MIT Morningside Academy for Design
To: SA+P staff, faculty, students
From: Hashim Sarkis
March 14, 2022
Dear SA+P community,
Following President Reif’s message earlier this morning, I write to celebrate with you the establishment of The MIT Morningside Academy for Design, a major cross-MIT entity housed in the School of Architecture and Planning. Established through a visionary and transformative $100 million gift from The Morningside Foundation, the Academy will enable design at MIT to grow and to connect across disciplines, from engineering to science, management, the humanities, and beyond. For more detail, see MIT News.
SA+P has been the traditional home of design at MIT since its founding and with the Academy, we will be able to expand the impact and scope of design to the rest of MIT and to deploy design approaches to address the world’s pressing problems.
I am also really delighted to share with you that John Ochsendorf (Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Engineering) will be the Founding Director of the Academy, and that Maria Yang (Gail E. Kendall Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Dean of the School of Engineering) will be the Associate Director.
This momentous and unprecedented opportunity for our School and for MIT is the outcome of many efforts by many people over many years. The length of this message is a sign of our gratitude to them.
Design at MIT
When I arrived at MIT seven years ago, President Rafael Reif and then-Provost Marty Schmidt tasked me to answer the question, “How do we shape the future of design and design education at MIT?” This question had been brewing on campus given the increasing importance of design in industry and the growing impact of design thinking in business and engineering, outside of design’s traditional spheres.
It took only a few rounds of inquiry and discussion to realize that design was alive and well at MIT and in numerous fields. Several recent initiatives spoke to that: the D-Lab, the International Design Center, and the collaboration with the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Others, such as the Design Minor and Major founded and stewarded by the Department of Architecture, MITdesignX, and the guidance provided to the creation of the Dubai Institute for Design and Innovation, ensued. However, what was lacking was a unifying vision that would give greater visibility, more support, and stronger integration for design across disciplines and into our broader STEM education.
Historically, SA+P has provided the fertile grounds for such visions, with leading figures in the field such as Muriel Cooper, Donald Schon, and György Kepes, to name only a few. Five years ago, a group of faculty from SA+P produced a position paper that highlighted the primacy of design in our School. In it they said:
“Each discipline at MIT views the learning process through its own particular lens: Engineering, for example, aims to improve learning by optimizing our efficiency and maximizing our performance. In SA+P, we look at learning through a design lens—as a process in which learners create knowledge and develop expertise as they design and make things in the world. Learning is not viewed as a one-way transmission of information and ideas from teacher to student, or computer to online learner. Rather, learning is an interactive and collaborative process, in which learners are constantly engaging with tools, materials, media, and one another. In SA+P, we learn through design. We learn about design. And we design to learn.”
But design was already strongly present and growing in Engineering, especially Mechanical Engineering, and in the Sloan School of Management as well. In all these discussions, it became clear that we needed to strengthen design education across MIT and to build a more all-rounded approach that complemented MIT’s strongly analytic and quantitative approaches to learning with creative thinking and human values.
To this end, in 2020 School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan and I asked John Ochsendorf and Maria Yang to convene a committee of faculty from across MIT to look at design at the Institute. Last year this committee authored a white paper with recommendations about the future of design at MIT. The bold, collective vision, strong aspirations, and the plurality of approaches to design outlined in this paper have inspired the creation of the Morningside Academy for Design. Since then, John and Maria have consulted widely across MIT for input and suggestions to ensure the success of such a cross-cutting initiative.
A Convening Place
Very much in line with the collective, bottom-up approach that John and the faculty committee laid out, the coming two years will witness collective brainstorming and open discussions that will help chart out the mission of the Academy. However, it is important to highlight that the Academy will be a place, a convening place. It will not be its own silo with its own faculty and students but will attract faculty and students from across MIT.
It will be housed in the new Metropolitan Warehouse along with the Department of Architecture, the design studios and research spaces of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for Real Estate, Project Manus, and several galleries and meeting spaces. Located at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street, it will invigorate the center of the future campus, where MIT meets the world. This ambitious project is slated to open in 2025, and some of the Morningside gift will help to support the construction.
Here undergraduates and graduates will creatively make and think. K-12 students will amplify their imagination, communities around us will think innovatively about their collective challenges, and fellows from across MIT will use design approaches to address pressing problems like climate, inequality, mobility, and energy. Here, inequity will not be a barrier to creativity. Here, the industry will interact with faculty and students. Here the breadth and depth of design will be explored: from the design of objects to that of systems, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the single source of creative talent to the open-source of collective genius, from art to science, from thinking to making, and from emphasizing the efficacy of the solution to imbuing everything we make with human values. Here will be the place where we ask deep questions about what values will guide our actions. This is what makes design such a unique and indispensable way of thinking, learning, and making the world.
Here we will be able to turn the initial question around to ask “How will design at MIT help redesign the future of education at large?”
1,001 Thank-yous
Where do I begin? I would like to deeply thank Rafael Reif and Marty Schmidt for asking the crucial question and for all their help to get us to the answer. My fellow deans have been enthusiastically advocating the idea from the get-go, especially Dean Chandrakasan and Associate Dean Maria Yang, who have been true partners in this venture and strong believers in design education.
I am profoundly indebted to Robert Millard, the former chair of the MIT Corporation (and graduate of SA+P), who understood the value of what we have to offer to the world and strongly championed it, and who built our relationship with Morningside Foundation trustee Gerald Chan. Since taking on the role of Corporation Chair, Diane Greene has strongly embraced and led this initiative to realization.
I am also very grateful to MIT’s development, finance, legal, campus planning and facilities, and communications offices for their support and guidance every step of the way.
Within our School, the credits can go back to the very inception of MIT more than 150 years ago with Architecture as one of its foundational programs. Past deans and heads of departments and units have been consistently and continuously advancing design. The School’s current leadership and administration have been very instrumental in guiding, debating, and shaping this initiative. I want to single out the important role that Nicholas de Monchaux has played in framing the relationship between Architecture and the Academy, and the seminal contributions of Dava Newman, Chris Zegras, and Tod Machover. I also want to hugely thank Larry Vale and Caroline Jones, as well as Siqi Zheng, Azra Akšamija, Sarah Williams, Svafa Grönfeldt, Phil Clay, Larry Sass, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Ken Goldsmith, Martha Collins, Monica Orta, Melissa Vaughn, and Jim Harrington. Special thanks to the development team of Barbara Feldman and Nick Marmor. Thanks also to the stalwart support of the Dean’s Office: Peggy Cain, Dineen Doucette, Hélène Rieu-Isaacs, Lori Gans, Maria Iacobo, Makeela Searles, and Jessenia Villa.
Ultimately, none of this would have been possible without the committed leadership of John Ochsendorf, his inclusive approach and optimistic spirit, and the excellent ideas that he, Maria Yang, and the design faculty committee have put in front of us.
Above all, I want to thank our donor, Gerald Chan, for his bold and visionary philanthropy, for his intellectual generosity and engagement with the faculty and students, and for his foresight that design as an approach to solving problems is all too important to keep to ourselves and that it is part of our mission to complement MIT’s analytical strength and technical prowess with creativity and with human values.
Please join me in thanking our donor and all those who helped bring the Academy to life, and in extending our best wishes and support to John Ochsendorf and Maria Yang in their new roles.
Best,
Hashim