Draft:MIT Morningside Academy for Design

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) is an interdisciplinary hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MAD was established thanks to a $100 million gift from the Morningside Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. Its creation was announced in March 2022. MAD is currently housed in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

MAD's purpose is to grow the footprint of design education at MIT through courses, awareness, and access; enhance the profile of design excellence, across campus and around the world; and improve the world through MIT designs and designers. It is an institutional home to other MIT entities promoting design through entrepreneurship and making such as MITdesignX, The Deep and Metropolis makerspaces, and MIT D-Lab since July 1, 2024.

MAD's leadership includes its Founding Director John Ochsendorf, and Associate Director Maria Yang.

History

In September 2020, Deans Hashim Sarkis (School of Architecture and Planning) and Anantha Chandrakasan (School of Engineering), invited Professors John Ochsendorf and Maria Yang to assemble a committee of design-focused faculty and staff from across all five MIT schools and the Schwarzman College of Computing to envision ways to "more fully offer design leadership in service to MIT and the world."

The committee's recommendations led to the creation of MIT MAD, which was announced in March 2022, and publicly launched at the MIT Museum on October 18, 2022, through the event "The Power of Design".

Activities

MAD overseas a variety of design activities available to MIT undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and the general public.

Design Fellowship

MAD created an endowed Design Fellowship which funds approximately 10 continuing MIT graduate students each year. The 2022 Design Fellows were the inaugural cohort, which included projects demonstrating the use of design for impact such as a deployable water desalination system, community portable kitchens increasing food security, garment customization, or the improvement of prosthetic care.

Subsequent cohorts included projects related to coastal resilience adaptation, designing sensory data interfaces to help patients and doctors, or optimizing 3D-printable structures with exceptional properties, disaster resilience, or soft robots.

Candidates may come from any MIT School, lab, department..., and are selected based on a written application and a faculty nomination.

DesignPlus First-Year Learning Community

Incoming undergraduate MIT students can choose to join a First-Year Learning Community. DesignPlus is one of four Learning Communities available at MIT. It allows approximately 50 students to explore different facets of design and work on hands-on projects in small groups, while building community and receiving guidance from design-focused advisors.

Design Research

MAD administers the "Designing for Sustainability" program, a joint research program co-created in 2022 by the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) from Potsdam, Germany, and MIT. Funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, its drives joint scientific design research in multidisciplinary teams with Principal Investigators from both Institutes.

Funded projects span sustainability, health, urban studies, computing, and other fields addressing critical challenges expressed in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Entrepreneurship

MAD is home to MITdesignX, a design-specific academic program dedicated to design innovation and entrepreneurship, which is also part of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. In addition to courses, MITdesignX runs a venture accelerator and seven international programs allowing multidisciplinary teams to develop their innovations and launch ventures.

Making

MIT has a long history of fostering maker culture. William Barton Rogers, who founded MIT in 1861 and became its President in 1862, included MIT's current motto "mens et manus," translating from the Latin to "mind and hand," in the Institute's official seal more than 150 years ago. Today, MIT offers more than 130,000 square feet of makerspaces across campus, and encourages all incoming students to attend first-time maker trainings.

MAD operates makerspaces promoting hands-on experimentation and innovation: The Deep, Metropolis, and the N52 Fabrication Shop.

Events and Public Programming

MAD regularly organizes design-related public programming and invites MIT-wide applications to encourage collaboration around design events across the Institute.

Leadership

MAD's Executive Team

• John Ochsendorf, Class of 1942 Professor; Professor of Architecture; Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; MacVicar Faculty Fellow; Founding Director of MAD.
• Maria Yang, Gail E. Kendall (1978) Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Associate Dean of Engineering; Faculty Academic Director of MIT D-Lab; Associate Director of MAD.
• Marion Cunningham, Associate Director of Administration.
• Svafa Grönfeldt, Professor of Practice; Faculty Director of MITdesignX.
• Kim Vandiver, Dean for Undergraduate Research of Mechanical Engineering; Director of Project Manus; Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Ocean Engineering.
• Skylar Tibbits, Associate Professor of Architecture; Co-Director of the Self-Assembly Lab; Assistant Director for Education at MAD.

MAD's Faculty Advisory Council

• Sarah Brown, Set Designer and Associate Professor in Music and Theater Arts.
• Catherine D'Ignazio, Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
• Canan Dağdeviren, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.
• J. Yolande Daniels, Associate Professor, Director, Architecture and Urbanism.
• Anette "Peko" Hosoi, Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Associate Dean of Engineering.
• David McGee, Associate Professor.
• Stefanie Mueller, TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Scott Stern, David Sarnoff Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
• Amos Winter, Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Met Warehouse

The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (Met Warehouse) on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is currently being converted into a modern hub for interdisciplinary design research and education. It will be a new home for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, uniting many elements of the school in a single place; and a home for the MIT Morningside Academy for Design.

Design at MIT

Design is a process and mode of inquiry that underpins research and pedagogy across the Institute. In 1865, MIT established the very first program of architecture in the United States, paving the way for major milestones such as the creation in 1968 of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), with György Kepes as the director, followed by the MIT Media Lab, organized in 1985 by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner, the former MIT President and Science Advisor to President John F. Kennedy.

Major innovations impacting design practice and education today were the result of MIT research. These include contributions to color motion picture processes (Technicolor, whose name was inspired by MIT, where inventors Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock received their undergraduate degrees in 1904 and were later instructors); the development of the first digital computer capable of operating in real-time; 3D-printing, (such as the powder bed process employing standard and custom inkjet print heads developed by Emanuel Sachs); major breakthroughs in the development of computer graphics (for example, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad); strobe flash photography developed by Doc Edgerton, etc.

In addition to the Design Minor / Major offered through the Department of Architecture, MIT counts hundreds of courses that include a design component within a wide array of disciplines and departments, contributing to New England's thriving design education scene, alongside design schools such as the Harvard GSD, RISD, the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston Architectural College, and others.