible to directly compare

educational outcomes between the Media Lab and other institutions. However, we did

receive useful information regarding the lab’s educational practices by addressing the

topic with each professor to whom we spoke.

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VII. A Review of Interdisciplinary Research and Education at the Media Lab

A. Interdisciplinarity at the Media Lab: Approach and Content

The Media Lab currently consists of 30 different research groups, each run by a

faculty member and usually staffed with a handful of graduate students (in addition, a

large number of undergraduates participate in various research projects). The groups

span a variety of topics of interest: group names like “Electronic Publishing,” “The

Future of Learning,” and “Aesthetics and Computation” hint at the diversity of projects

presently in progress. However, though the nature of the work the research groups do

varies widely, each one is devoted to affecting the way humans interact with

technology in some way. For example, the “Tangible Media” group is developing

technologies which will allow humans to make use of more of their senses (e.g., touch

and hearing) when interacting with computers. Meanwhile, the “Lifelong

Kindergarten” group is exploring the ways in which digital technology can be used to

augment educational practices. Every group in some way works on the intersection

between people and machines.

The organizational structures at the Media Lab are few and fluid. Currently, three

consortia—entitled “Digital Life,” “News in the Future,” and “Things That Think”—

serve as loose categories into which the research groups fit, as well as access points for

sponsors (for example, a publishing company sponsoring the lab might hone in on the

News in the Future consortium and the groups affiliated with it). However, according

to the professors we spoke with the consortia are so loosely organized that the

17
fundamental unit of organization at the Media Lab is actually the research groups

themselves, as run by individual faculty members.

Media Lab faculty pursue their research interests with a great degree of freedom.

Negroponte believes in a hands-off managerial style and directs the lab by helping to

provide financial support and broad guidance rather than by micro-managing. Also,

lab researchers do not depend on individual grants for support: when a corporate

sponsor donates money, it is shared equally among the Media Lab’s faculty members.

As a consequence, individual lab members do not have to justify their particular line of

work to funding agencies (although of course sponsors hope to reap intellectual benefits

from the Media Lab as a whole). This arrangement further frees lab personnel to

pursue whatever line of work they deem important, and their ideas and efforts set the

tone for the lab.

B. The Strength of Interdisciplinarity, As Seen at the Media Lab

The foremost benefit to working at the Media Lab seems to be increased creativity.

In part this stems from a lab-wide belief that “new” is better; Media Lab members are

focused on inventing, rather than on refining or studying existing entities. As Professor

Deb Roy put it: “we always have this, almost, mantra against incrementalism . . . if

what you’re doing is producing the next—you know, version 2.0—it doesn’t belong

here in the same way as looking for some radical recombination of ideas, where on a

meta level you’re shifting/recombining things rather than on a microlevel.” Given the

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focus on discovering new areas of inquiry and creating new things, it is no wonder that

Media Lab faculty and students are often successful.

However, Roy went on to say that, “[w]hen you make that recombination ‘meta’

enough you’re talking about mixing disciplines, which quite often happens here.” Of

course, it is the mixing of disciplines that I am primarily concerned with in this paper,

and such mixing appears to be equally crucial to creativity at the Media Lab. Although

of course it is possible to be creative in any setting, including a discipline-based one, the

combination of computer programmers, engineers, scientists, and artists present at the

lab allows individuals to invent in ways they simply might not think of in another

environment.

For example, consider the work done in the Synthetic Characters group. Led by

Professor Bruce Blumberg, the group creates cartoon-like digital characters which are

self-directed and able to learn from their digital environment (as well as aesthetically

pleasing). The more complex characters the group has developed are guided by

sophisticated and flexible computational models which account for the characters’

needs, desires, and affect, but which do not determine behavior in advance. One of the

group’s goals is to use the characters’ behavior as a test to determine the strengths and

weaknesses of various theories of motivation and intelligence (which inform the

computational models that guide the characters). While many simulations in various

disciplines have this goal, the work of the Synthetic Characters group is unique in that

many facets of intelligence and behavior are evaluated simultaneously within a single,

life-like character, rather than in isolation. This is a significant advance, because a

19
model of intelligence, for example, that runs seamlessly in isolation may fail to work

when a large number of behaviors are dependent upon it.

In order to build their models and characters effectively, Blumberg and his students

have combined principles and techniques from a variety of disciplines. Many sources

are unsurprising: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and graphic design, for

example. However, one discipline that figures very heavily in the work of the Synthetic

Characters group is not usually found in technologically-oriented institutions like the

Media Lab: ethology. Blumberg derives many of his ideas from work done by animal

trainers (not surprisingly, the characters the group has developed in the past include

dogs, raccoons, and chickens). In fact, when we interviewed Blumberg and asked what

he was currently working on, he had this to say:

I spent the last two days with a dog trainer, and had all our group go to a
dog training facility to actually train dogs. So we take ideas and
observations from animal behavior and animal learning, we go out
training, and then build complete, if simple, systems, and see what we
learn from that, and iterate through the process. So what we’re trying to
do right now is build an animated dog that thinks for itself whose
behavioral complexity is that of a real dog, who can be taught using
traditional dog training techniques, and who you could then put in, say, a
virtual world to do sheep-herding, train it how to do sheep-herding, or
scent detection, or be a seeing-eye dog or whatever.

Blumberg’s willingness to look outside of the usual disciplines associated with

machine intelligence has enabled him to draw on the wealth of knowledge present in

ethology. Not surprisingly, therefore, he described an openness to interdisciplinarity as

invaluable when tackling intellectually tough problems, saying, “you really have to pull

from all the shelves in the library. Because there’s a reason why there are all the shelves

20
in the library . . . it really behooves you to pay attention.” Finally, the ethological

principles imbedded in Blumberg’s work make it interesting to a wider audience. As

Blumberg said:

The ethologists who have seen the work and read my thesis by and large
were very intrigued, because it was really interesting for them to see,
because most of them aren’t computational kinds of people. So it was
interesting to see these ideas that they had read about in [work by the
famous ethologist Konrad] Lorenz implemented in a computer model
where they could test it.

Other groups are pursuing similarly unusual research projects. Consider, for

example, Professor Roz Picard’s Affective Computing group. Picard and her students

are working on a variety of projects designed to make digital devices responsive to

humans’ emotional states. In attempting to do so, the members of Affective Computing

have had to draw from a number of disciplines. Like their counterparts in the Synthetic

Characters group, members of the Affective Computing group have studied and

incorporated a number of psychological theories of emotion and motivation into their

work. However, Picard’s group has also developed an appreciation for the

physiological indicators of emotion in humans. Picard and her students have designed

interfaces that feed biological data from the user into the computer, and are creating

programs that can:

1. recognize the data;

2. translate the physiological data into a representation of the user’s feelings (with
enough subtlety to distinguish between different gradations of emotions—e.g.,
distinguishing irritation from anger);

21
3. store the data such that a long-term emotional profile of the user can be created (for
instance, the computer might notice emotional patterns the user habitually
displays—e.g., a tendency to follow anxiety with frustration);

4. adapt the computer’s behavior so that working with it is a more pleasant (and
useful) experience.

Clearly, Picard has moved into realms far from her “home” discipline of electrical

engineering. The extent to which this statement is true can be ascertained in part by the

variety of disciplines represented by her students in the Affective Computing group.

Picard told us:

I had two [students] recently come from a human-computer interaction

discipline . . . Some of them have come from electrical engineering, one
came from physics and immediately did graphics and interaction stuff, it
was great . . . The most common has probably been an engineering
discipline or computer science. I have one from psychology.

On its own, this variety is impressive. In keeping with the Media Lab’s special

emphasis on a cognitive style characterized by flexibility, however, Picard

described a willingness to branch out into new intellectual areas as the key to

success for a student in her group:

Somebody who comes from a particular area and wants to stay in that
area worries me a little bit, especially if they are not open to at least
investigating what’s around the areas they are familiar with. I see that as a
sign of a lack of adventurousness. Maybe that’s not quite the spirit we
want.

The Synthetic Characters and Affective Computing groups are simply two example

of the team-driven interdisciplinary work done at the Media Lab. The drive to combine

disciplines pervades the institution. In fact, one Media Lab professor we spoke with

22
feels he has hit upon the ideal number of disciplines to be combined. He tells his

students that the key to useful creativity is to look at how three disciplines have

approached a problem, determine what has been missed, and then use some

combination of the three disciplines to fill in the gaps. Of course, he might add, this is

easier said than done!

Such cross-disciplinary mixing is supported by the Media Lab’s emphasis on

movement: students are encouraged to work with and learn from research groups other

than their own. Professor Ken Haase went so far as to describe the students at the

Media Lab as the “glue” holding the various research groups together by transferring

information from group to group. This movement between groups is commonplace at

the Media Lab, because, as Deb Roy mentioned:

the environment is set up to really make it easy to have a conversation

with a musician, or someone who writes operas, or someone who studies
children’s learning, and then connect it with something you’re doing in a
completely new way . . . that’s the sort of work that is certainly most
appreciated and, really, the environment is most conducive to.

In fact, Roy’s current work at the Media Lab evolved from his own wanderings

as a student: he was able to combine topics investigated by two groups and

create a novel and important synthesis.

Roy’s work (discussed in the next section) sheds light on another aspect of the

Media Lab environment that differentiates it from other institutions: the focus on

creating physical artifacts as opposed to writing papers. While personnel at

23
some discipline-based institutions also create products, every member of the

Media Lab creates objects as an integral part of their work. This point of view is

partly a legacy of the Media Lab’s origins: as noted, Negroponte was trained as

an architect, and the Media Lab is still officially housed in the School of

Architecture. As a consequence, the architectural notions of building and the

design studio have always been central to the Media Lab’s research practices,

and the “demo” (demonstration) is an essential form of output at the Media Lab.

Also, one of the disciplines that undergirds a great proportion of the work done

at the lab (as well as at MIT in general) is engineering. The combination of

architectural and engineering influences means that working in an

interdisciplinary fashion at the Media Lab is bound up in creating physical

objects. These objects nearly always involve digital technology, but can take on a

tremendous variety of forms: software agents, computerized toys, and

technologically augmented instruments are three examples of objects that have

issued forth from the Media Lab.

C. Constructive Interdisciplinarity: An Example

At the Media Lab, faculty and students are expected to do more than simply

mix and match ideas—they are expected to produce objects which embody those

ideas. One of our subjects, Deb Roy, was a student at the lab before joining the

faculty, and his thesis work (as well as subsequent modifications he made before

24
becoming a professor) is an excellent example of what can be produced in the

Media Lab’s catalytic environment.

Roy studied computer engineering as an undergraduate, but during his

graduate years at the Media Lab he developed an interest in speech and the

processes underlying language learning. For his doctoral thesis, Roy began an

investigation into how multisensory processing leads to the development of a

lexicon. He observed that while humans do not learn language in the absence of

multisensory stimulation (i.e., they build a vocabulary while being exposed to

sights, tastes, smells, etc.), most “current spoken language recognition and

understanding systems are not grounded”5. That is, most language recognition

systems today only receive written and/or spoken words as input.

Roy decided to use his observation to improve machine language recognition

and production. He developed a computer system called CELL (for Cross-

channel Early Lexical Learning), which he subsequently embodied in the form of

an active, aviatically-inspired robot (which he built) dubbed Toco the Toucan.

Toco learns vocabulary by interacting with natural human speech and the

environment simultaneously. The system works as follows: the human

“teaching” Toco vocabulary describes an object into a microphone that inputs

verbal information into Toco’s auditory system. Meanwhile, Toco apprehends

the described object via a camera in one of his eyes. For example, in a video on

5
Professor Deb Roy’s research is described online at dkroy.www.media.mit.edu/people/dkroy/research.html

25
the Media Lab’s webpages6 Roy presents Toco with a red cup and says, “Look,

it’s a red cup.” Toco is able to associate Roy’s spoken phrase with the physical

object in front of him, and parrots back the phrase “Look, it’s a red cup” when he

has the relation down.

Toco does more than simply remember objects and their verbal labels,

however. When analyzing an object, Toco encodes color and shape separately,

and he also processes color and shape words separately. Consequently, after

being exposed to a number of objects of various shapes and colors, Toco can

describe novel objects correctly. In the aforementioned video, for example, Roy

began by presenting Toco with a red cup and a yellow ball; Toco was

subsequently able to identify and describe a yellow cup placed before him, even

though he had never seen one before. In short, Toco learns a flexible vocabulary,

rather than simply storing descriptions about individual items. Furthermore,

Toco learns from natural, connected speech and regular objects, not from

specially inputted data.

Roy’s work with Toco is impressive: he has effectively combined a model of

early language acquisition with computer engineering and robotics. It is also

important work, as Roy has developed a system that stands to make

contributions to developmental psychology, cognitive science, and artificial

intelligence, and which would be of acute interest to industries involved in

speech recognition and processing systems. Finally, Roy sees his work as having

6
The Toco video is available online at dkroy.www.media.mit.edu/people/dkroy/toco.html

26
a practical purpose. As he said, “I’m starting to realize, from talking to people in

the speech field now, that this will be relevant and I expect to have an impact.”

Furthermore, the work is an example of the Media Lab’s strengths as a

research and educational institution in general. Roy approached his education

with curiosity and a focus on invention. He was expected to create, and he

succeeded in dramatically expanding existing efforts in speech recognition,

processing, and generation. Roy told us, “a lot of these ideas that I talked

about—grounding words in our spoken languages—simply have never been

addressed; it’s completely wide open.” Furthermore, in developing his project

Roy made connections between separate areas of investigation around the Media

Lab. During our interview, he described his movement from a group that

focused on speech to one that focused on vision, and how that contributed to his

project:

the good thing is this whole issue of grounding, which has to do with—it
started off with connecting vision with speech, which is what happens
when you bring a speech person into a vision group . . . I was in a unique
situation; I was doing work in a group that didn’t do that kind of work.
And it influenced me, and I ended up thinking about relations between
visual and auditory input in a way that people haven’t before.

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D. Weaknesses of Interdisciplinarity, As Seen at the Media Lab

1. Depth and Time

The Media Lab’s strengths do not come without drawbacks. As mentioned

earlier, in order to augment its creativity and innovative potential, the Media Lab

has de-emphasized studying history and working on refining past work. Media

Lab researchers are always looking to the future, much more so than most of

their academic peers. Some of the ways in which this philosophy manifests itself

are rather shocking. For example, as one subject told us, “in general [Nicholas

Negroponte’s] advice to incoming faculty is to drop what they’re doing and

change fields right as they walk in the door.” Needless to say, this differs

tremendously from the practice at most academic institutions, where faculty

members are hired precisely because of the potential for continued productivity

in their particular area of expertise.

Because of the emphasis on change at the Media Lab, it has often been

suggested that faculty and their students do not deal with issues in great depth.

A former Media Lab student lent support for this notion, telling us:

the Media Lab is a place that, of course, has some boundaries, but in
general if your philosophy is to let people try things, crossing boundaries
and not paying attention to boundaries, you haven’t necessarily staked a
particular piece of turf and one, claimed it as a discipline; and two,
explained what the key tenets of that discipline are so that you know what
is encompassed by it and what is not encompassed by it. It makes it
difficult to push deeper, because you don’t have the framework . . . .

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 Concerns about depth and the sustained investigation of a few topics at the

lab are reflected by debates lab professors have over whether or not to

implement an undergraduate major in MAS (no such major exists at present).

Professor Mitch Resnick told us he currently argues against the Media Lab

developing an undergraduate major because “right now I feel that there’s not

enough of a discipline here. I think that it is good for an undergraduate to get

more of a grounding in a particular disciplinary area.” Another subject also told

us that he did not think the Media Lab should allow undergraduates to major in

Media Arts & Sciences (MAS). The problem, he said, is not that the content the

Media Lab researches is unworthy of a major. On the contrary, he opined that

MAS would be an excellent course of study because students would get an

“introduction to a lot of basic concepts in society”. For this professor, the

problem with a Media Lab undergraduate major stems from the fact that lab

researchers do not probe the same areas with enough consistency for a sustained

program of undergraduate education. As he told us, “I think that to have an

undergraduate major you do need to be a place that says, ‘Well, we really do

teach this class every year. We don’t lose interest in it and stop teaching it.’”

Clearly, this professor and Resnick are articulating the need for a solid grasp

of basic concepts before one moves on to experimentation with new ideas. Both

suggested that there is presently not enough stability and focus on a few key

ideas for them to feel comfortable with MAS as a major course of study for

undergraduates (although nearly all the professors we interviewed spoke

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glowingly about the Media Lab’s ability to augment an undergraduate’s

education through research opportunities). However, the Media Lab has never

billed itself as a place designed to educate undergraduates. Furthermore, as

mentioned several times throughout this paper, the Media Lab explicitly focuses

on lateral thinking as opposed to “burrowing in” on a few topics. Therefore, the

critical question is whether or not the Media Lab’s lack of disciplinary grounding

poses problems for the research and/or development of its faculty and graduate

students? Does the Media Lab take its anti-disciplinary stance too far?

A statement by Resnick indicates that he does not think so, provided an

adequate disciplinary foundation is already in place; as he put it, “when

someone has that [disciplinary] background I think this is a good place to come

to graduate school.” Other statements made by Media Lab professors suggested

other points of view, however. For example, a quote from Bruce Blumberg

suggests that the answer to this question is, “sometimes”. Blumberg told us:

even though the Media Lab prides itself on being sort of out there and on
the cutting edge, just because you’re on the cutting edge doesn’t mean
that you shouldn’t know the classics, if you will. And I think that
sometimes, people don’t do their homework. And that they would do
well to.

Professor Tod Machover sounded a similar note. He suggested that if the

Media Lab has an educational flaw, it is the tendency of students to move too

quickly from one project to another. Once a demo has been built, many students

do not take the time to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses thoroughly in an

30
attempt to improve the work. Instead, they move on quickly to another project,

another idea. The result, Machover said, is that often products do not achieve

their full potential and their quality is not as high as it could be.

While the Media Lab has done pioneering work moving across boundaries,

lateral thinking does not necessarily mean that one needs to move from topic to

topic exceptionally rapidly. Indeed, Machover would like to see the Media Lab

adopt a somewhat slower pace with regard to innovation, so that new ideas

could be explored in greater depth: there is no need to come up with five new

ideas each week. As he suggested during an interview, if an individual really is

inventing five things a week, then many of those things simply are not going to

be very good.

An important question is: to what extent are any problems with depth and

quality at the Media Lab due to interdisciplinarity, and to what extent are they

simply due to the rapid pace of work? This question is very difficult to answer:

Machover clearly ascribed problems to the speed of turnover from project to

project, while Blumberg’s comment highlights the importance of having a solid

grounding in the particular area of interest. In truth, at the Media Lab

interdisciplinarity and quick movement from topic to topic are somewhat

confounded: one feeds the other.

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2. Problems with Standards

One conundrum that has emerged at the Media Lab is due solely to the lab’s

interdisciplinary methodology—it is the question of standards. In a discipline, at

least ideally, there are common standards of quality that must be met before a

product is accepted as finished. As indicated by Tod Machover’s statements,

paraphrased above, there are fewer rigorous standards for demos at the Media

Lab than might be ideal. However, this problem certainly does not exist because

the Media Lab has abandoned standards altogether. Instead, it appears to be the

consequence of several different disciplines with different standards mixing

together, without a clear consensus being reached as to what universal standards

of quality for Media Lab work might be.

As Professor Roz Picard told us:

The lab has had these different cultures: some people don’t value
publication at all, some people value performance, some people value
demos . . . When you bring such diverse people together they also have
diverse values, they have diverse ways of measuring success, and some of
these really conflict. We have to figure out how to get along with that . . .
When you don’t succeed, when there is real conflict, then that becomes a
weakness, people get stressed, and there is a loss of productivity because
people don’t understand what they are supposed to be doing: maybe a
student who really believes publications are important winds up working
for an advisor who doesn’t value that and they wind up really not doing
so well. Because the status quo is so hard to figure out it’s a little tricky to
navigate. If you do it well it works fabulously, but if you don’t I think it
becomes a real detriment.

Another Media Lab professor described an incident where a student did not

internalize a set of standards during his education at the lab: the student had an

extremely trying oral qualifying exam in part because he was making claims

32
without providing evidence to support them. The student’s troubles caused his

advisor to think, “I haven’t trained him right. I haven’t taught him what a

standard of evidence is”. The same professor wondered, “Can I train them in

every field? Am I training them for any field?”.

Because of these types of concerns, this particular Media Lab professor makes a

concerted effort to spend time teaching students about meta-science, the overarching

ideas that form the basis for sound experimentation and scientific practice. Other

Media Lab professors, instead of trying to teach their students general ideas about what

constitutes quality work, simply require their students to display their work in a variety

of ways and to meet the varying standards of each discipline from which their work

draws. Unfortunately, of course, this means that for one project a student could be

required to produce a demo, run experiments, and write a number of papers. One

faculty member spoke about the difficulty of balancing the need for both demos and

papers in her own work, saying, “it’s hard, truthfully, to find the hours in the day to do

both”.

As an institution, the Media Lab has resisted creating a set of standards with respect

to faculty members and has instead opted to “offload” judgment of faculty work to the

wider world. Nicholas Negroponte told us, very frankly, that the prerequisite for

advancement as a Media Lab professor is world fame. Negroponte was very clear that

he did not mean fame in the public sphere, necessarily. Being on “The Tonight Show”

will not automatically get you ahead at the Media Lab (though it might not hurt!). The

key for faculty members is to be famous among those qualified to judge the quality of

33
the work they are doing—primarily academics or industry members who work in a

related field (because Media Lab faculty do particularly unusual research, finding

someone in precisely the same field is often difficult; this may be a challenge faced by

interdisciplinary workers in general).

However, this model obviously cannot be put to use with students. Also, it does not

help Media Lab personnel judge their efforts before they send them out of the lab.

Finally, being the “best in the world” can be a false indicator of talent if the type of

work being pursued is extremely unusual. Presumably, one could become famous as

the only person to master an esoteric area of inquiry, but because of the lack of qualified

judges it would be foolish to put much stock in such an person’s work simply because

they were famous as “the best at X”.

We asked Negroponte if he had ever considered implementing a lab-wide

standard of quality at the Media Lab, and he replied by saying he has always

tried his hardest to make as few lab-wide rules as possible. When issues like this

come up, Negroponte admonishes his charges to enjoy their freedom instead of

asking for more rules (though he said he understands why the lack of rules

makes many people uncomfortable). He believes that multiple ways of doing

things—multiple insights, multiple disciplines, multiple standards—lead to a

richer final product.

However, it seems that the lab could benefit from a common (minimally

restrictive) set of standards. A set of clear guidelines outlining the requirements

for student work at the Media Lab might help students work through the

34
strengths and weaknesses of their demos. Also, guidelines could make it easier

for students to move amongst faculty members who favor different forms of

output.

Finally, regularized standards could help keep Media Lab faculty honest with

respect to their own areas of specialized knowledge. Several Media Lab faculty

commented that because of the lab’s reluctance to hire several faculty members with

training in the same background, there is often only one person at the lab who really

understands a particular area. As a result, as Professor John Maeda put it, “you talk to

people who know nothing about your field, so you can invoke all these fancy terms,

and suddenly you can realize that, ‘I’m so smart’ or, ‘I think I’m so smart, I’m so

special.’ And, that’s a primary weakness, I believe.” Deb Roy made similar comments:

I think the weakness also comes from the same environment, which is: we
have to constantly look outwards—outside—to get proper criticism of our
core areas. I work in a certain area of spoken language technologies and
multilingual processing, and nobody else does . . . and it’s difficult for my
colleagues to assess my work; they basically believe what I tell them . . .
and so we have to keep ourselves honest by going out and—so that’s a
danger: the onus is on you, whereas I think if you’re in an environment
where everyone’s doing similar things you push each other and there’s a
lot of internal competition. Competition here is of a different sort; it’s not
at that technical level. By definition, it can’t be.

Perhaps a regularized set of standards for use within the Media Lab would

help alleviate concerns like those of Maeda and Roy: lab researchers could use

the standards as guides when evaluating work too specialized for others to

grasp. Tod Machover intimated that he hopes to use standards more rigorously

35
in the Center for Future Arts (one of three centers now being developed at the

Media Lab) in order to improve the quality of the lab’s artistic achievements.

VIII. What About Intellectual Tensions at the Media Lab?

Earlier, we noted the intellectual differences between cognitive psychology

and neuroscience. In order for people to begin practicing what is now regarded

as cognitive neuroscience, those differences had to be addressed. Melding the

two disciplines required a re-evaluation of each one’s key notions, and also

required intellectual flexibility on the part of scientists. It seems likely that

researchers at successful, boundary-breaking institutions would have to go

through the same intellectual steps as those initial cognitive neuroscientists.

After all, disciplines are separate for a reason; traditionally, at least, one did not

need the same skills to study physics that he or she needed to study biology, for

example, because the two disciplines were geared to ask and answer different

questions, and used different methods. To combine different disciplines is

(often) to reformulate the central ideas of each.

At the Media Lab, where the research focus changes on a regular basis,

people have to exercise their intellectual flexibility repeatedly as they seek to

make connections between different research areas. To perform such mental

gymnastics is no small task. Moving seamlessly and productively from

discipline to discipline requires (at a minimum) a fundamental openness to new

ideas, impressive intellectual assets, and a willingness to spend lots of time

36
working with materials and notions that are initially foreign. A great deal of skill

and thought is required to bring separate disciplines together effectively.

How do Media Lab researchers go about making the intellectual connections

between disciplines? How do they bring together engineering and the arts, for

example, which have such divergent notions concerning subject matter, working

style, and criteria for success?

Unfortunately, at this point, the answers to these questions are unclear.

Media Labbers are obviously combining disciplines in a useful way, but most of

the professors we spoke with did not talk specifically about how they deal,

intellectually, with disciplinary contradictions. There are probably two reasons

for this:

• We did not ask about this issue specifically enough;

• It is very possible that Media Lab researchers have been combining

disciplines for so long that they no longer think much of it—they are beyond
considering the differences between areas of inquiry.

Neither of these reasons is very satisfying. In our future work, we intend to

be much more direct in questioning subjects about the intellectual tensions

between disciplines in hopes of eliciting more responses on this issue. Also, we

expect that researchers at a more “typical” interdisciplinary institution—e.g., a

genomics center—might be more self-conscious regarding the disciplinary

combinations they are involved with than researchers at the Media Lab. It is

37
important to find out how disciplines are being combined, even if subjects no

longer spend a great deal thinking about how they are doing the combining,

because the degree to which the compatibility of two disciplines has been

thought through is likely to determine the value of the resulting interdisciplinary

work.

Although they did not speak directly about resolving the underlying tensions

between disciplines, Media Lab professors did have interesting things to say

about closely related topics. For example, Roz Picard told us about the

challenges she has faced from fellow engineers as she has imported ideas from

psychology into her work:

I did a bunch of computer chip design, computer architecture design, the

VLSI design... and switching from that to image analysis, which are both
different fields of electrical engineering, felt like a big switch at the time...
Switching and adding in collaboration with artists and working with
psychologists and cognitive scientists on affect stuff has been a much
harder thing, because the core values of the engineering community
suddenly raised their eyebrows, people raised their eyebrows and said,
wait a minute, this is sissy science, what’s going on here? Is there science
here?

John Maeda mentioned a different concern. He lamented the fact that finding

students who are willing and able to mix disciplines is difficult, and he ascribed

the problem to discipline-based education:

our educational institutions can only create two types of people . . . one
person can think scientifically or logically, and one person can think
illogically or more about in relation to the world . . . it’s a sad commentary
on the fact that our institutions can’t create modern day Da Vincis. Why is

38
 it this doesn’t happen? And, it’s very simply because the disciplines are
stuck in ruts, essentially.

Maeda’s goal is to produce modern day Da Vincis—students who can use all

aspects of their minds equally effectively. He told us:

I’m working on . . . figur[ing] out how to make people who are very fluent
in technology and also have an ability to think about what they would do
with that voice of technology. Mainly, the ability to combine thoughts of
creativity with technology as a natural reflex. These people are very few,
and I recruit these people; I’ll go everywhere, find these people who don’t
really fit in, don’t fit in either side very well because people like to classify
you and therefore it’s very difficult. You can see they’re very troubled in
this, so I provide an environment for them to all be together and act like
it’s normal, I guess.

“Acting normally” may mean very different things for people in different

areas, however. The traditions and practices of different disciplines, as well as

the cognitive abilities required to work in them, vary widely. For example, Roz

Picard was very upfront about the different levels of rigor she has found in

engineering, psychology, and the arts:

I’m not at all impressed with the level of cognition I see in the psychology
camp. There are some outstanding people, but there is also a lot more
rotten thinking than I’ve seen in the engineering community . . . I think I
take it for granted that people there are very logical and rational and they
make their arguments and support them with data. I’ve run into some
people who are very frustrating to deal with in this other community . . .
The arts people I’ve been working with are such a pleasure. Maybe I
don’t expect them to think in the same way as I expect engineers to think,
whereas I sort of expected the psychologists to, and maybe because I go
with a different set of expectations, I’m much more open to whatever they
bring to the table . . . .

39
 Based on Picard’s comments, one would not necessarily expect a seamless

interface between psychologists, artists, and engineers. In fact, Picard told us

that doing research in psychology and engineering means she has to expend

twice as much effort to meet the standards and address the questions of each

discipline:

There have been people from the psychology community questioning

some of our methods; not understanding our pattern analysis methods:
too many variables, not enough data, why didn’t she run the standard
ANOVA analysis, and what is P and all that stuff . . . so the burden is on
me to really sit down and get a deeper understanding of their methods
and show them how their methods do and don’t relate to our methods. In
a sense I feel like I have to do my work and then their work . . . it’s harder
and I’m willing to take that on, it’s just that it takes me a little bit longer to
get around to doing that.

As revealing as these comments are, it is still not clear how Media Lab

professors go about reconciling the underlying differences between disciplines: it

is one thing to adjust standards, and another to rework a discipline’s basic

questions. As suggested earlier, however, the Media Lab seems to be rather

unreflective regarding the disciplinary boundaries being crossed in particular

pieces of work. In fact, Maeda’s comments appear to sum up the Media Lab’s

theory on how best to combine disciplines: simply provide an environment for

intellectually inquisitive people to work together and productive

interdisciplinary work will issue forth.

Many Media Lab professors told us about the value of being able to speak

with colleagues from a variety of different specialties—maybe the differences

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between disciplines are reconciled during these conversations. Unfortunately,

because we did not ask directly about how the underlying intellectual tensions

between disciplines are addressed, we cannot ascertain the degree to which that

statement is true. This is a topic which we will investigate further in future

research.

IX. Organizational Structures Which Support or Hinder Interdisciplinary

Work

The Media Lab, as noted earlier, has very few clear organizational principles.

However, three, loosely-defined structures or factors have led to the Media Lab’s

interdisciplinary success:

1. the leadership’s managerial style;

2. the lab’s commitment to having interdisciplinarity at its core;
3. the structure of the research groups.

Each element has contributed to the Media Lab’s interdisciplinary work in a

unique and important way.

First, there is the matter of the Media Lab’s leadership. As anyone even

remotely familiar with the Media Lab knows, Nicholas Negroponte has been an

absolutely indispensable part of the institution’s rise. What is less well-known is

how his hands-off managerial style (really an organizational “anti-structure”)

has contributed to the lab’s work. Nearly every Media Lab professor we spoke to

testified to the fact that Negroponte’s policy of giving researchers the resources

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to do their work and then leaving them alone contributed massively to their

creative success.

For example, Tod Machover described how he came to the Media Lab for an

interview as a young researcher in the early 1980s, full of ideas to pitch to

Negroponte. Over lunch, Machover mentioned potential project after potential

project to the Media Lab’s founder, expecting to hear words of approval or

disapproval: Machover received, instead, only polite nods and neutral responses.

Slightly unsettled by the end of lunch, Machover asked Negroponte directly: “Do

any of those things seem particularly interesting?”. Negroponte replied by

saying that Machover was asking the wrong sort of question: if he decided to

come to the Media Lab, then he would be directing his research, not Negroponte.

Negroponte made it clear that his role was simply to find excellent, inquisitive

researchers and provide them with the materials to do their work. Machover

was impressed, and the world has been impressed with Machover’s work at the

Media Lab in the ensuing years—a testament to Negroponte’s methods.

Second, Negroponte’s laissez-faire style has been supported by the lab’s

explicit commitment to interdisciplinarity. Many other interdisciplinary

institutions, organized without such an explicit commitment to

interdisciplinarity, have suffered because of this misstep. Ken Haase described

contrasting structures at other such institutions beautifully:

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 When Nicholas and Jerry [Wiesner] first started the Media Lab in the late
‘70s / early ‘80s, they expected that within a few years there would be a
lot of competitors and they were surprised when this didn’t happen.

One of the reasons it didn’t happen is if you look around at the different
programs that might be competitors, they are either one of two structures.
One of the structures has something which is a center that is between
departments . . . people from different departments are a part of it, but
essentially you’re getting their marginal energies and not their core
energies.

The second case is: some existing department declares a part of itself to be
a media center or a media laboratory or whatever—so it’s a part of
computer science or it’s a part of arts or it’s a part of literature or what
have you . . . and in that case it’s part of the department and it’s not really
interdisciplinary. In addition, it also . . . may get more marginal energy
than core energy.

What the Media Lab did that was unique was that it was an
interdisciplinary center where people were based in the Media
Laboratory, so that their primary affiliation was in the Media Laboratory,
which meant that it was getting core energy and not marginal energy.
And I think that there’s a lot to be said for that kind of structure.

Third, Negroponte and the lab’s founders did not simply set up a general

interdisciplinary space and leave it wide-open. Instead, they encouraged the

formation of a large number of research groups with varying interests, which

would feed off each other and synergistically move forward. This is the

organizational scheme that is still in place today, and as we saw in the work of

Deb Roy, movement between various research groups indeed does lead to new

ideas, new connections, and increased creativity. In addition, several professors

cited the flow of students between research groups as one of the most important

stimulants for their own work as well.

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 There are only a few elements related to interdisciplinarity that hold back

work at the Media Lab. One, already mentioned, is the presence of so many

interdisciplinary workers with different backgrounds, which makes it hard for

individuals to get an informed critique on what they have done (because they

may be the only lab members trained in their area).

There is a key point to note before taking this shortcoming too seriously,

however. Several Media Lab researchers said that although the trouble with

getting an informed critique from inside the lab was definitely a problem, it is far

from devastating and well-worth the benefits that come from having so many

different people from such disparate areas working together. For example, when

we asked Mitch Resnick whether this situation constituted a problem or not, he

replied:

Yes. The question of how big a problem it is is a hard thing to gauge. Is it

worth the tradeoff? Yes. Do I sometimes wish that I had more people
within the building who were more focused on issues about learning and
education? Yeah, I think that would be helpful to me; I would like that.
Would I want to trade so I would be at a school of education where I
would have many more people surrounding me with interests in learning
and education but missing the other things? No.

Other Media Lab professors made similar statements, and some even suggested that the

lack of disciplinary colleagues at the Media Lab forced them to be more connected to

like-minded researchers outside the institution than they would be otherwise.

Another problem that subjects mentioned is a bit more invidious and relates to the

lack of defined identities at the lab. While the freedom to do research across a number

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of different areas is liberating, it can also result in a struggle for distinctiveness. One

subject told us that collaboration at the lab is not as easy for junior faculty as it might

seem, as the desire for unique, distinctive research (necessary for a successful tenure

review) squelches the impulse to work with others pursuing similar projects. The

possibility for a person’s individual strengths to get overlooked may indeed be higher

when the distinctions between different researchers are made less clear; this particular

subject cited a hesitancy on the part of others to work on common problems as evidence

supporting this hypothesis.

X. Interdisciplinary Research at the Media Lab: Summary

The Media Lab is well-designed to support interdisciplinary work: Nicholas

Negroponte sets a tone that embraces free, open-inquisition, interdisciplinary work is

expected and supported, and the presence of a variety of interacting but unique

research groups ensures that novel ideas will be spread around the lab. The two major

structural problems are:

1. the lack of bodies of experts who can judge work that draws from specific
disciplines (however, as we have seen, this is the result of the lab’s focus on
interdisciplinarity, and it is a trade-off many Media Lab professors are happy to
make);

2. the problems associated with (too) close collaboration, noted above.

Interestingly, the Media Lab is undergoing two dramatic changes that figure to alter

its structure significantly. First, Nicholas Negroponte is stepping down as the lab’s

director, and it is unclear at the moment as to how the lab will replace him. Second, the

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lab has grown so large that a decision has been made to split it into three centers: one

devoted to technology and the arts, one to technology, children, and developing

nations, and one to “bits and atoms” (a lab effort to embed digital technology—“bits”—

into everyday physical objects—“atoms”). It will be interesting to see how the three

centers interact, and whether or not the presence of distinct units will make the lab

more disciplinary than it is today (most Media Lab professors hope that it will not). In

fact, a follow-up study of the Media Lab in a few years might yield a much clearer

picture as to what factors are necessary for an effective interdisciplinary institution.

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XI. Conclusion

The Media Lab is a place that has espoused an interdisciplinary approach and

achieved singular success. Though there are some weaknesses associated with the lab’s

method of combining disciplines, the results of that method have been twenty years of

ground-breaking research, hundreds of students with inquisitive minds and the skills to

match, and an international reputation for excellence.

Paradoxically, all those strengths keep us from drawing general conclusions based

on the way interdisciplinary work is carried out at the Media Lab: the institution is

simply too unusual to serve as a template for how interdisciplinary work, in general,

gets done. Few other organizations have the same resources or intellectual capital that

the Media Lab has, and even fewer have the good fortune to exist in partnership with a

university like MIT. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, most interdisciplinary

institutions have a narrower focus than the Media Lab.

In order to get a more accurate picture of the value of interdisciplinary research, as

well as the components that contribute to it, we intend to examine a handful of other

outstanding interdisciplinary institutions in the near future. We also plan to investigate

collegiate and pre-collegiate interdisciplinary programs, to complement the preliminary

look at interdisciplinary education that we have obtained at the Media Lab.

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