Professor Maria Yang on Design at MIT and Stanford, AI and Design, Sketching, the Morningside Academy for Design, and the Splendor of Acronyms - Ep 10

Professor Maria Yang comes to the lab to talk about the early years at MIT and Stanford, and her research in design processes. We also chat about the discipline, and she shares the latest scuttlebutt on the Morningside Academy for Design.

We send off another sticker to the March Global Challenge winner, and test Maria's acronym and abbreviation recall skills.  Spoiler: she knows them...really well.

Morningside Academy for Design: https://design.mit.edu/
Maria Yang: https://meche.mit.edu/people/faculty/MCYANG@MIT.EDU

Podcast specific:
Podcast Instagram: @lockthequill
Comments or questions: lockthequill@mit.edu

The Lab at MIT:
Pappalardo Lab Instagram: @pappalardolab
Comments or questions: pappalardolab@mit.edu
Pappalardo Lab website

Transcript

[music]

Shop Staff: Lock the Quill!

Danny: Mechanical engineering professor and associate dean for the school of engineering, Maria Yang, joins us in the lab to talk about her undergraduate and graduate experiences at MIT and Stanford and her journey back to MIT. Maria talked about a research and design processes and share some thoughts about the discipline of design. We also talk about the new Morningside Academy for Design where Maria is associate director. We test the new quiz prototype, but we start with the March Global Challenge.

[music]

Student, Garrett: Congratulations to Julie from San Francisco.

Student, Aileen: Julie is a March winner of the Lock the Quill Global Challenge. Thanks for listening.

Students: Thanks for listening!

Danny: Garrett, Aileen, why are you guys reading this?

Aileen: We're from San Francisco.

Danny: Hey, Julie. Your prize is on the way, and for the rest of you, we reset our rangefinder for April's Lock the Quill Global Challenge. To enter, just email us your mailing address to lockthequill@mit.edu. The furthest listener by the end of April will win a Lock the Quill sticker, and we'll thrown in something extra. Good luck.

[music]

Danny Braunstein: Our story begins in a small town between Indianapolis and Chicago, West Lafayette, Indiana and Tippecanoe County, home to the Boilermakers of Purdue University. An envelope arrives at the Yang household.

[music]

Maria Yang: I got into MIT as a freshman by some miracle. It was awesome. I came out here and I was like-- so loved being in a real city because I'm from a very small college town. I had a hard time deciding what I was going to major in. I ended up majoring in course 2 because the classes looked the most fun. I did pretty well in the classes, but I realized the ones I really loved were around design because you get to make things. You get to think about users, and you get to think about how everything fits together and you work in a team.

Danny: Was this Tiny's lab at the time?

Maria: That was Tiny. He was not tiny.

Danny: No. This was when-- 12-inch table saw without any guards, dirty windows, steam equipment.

Maria: I remember distinctly one of the girls in my class. It was like two days before the 2.70 which is 2.007 now. She cut her finger pretty deeply and it was 11:00 PM, and they were like, "Okay. We're closing up shop." Everyone was like, "We're not quite done with our things." I'm like, "This girl has been injured," I was like, "pretty seriously”, she needed to go to the hospital." Yes, that was a memorable.

Danny: Tiny must have yelled at her for bleeding all over the place?

Maria: I can't remember. All we heard is like, "Someone cut themselves," and then we're all like, "Oh my god."

Danny: We renovated in about '95. What year was this approximately?

Maria: This would have been late '80s.

Danny: Late '80s.

Maria: Yes. I'm dating myself.

Danny: We’re contemporaries.

Maria: Yes.

Danny: 2.007 was impactful… or 2.70?

Maria: Yes, 2.70. Then also it was the equivalent of 2.009, although in that time, we didn't make anything. We only drew pictures of our-- I took it from Ernesto Blanco.

[music]

Danny: Okay. I'm going to pause right there. The late Ernesto Blanco was a beloved teacher here at MIT. He was born in Cuba in 1922 and worked as a draftsman in Havana. Ernesto came to the US in 1949, completed a Bachelor of Science at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, returned to Cuba and returned to the US in 1960 where he taught at MIT and Tufts. He was in private practice, founded his own engineering firm, and eventually returned to MIT full-time in the '70s.

He was an engineer's engineer, an inventor, tanker and teacher. Ernesto had a calming way about him, never flustered, always even keeled, deliberate and warm, a benevolent soul. He was known for his beautiful technical drawings. His jacket, tie and lab coat always buttoned up, always professional, a true gentleman.

[music]

Danny: “You have a very nice machine.”

Maria: “Yes, very black.” Yes. [laughs] Yes. It was awesome. I learned so much about just how to make a drawing from him and also wearing the lab coat, and he was so professorial and so perfect.

Danny: Did he do the lecture in Spanish?

Maria: [laughs] No, he did do it in English.

Danny: Oh he did? There was one that he would famously do in Spanish.

Maria: I don't recall it in being in Spanish.

Danny: To drive the point home that drawing is the language.

Maria: Oh, that's so good. That is so Ernesto. Yes. Yes, I took it from him, and I loved it. Then after that I thought, "Oh, maybe I'll go to grad school."

[music]

Maria: I decided to go to Stanford and was there for a while thinking about robotics or design because it was ….and I decided design was what I wanted to do. Then I had a little existential crisis. I'm like, "What do I want to do about design?" I realize I either wanted to practice design or study the design process because I'm really interested in how people design things, and how things get designed. I decided to study the process part of it, but along the way, I did what you're not supposed to do, is-- my advisor, Mark Cutkosky. He's a robot guy. He actually is also Sangbae Kim’s advisor.

We're actually academic siblings, and he let me do some internships along the way which was super nice because then I got the experience of actually doing design at different companies. One was a haptic force feedback device company and another was a big defense contractor, so I got a lot of great experiences on that front.

Danny: Can you tell us a little bit about your thesis?

Maria: Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh. My thesis was around design search. One of the main things that we think about when you look at processes, how do you understand design intent? Why did you make a decision because, once you know why people make a design decision, later on you can figure out what's happening or why something went wrong.You could backfill it in.

What we did is we looked at different design documentation, how we could figure-- search for design intent. We came up with this whole search-- this is before search engines.

Danny: Oh, yes.

Maria: I know I'm going to preface that. [laughs] We came up with this whole structure for grouping and coming up with different ways to do search.

Danny: You mean you couldn't Google it?

Maria: You could not Google it. Although in parallel, we knew the Google guys were there and the Yahoo guys were also there. I actually knew them from school just because they were doing-- the Yahoo people. It was all in play at that time, but obviously, I did not make Google or Yahoo. [laughs]

Danny: Right. Where was d.school, David Kelley? Was that going on at the time?

Maria: Yes. I was in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and I was in the design division. They had a program within that called the Product Design Program. You could be a product design undergrad, and it was a sub major of their equivalent of course too. Then also a graduate major of product design, so it's a joint program with the art school. Those were really the precursors for the d.school.

The d.school I think started 2004 or '03. It was in that process. They got a nice gift from Hasso Plattner Institute, so that's when that officially happened, but before then, I think those had been around for maybe 20 years beforehand, maybe longer.

Danny: When you were there, it was operating?

Maria: It was operating, but not called the d.school.

Danny: It wasn't the d.school.

Maria: Yes. The d.school really brought together a lot of themes in a nice way.

Danny: This is interesting then because I wanted to talk about design thinking and the postmortem.

Maria: Yes, the tech review article.

Danny: Okay. Was design thinking a thing?

Maria: I would say at that time the thrust was really about user understanding, prototypes, and iteration. The emphasis on understanding the needs of users was definitely an important part which I think at the time was really unusual compared to other pure schools. Using the term design thinking has given an entrée to a lot of different people to think about design in a way that was not possible like 20 years ago.

[music]

Danny: The article through which Maria and I referred is in the March-April issue of MIT technology review, written by designer, artist and writer Rebecca Ackerman. The title is a Postmortem on Design Thinking: Empathy Failed to Fix the World. What now? What now, indeed. Ackerman comments in the section ideas over implementation that execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking, and she continues to write about the hazards of empathy over expertise.

This is a topic for another time, but Tech Review, editorial director Allison Arieff commented, "If we accept that everything is design, and by extension that everyone is a designer, then our expectations for the discipline may have been unrealistic, even misguided." Let's get back to Professor Yang's story.

[music]

Maria: At the end, when I finished my PhD, I decided that that was enough of school. That's good enough. No more, had enough. Some friends of mine from grad school started a startup company, and they were like, "Do you want to join?" I was like, "Sure." It was great because we got to design things together.

Danny: Was this in Palo Alto as well?

Maria: Yes. This is Palo Alto. Actually, technically Menlo Park, and then Belmont, California. It was great. We had venture funding, so it was very exciting time. Then I realized after a couple of years that I like the autonomy of academia. If there's something interesting to you, you can just study it as long as you can figure out the funding. You have a lot of autonomy, which is something I missed a little bit about that.

I ended up going back and doing a postdoc at Caltech. Caltech actually has their version of 2007 which is I think ME27. I think that's the number. It's been a while, but as it turns out, the professor Erik Antonsen, who's also a Mech E grad, he was going on leave to work at NASA and he needed someone to teach 2.70 there. That was my job for a year. It was great. It was so much fun.

Danny: You were teaching the 2.70 equivalent at Caltech?

Maria: Yes which means it was fantastic students but much smaller. It was 23 students, and they gave me four TAs. They were like, "Oh, sorry, it's a little low staffed." I'm like, "That's great." [laughs]

Danny: If you were to scale that for reference, we'd have about 25 TAs for 007 right now.

Maria: Exactly. They were undergrads, but they were so good and it was terrific. Such a good experience. Then professor job opened up at University of Southern California, and I took that. I liked it and then a job opened up here, and so I ended up moving back here.

Danny: You were at USC?

Maria: Yes, Trojans.

Danny: I didn't know that. Then MIT calls you?

Maria: Yes. It was great.

Danny: That almost sounds like Peko’s story.

Maria: She was at Harvey Mudd.

Danny: She was at Harvey Mudd for about a week.

Maria: That's right. I remember that now.

Danny: Yes, and the phone rang.

Maria: [laugh] That's amazing.

Danny: Maria packed her bags to head back to Cambridge leaving the warm weather, smog, sunshine, and In-and-Out Burger in favor of cold short days in Duncan's. It's character building.

Maria: One thing I've always been interested is how people design things and also the artifacts in design, like sketches, prototypes, digital models, and all of that. How do those link up because the basic premise is, if you have good design process, you're more likely to have a better design outcome. That's how I think of things, and research bears that out. It's not 100%, but there's a connection.

We have a whole line of work along that side. Right now though, I think one of the things is AI. We're thinking about how generative design tools and other AI tools change the game for human designers. Are we being being replaced or are we changing the role of how a human designer works? We have a lot of experiment thinking about how those integrate. I have--

Danny: That must be relatively new.

Maria: Well, we've been thinking about hybrid-- we call it hybrid intelligent approaches. Other people use similar term. For a couple years now, along with-- I have a project with Sang-Gook Kim and Caitlin Mueller in architecture and civil engineering. We've been thinking about those topics because you can see it coming down like, if designers are using tools that are able to come up with designs, it's very different than just making representations with CAD, right?

You have to think about how we change the tools and also how the designer changes to address that. I don't think we're at the point where you just imagine something and push a button, and then all these awesome designs come out.

Danny: Is that where you think that AI and design on the generative side is heading?

Maria: One thing right now with given generative design tools, one of our grad students, Jana Saadi, she just did a study where she interviewed different engineering designers who use generative tools to come up with designs. The interesting thing is all of them use it first to explore a design space. They come up with an optimal design, and there's like 5,000 of them. What they do is they take that design, and then they modify it.

They actually don't care as much about the performance because they want it to look a certain way and also for certain constraints that maybe they didn't specify originally that were hard for them to make explicit. I think right now the tools maybe are not quite good enough to do exactly what you want. They can't read your mind. I do think that people are using them, and they are using them as creativity starters.

Maybe instead of coming up with 30 ideas yourself, you put some ideas into the system. It comes up with a bunch of ideas and you think, oh, you know what? I didn't think of that. Maybe I will riff off of that.

Danny: At what point do you think it would be refined enough to provide a narrower solution space?

Maria: I don't know. It depends on how good we are at getting what people want. I think the thing is people don't always know what they want to design. They design something, and it was not what they intended. They have to go back, and they iterate. I think that process is still there.

Danny: Do you think then designers are going to be more on the specification side?

Maria: Possibly. It doesn't sound very fun but-- [chuckles]

Danny: Well, no, but it's design-- I think of it in terms of design input and design output. Are we turning into the design input people?

Maria: Right. Are we specification engineers? Yes. I worked with a grad student, Michael Stern, years ago, and he did additive manufacturing. He was like, I can imagine where you say these are the requirements, and then maybe you iterate on what those requirements are or specifications. Then you put them in the system, and then, boom, you get 50 designs. That could be.

Danny: Is this a good thing?

Maria: I don't know. Does it free the designer to think about other things and do other things that we haven't thought of? Maybe, or maybe it helps a mediocre designer become much better because you can think of all these things. They're all based on machine learning, so they're only based….I'm sorry…ChatGPT, those are based on machine learning. The generative design tools are more based on geometry, and those are a different style.

Maybe for the GPT variety, it seems like you can only base it on things that exist already. That means true innovation. I don't know, maybe that's still the providence of humans. I can't predict.

Danny: I can predict.

Maria: Go ahead.

Danny: It is.

Maria: [laughs] Okay. I love your confidence.

Danny: It is.

Maria: Excellent. Yes. Right. Well, because we formulate the problems.

Danny: There's also the second part is there's the idea and then there's making it real. I think the most effective practitioners are going to be those who can do both.

[music]

Danny: Can you comment on your research and concept generation and sketching?

Maria: Okay. There's actually a gigantic body of research on creativity. It starts mostly with the psychologists…. but for engineers and designers, there's the intuitive practice of design which is you just go with it. Come with ideas on your own fantastic approach, but the engineer in me is like, well, a lot of people feel hesitant or they feel like they aren't creative. Maybe you're at a big company, and you want to make sure people have processes they can follow, so what are strategies that you can use to help them come up with ideas?

We do a lot of investigations, and so like, well, what are the factors that really help that? Particularly, my thing I love is sketching because I feel like it's a visual representation. It's somewhat intuitive. It's really important for the practice of designing anything physical or 2D, 3D, anything. We wanted to see how you could help people, what ways they represent ideas, and how that impacts the kinds of ideas they come with and how quickly and how many. Does it make the outcome of the design better?

What we've looked at is it actually-- the act of drawing people, who draw more tend to come up with more ideas, and then just probability suggests, if you come up with more ideas, you're more likely to come up with a good idea. There's a implied probability there.

Danny: Yes, you do emphasize quantity, especially in the early phase.

Maria: Yes. Very good. Quantity breeds quality. Yes, absolutely. I didn't make that up. That's something that people-- that's been around a long time. Yes.

Danny: You make a distinction between thinking sketches and talking sketches, what's helping me formulate the idea and what's helping me communicate that idea.

Maria: They're two different things. I'm a big fan of thinking sketches because I feel like-- and also that's not my idea there. The whole dichotomy has been around a while, but the idea that people-- because people just doodle, but they're helping them get through an idea and work out things, even if it's this weird sketch, but you do what you present to other people to show them. I'm gesturing with my hands right now which no one can see on the podcast.

If you want to show someone, then that's a different type of drawing than just drawing for yourself to think through an idea. Thinking sketches, it doesn't matter how well you draw. You draw whatever helps you think. It's the stuff that you show other people, then you might have to be a little more careful about how you draw.

Danny: When I was talking to Sanjay a few weeks ago, we were talking about how hands-on work activates the motor cortex which reinforces learning.

Maria: Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Danny: I'm just wondering, in generating ideas, if the act of thinking sketches is essentially the same thing.

Maria: Architecture professor, Donald Chong, he said “drawing is a dialogue with paper” or “conversation with paper”. I can't remember which one he used, because it's like you're going back and forth. I wonder, I can totally see that. Some people can't think without a pencil in their hand.

Danny: You must encounter this a lot when students do their work, especially beginning of semester, we ask them to do concept work. They all say, "but I can't draw."

Maria: Yes. It's classic.

Danny: How do you help them get past that?

Maria: We really have done studies where we show it actually doesn't matter. The thinking drawings, doesn't matter how you draw it. That's the first thing. Then the other is, like in my classes, we actually make them pin their work up on the board so everybody has to see them. We make a point of not-- no one's going, "Oh, your drawing is terrible, ha ha ha." You just have to say, "I'm going to get past how I feel about my drawing and just put my stuff out there so people can look at the ideas." That's really the idea there.

Danny: When you pin it up though, it moves from a thinking drawing to, say, a communication drawing.

Maria: Communication drawing. If you see other people's thinking drawings, then you don't-- and actually, I will say the pinup drawings are probably more like communication drawings, so good catch. It gives you the practice of putting it out there and normalizing it. If you're at an art center-- I knew this guy who he was like, we would get a ream of paper every day. By the end of the day, we had to have drawn-- used up the entire ream drawing.

At that point, you probably just don't even care. You're probably just like, my hand is tired. I just want to get out of here. We don't reach anywhere near that level of sketching of quantity, but you kind of want them to just think it's fine. I'm just going to put this out there and not worry too much about it and get all-- because otherwise, you'll stop drawing. The worst thing is, if you decide I can't draw, so I'm just not going to draw. I'd much rather have you draw a terrible drawing than not at all.

[music]

Danny: The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is an imposing 220,000 square foot fortress made of 19th century brick and mortar, protecting the corner of Massachusetts Avenue in Vassar Street. In MIT building, the Met was a storage facility since the dawn of time and home to a specialty audio retailer and a small diner and cultural center known as Fresco's.

In 2015, the tenants were told to vacate as the building was to be repurposed for student housing. The student housing plan died on the vine, but instead, the School of Architecture and Planning will be moving in after an extensive renovation. The Met will also be home to the Morningside Academy for Design, a new interdisciplinary center that is focused on design, design education and research, design-related events and entrepreneurship.

It's a big deal, folks. The vision and leadership to make this real came from none other than Mechanical Engineering Professor Maria Yang and School of Architecture and Planning Professor John Ochsendorf.

[music]

Danny: Can you just give us an overview of the organization, the origin and its objectives?

Maria: Yes. Morningside Academy has been around for almost exactly a year now. It was funded by a generous and wonderful donor, Gerald Chan, who really saw the value of using design to help technologies and students and people make impact in the world using design. He famously funded the T.H. Chan-- or his philanthropic arm funded the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. He's trying to make good in the world.

The goal really is to bring together communities who are interested in design within MIT, so make a platform. “Throw a sheet over the ghost," that's what Kate Trimble has said. She's in the office of the Vice Chancellor and was on our committee. That's one interest is community building within MIT but also making strides in education, innovation, entrepreneurship. There's also a K through 12 component, so there are a lot of different things that are in play.

Danny: Who is going to live in that building?

Maria: That building is primarily school of architecture and planning. A small bit of it in the back will be the Morningside Academy for Design, but really it's the School of Architecture and Planning which is super exciting. It's going to be beautiful building at the end. On the first floor, there will be Project Manus space for the entire MIT community as well.

There will be studio, machines, model making, all sorts of great tools. The School of Architecture and Planning, that's their building really. It's primarily their building. The Morningside Academy funding, it's housing School of Architecture and Planning, but the impact of the academy is meant for the whole institute.

Danny: This is huge.

Maria: Yes, super exciting. Really exciting.

Danny: I've spent a lot of time on the website, and I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm just going to list things. Design Plus seems like a program that's geared towards introducing first-year students to this thing we're calling Design, is that right?

Maria: Yes, first years. Yes.

Danny: That's like a class--

Maria: It's a class. It's like a first year seminar.

Danny: You're offering fellowships for graduate students?

Maria: Yes. It's open to any major at MIT. MAD really is trying to be broad across the institute that it's a fellowship. Whatever you're doing already or if you have an interest in design-related work, MAD will fund you for nine months of funding so that you can do that work. It enables you to do research in that area.

Danny: MITdesignX, which is largely a school of architecture program.

Maria: Yes. It's an entrepreneurship kind of accelerator.

Danny: How do classes offered through the IDM program, Integrated Design and Management program or Sloan fit into what you're doing at math or do they?

Maria: We have a whole list through the ecosystem, and IBM is one of those. Sloan, there's not an official partnership, but we certainly have fellows that are part of Sloan, and they're funded as MAD fellows. I'll pull back a little bit and just say that the real interest here is that we had this whole faculty committee, like over COVID. One of the things you noticed there are pockets of design, bigger and smaller across MIT and just being able to bring them together and give them a platform so that people can say, "Here, there might be funding for grad students.

There is possibly some--" For the freshmen, just introducing them that there is actually design at MIT. We want to make that possible. Also, bringing together programs that are of interest to design. Actually, now Project Manus is part of Morningside.

[music]

Danny: You have heard reference to Project Manus, but may be wondering what that means. Let me back up for a little context. Our founder, William Barton Rogers, had a vision for a new type of university and pulled together a number of prominent individuals to form the MIT corporation. Their first governing document, the Act of Association reads, "We, the subscribers feeling a deep interest in promoting the industrial arts and sciences as well as practical education, partly approve the objects and plan of an institute of technology embracing a society of arts, a museum of arts, and a school of industrial science."

Further, MIT was founded as a land grant school, the result of the Moral Land Grant Act that was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. The primary mission of which was to promote the mechanical and agricultural arts. You see, application and creation is in our DNA. For you MIT people out there, I know you know this, but I'm often surprised to hear that others outside our community think of us strictly as theoretical bookish types. It's not one or the other. It's Mens et Manus, mind and hand.

[music]

Danny: Which brings us to Project Manus. Project Manus is a campus-wide initiative to champion and develop maker facilities at MIT, and to a certain extent, pull together and help with wayfinding and awareness of the other 100,000 square feet of campus labs and shops. A few facilities formally fall within the purview of Project Manus, namely the Deep and Metropolis. As part of the Met Construction Project, Project Manus will be creating a new 17,000-square-foot maker facility and will be part of the offering of the Morningside Academy for Design.

[music]

Maria: The intent is, if you have a project in mind, you can go there, and they'll train you, and they'll have studio space. It's meant to really give students who are interested in making things the opportunity to do their thing whether it's for a class or a personal project.

Danny: On the website too, you talk a lot about events, collaboration, research. It seems to me it wants to be a clearing house for those things design-related.

Maria: Yes, what we're trying to be. If there's like a cool talk--

Danny: You were going to say everything.

Maria: Everything. Well, I mean I don't know. It's hard to be everything to everyone, but if there's a cool design-related talk, we're there to co-sponsor and visitors. All that's kind of--

Danny: There's an event in Boston in the spring.

Maria: Yes. Boston Design Week. You have been doing your research.

Danny: Everyone goes to Boston Design Week. You're hosting a few events.

Maria: Yes. At the museum, at the MIT museum.

Danny: I see.

Maria: I think they're all around, I think.

Danny: When do you move in?

Maria: In 2025, so, oh gosh, two years from now in the Met Warehouse.

Danny: Right around the corner.

Maria: Right around the corner. There's going to be a space for MAD and then, of course, there's going to be Manus in the first floor. Having a space will be instrumental in the whole-- a convening space for people to go and talk about design, do design, find a community. That's a really big thing because people will say things like, "Oh, I didn't know there were other people doing X in my design world." You want to bring them together and make sure they have some coherence and convergence. hat's really the goal there.

Danny: Do you think there's room for traditional design school offerings?

Maria: Like industrial design?

Danny: Industrial design.

Maria: We're definitely open, and we have interest in that work. We don't have a dedicated industrial design program. IBM is probably the closest. Media Lab has some as well. Of course, there's a strong visual component in architecture too.

Danny: What would you look to aggregate that?

Maria: I don't know right now. Part of it is also, John Ochsendorf who's the founding director, he talks about we're building the train as we're driving the train. Things are coming together now.

Danny: I wouldn't be enrolled in the Morningside Academy of Design?

Maria: No. Right now, there's not really a degree program.

Danny: Do you think there would be?

Maria: I don't know. That's something to explore. Do you have thoughts on that? I'm curious.

Danny: I think there's an opportunity in industrial design.

Maria: Also having curriculum or something that draws students in. I do agree, if you build it and they will come kind of philosophy does not always work with making because you want to know what to do with these tools. It's project-based for a lot of people if I want to make this thing and understanding the principles behind it. We're not just hacking away hoping for the best.

[music]

Danny: What is design?

Maria: Oh my gosh, yes. I can tell you my personal take on it.

Danny: Yes, that's why you're here.

Maria: I think it's using creativity to design a system or an object with some social impact or end user, but there are many, many definitions. I think any definition you give, you can get in trouble. [laughs]

Danny: It is a loaded word.

Maria: No, no. That means different things to different people, right?

Danny: Sure.

Maria: There's no one ring to rule them all, I think

Danny: You had your statement, then you had comma for social change or social impact, is what you say.

Maria: When I think of design, I think about being useful for some person.

Danny: Does that use have to be like a profound social change?

Maria: You don't have to solve climate change. No, exactly, that's too big an ask.

Danny: Charles Eames said that one can describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.

Maria: Oh, so an end use. Not end use, but achieve an outcome.

Danny: Achieve, yes.

Maria: Absolutely.

Danny: This is the one that I don't understand from him. I'm wondering if you have some insight. “The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem.”

Maria: Oh. Is he saying that, if you are so concerned about maintaining your particular brand of style, whatever that is, you're not really solving a problem? It's just being more minimalistic about your solutions where you pair things away.

Danny: My interpretation is you're putting yourself before the end user.

Maria: Yes. I can totally see that.

Danny: I don't know if that's what's meant by that, but that's what I might think of--

Maria: I can see your interpretation too, absolutely.

Danny: Another one of Eames' quotes, "We don't do art, we solve problems."

Maria: Yes. I always think of art and design. People are like, "Oh, what's the difference between art and design?" I think of it as something more for you as the artist and then design is for someone else as well or some outcome with some performance.

[music]

Danny: How has the discipline of design evolved at MIT?

Maria: I can only phrase it from my point of view.

Danny: Sure.

Maria: I remember when I was an undergrad, it was much more mechanical design primarily. This is my bias as someone who thinks about users and designers. I think that end of the world has expanded quite a bit over time. All along, there's been design in a lot of places. The Media Lab has a lot of design, School of Architecture and Planning, obviously. If you look at all the different departments, they all have engineering and design kind of mixed in 16 course. You name it, they have it. I think that's evolved a lot. There's been a much stronger emphasis on social impact. If you think about D-Lab--

Danny: Can you just summarize what D-Lab is?

Maria: Yes. MIT D-Lab is an entity on campus that thinks about courses, does courses and also has experiences and research focused on how you can address the problems of communities that are low-income countries, usually global. Often, that means we'll have student classes where students will design and build, say, a system for infrastructure or a water delivery system, or they'll make some new prosthetic, super cool stuff.

They will also go out and work in communities to do things in a collaborative way that's grounded in the needs of the community. We don't just come in and airlift a solution and say, "Oh, best of luck." It's really meant to be collaborative in the process.

Danny: Looking at what we're doing and where we're heading, I just didn't know if you had any particular thoughts.

Maria: I feel like we're in such a great place and with a really bright future. I was just thinking, when I was an undergrad, it was a very different place at MIT, very different vibe and very different goals. Now, we have this really strong forward-thinking approach to problems thinking about big problems, climate change, and all these things. Also, I think there's such a strong sense of human and social impact at MIT that was not present maybe 20 years ago even. That's a big change. I feel hope, and I feel promise and excitement around it.

Danny: You're a persistent optimist. I love it.

Maria: [laughs] Do you disagree?

Danny: No, I don't disagree!

Maria: [laughs] No, but I do. I think I do, I see it. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. The Met academy gives me a lot of hope because I feel like, "Oh, we have these fantastic students who are super excited about design, and they're doing things, and they're making change." How could you not be inspired by that?

Danny: No, I agree. I think it's super. I just can't wait till it gets done. The one thing I ask since you are associate director, is there any way to get Fresco's back in the corner there?

Maria: Oh my gosh. That is above my pay grade.

Danny: Is it above? We can't go anywhere for eggs in the morning.

Maria: I did not even know until later that they served eggs. I was not informed.

Danny: You know more genius ideas came out of Fresco's than any place on campus.

Maria: That's so good. My sources tell me there will be dining options.

Danny: Dining options. Okay. Let's bring it back with the character of Fresco's.

Maria: Okay. [laughs] I'll talk to the people I know.

Danny: Oh, Yes. Thanks. Talk to your peeps.

.

[music]

Danny: I've tried my department name and number quiz with a few people, and I think they're on to us. Some listeners have written in with great ideas to mix things up. Today, we test a concept sent to us from some colleagues upstairs. Okay. Maria, I'll give you an MIT abbreviation or acronym, and you tell us what it means. SAandP.

Maria: SandMP. School of Architecture and Planning.

Danny: SHASS.

Maria: School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences.

Danny: SOE.

Maria: School of Engineering.

Danny: SOS.

Maria: School of Science.

Danny: DLC.

Maria: Department-- Oh my god. DLC. [chuckles] No, no, no. Department, Laboratory or Center. [laughs]

Danny: GIB.

Maria: GI-- General Institute Budget.

Danny: GIR.

Maria: General Institute Requirements.

Danny: DSL.

Maria: Division of Student Life.

Danny: IAP.

Maria: Independent Activities Period.

Danny: DTYD.

Maria: What does that mean?!?

Danny: Dance till you drop.

Maria: I've not heard that. Is that an MIT thing?

Danny: Burton Bombers.

Maria: God. I did not--

Danny: Ask Evelyn.

Maria: Evelyn would know. I know I'm just thinking, exactly.

Danny: IHTFP.

Maria: I have truly found paradise

Danny: [laughs] Oh, you're so good! Oh, damn.

Maria: I remember the old one. I have one for you. Are you ready? SPAMIT.

Danny: Oh, stupid people at MIT.

Maria: That's gone. I know.

Danny: I want to reprint those T-shirts. I remember those shirts so well.

Maria: They've got away, they've been out for a while I think.

Danny: For about 30 years.

Maria: Is it really? [laughs]

Danny: Would you wear it? There's a dean of engineering wearing this SPAMIT shirt.

Maria: Stop. [laughs] I don't think I even had one when I was a student.

Danny: I didn't either because I couldn't find who was distributing them. That was really good.

Maria: Oh, why, thank you.

Danny: Oh, I'll buy you a pitcher. We'll go to the Muddy. [laughs]

Maria: Did I beat Sanjay? That's the important part.

Danny: You mopped the floor with Sanjay on this one. [laughs]

Maria: I'm totally kidding.

Danny: I'm not. [laughs] That is why you are the dean of the school.

Maria: I'm not dean! [laughs]

Danny: Associate assistant, whatever.

Maria: I'm the helper dean!

Danny: You know what it means. Thank you so much for coming on.

Maria: [laughs] Thank you.

Danny: Have a great weekend.

Maria: You too.

[music]

Danny: Thanks to Maria Yang for spending time with our little operation. Maria, good luck with Boston Design Week and MAD, and please stop by anytime. The folks here love you, as I'm sure you know. Thanks to Garrett and Aileen, two of our Bay Area 2.007 students who stuck around over spring break to work on their robots. Remember, the family that mills together, chills together. During our quiz, you heard Maria and I refer to Evelyn. Of course, that's none other than Evelyn Wang, our former department head now director of ARPA-E in Washington DC.

Evelyn, just a reminder that the Burton Bombers are planning their annual party. Did any of you catch a cleanup music? We can't get you to use a broom, but you wait until Maria's in my office to test drive the shop back. Whatever. Hey, we love you anyway. Of course, thank you for listening. Have a great weekend everybody.

[music]

[00:40:44] [END OF AUDIO]