Dava Newman, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named the next director of the MIT Media Lab.
Dominick Reuter
The MIT Media Lab has always been about rethinking society’s paths to the future, about the fusion of technological systems and human behavior. Lately, he has been thinking a lot about his own future after a disastrous blow to his reputation in a 2019 scandal related to the theft of funds from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A key step in this process came on Tuesday, when the Media Lab appointed its next director: aerospace researcher, space suit designer and longtime MIT professor Dava Newman, who also served for two years as NASA’s assistant administrator at last part of the Obama administration’s mandate. Among the many characteristics and talents that the university administration observed about Newman – designer, engineer, thinker and more – she stressed that she is “important, optimistic”.
The positive vibes will undoubtedly be welcome to resolve the question of who will lead the Media Lab in the 2020s. Newman’s appointment comes after a great search by the institution, whose previous director, Joi Ito, resigned in the midst of to the Epstein scandal. A highly successful exhibition at The New Yorker detailed the complications of Ito and others, and the revelations led Wired to question whether the Media Lab had “lost its moral orientation”.
Since Ito’s departure in September 2019, the Media Lab of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been managed by a five-member executive committee. This group will support Newman, whose appointment takes effect on July 1, while she works with faculty members to define the direction of the lab’s research. Among the expected changes: how the institution examines the people who support the laboratory and how donations are requested.
“The Media Lab has been very, very busy assessing culture and climate,” Newman said in an interview on Wednesday. Your top priority as a new director: “I’m going to hear a lot”.
Founded in 1985, the MIT Media Lab is known for its free and interdisciplinary approach to research. It has a diverse, even stunning, range of programs, ranging from personal robots, poetic justice and human dynamics to affective computing, biomechatronics and nano-cyber biotrek.
Below is my conversation with Newman, edited for greater length and clarity.
Tell me about your vision for the Media Lab. What do you see going forward?
Newman: Really, fundamentally, I call the Media Lab the magical place that, in the first place, strives to benefit society. How we do that is by inventing technologies and experiences, [and] immerse people in it, so that we can transform [and] improve lives and communities. It is multidisciplinary. [Among] emerging technologies, we are very focused on digital, material and biological.
It’s a very broad portfolio of things that the Media Lab does.
They are humans and machines [and] training. Now, given the pandemic, given the nature of it all interacting virtually, we really have a great opportunity to look at open learning and collaborative education. Part of it will be virtual – what I call a hybrid model, because part will be in person, part will be virtual and digital. In addition, thinking about the environment, the climate, sustainability, because everything we do, we have to be focused on the benefit for society and, of course, we have to be aware of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
What is your first priority, what is the first thing you are going to do?
The first part is that I will listen. There has been incredible work going on in the past 15 months by the leadership of the faculty, the executive committee, the working groups. The Media Lab has been very, very busy assessing culture and climate.
So, first I’m going to start accelerating. I will be listening a lot and then working together. Very excited about: OK, what is the shared mission, we have shared values, how are we going to work together to do this?
His predecessor, Joi Ito, fell under a cloud, a scandal. How will you restore confidence and security?
The best way I know to do this as a leader is to be inclusive, to invite everyone to the table. Everyone comes from a different perspective, so that’s why I say listen, really making sure that the team, the students, if they feel like they weren’t heard – I know they feel like they were heard last year, but let’s just maintain that dialogue. It has to be very open, very transparent. That is how we can arrive at shared values and dreams. We also want to focus on critical mass, critical contributions.
Are there specific aspects of your work in the aeronautics and astronautics department that you will bring to the Media Lab?
Absolutely. It is my aerospace job, but my career is also dedicated to STEM, education and teaching. And I always talk about it as STEAM, so I brought the arts, I brought the design. It’s to have a conversation, especially with girls and boys, and I can teach these lucky college students, but a lot of my speech is for outreach – and I always say: Don’t I look like a space scientist? Because you have to open people’s minds because we know that people are going to draw a guy with glasses and a white coat, that’s a scientist.
Design is also doing and doing, and that’s what the Media Lab does, prototyping and failing, getting it right – we never got it right the first time, so we have to iterate, we have to design and design and do and do, and we’re always trying to improve, but we have to put ourselves out there too. You will never design something perfectly the first time.
You spent two years at NASA. What kind of lesson can you bring from this to your work at the Media Lab?
what it was a huge portfolio. I focused on NASA on innovation and technology, [and] approached him as an educator and teacher.
There is also a lot about people, diversity and inclusion at NASA. It is very widespread, I think – [with] both industry and government – I come in and you hear the data and the numbers, and they are always very disappointing. At NASA, 13% are engineers. I was shocked. At MIT, we have parity, we have 50% college women. We are working with our graduate students, we are working on representing the faculty, things like that. But, coming out of academia, and especially from MIT, we have worked hard on this over the decades. This is an interesting discussion to have with the industry and the government as well.
The Media Lab works closely with the private industry. Can you talk specifically about the work between the Media Lab and Silicon Valley in particular?
You asked me about NASA too, so I’ll start there. At NASA, I was responsible for the partnerships. Public-private partnerships were very important and we really tried to innovate. Starting from the government’s way of doing business, we really did business in a different way. And also the public-private partnerships at NASA that resulted in Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo – it took more than a decade to get it right. Now, what is wonderful is that we are seeing the return.
I kind of take that learning to the academy, and the portfolio at the Media Lab is definitely some traditional funding, absolutely government funding for research and also industry funding, and we are very excited to be working with the industry. We seek the same thing: transformative technology. Inventing the future – this is the best job in the world.
Tell me about the status of BioSuit [Newman’s spacesuit design project]. How are things going with this?
It’s still research, there are definitely students working on it. We probably have two or three new versions of models and prototypes. The technology part has really changed to advanced materials, thinking about – they are fantastic – hydrogenated boron nitride nanotubes. Now [we’re thinking about] the coat, the overcoat, because we are really going back to the moon, so now we have to think about the thermal condition and radiation. Now we’re starting to think a lot more about materials and life support systems, things like keeping people very mobile and also healthy and well.