MDE Fall 2024 Update

Presenting the MDE Trailer

MDE is actively producing various videos that communicate the program to prospective students, employers, and the broader public. We began with the MDE trailer (below) and would be thrilled for you to share this within your own networks. We hope this is a resource for you in explaining MDE, especially if you meet someone who would be a great fit for the program.

Alumni Engagement—Looking Back and Ahead

It was great to see so many of you at the alumni reunion in March 2024, and we’re still determining the cadence of such events. While engagement opportunities will continue throughout the coming academic year, large reunions won’t occur each and every year. Looking ahead to AY24-25, we’re excited to engage you in IDEP reviews, panels, resume/portfolio reviews, and events. Email announcements/polls will be released through the alumni mailing list.

Are you receiving program announcements via [email protected]?

I’m not! Please help me.

An MDE first! In addition to alumni panels and guest speakers, alumni delivered most of the instruction during the preterm workshop. Meet our alumni instructors and technical/desk-crit support from August 2024.

Studio Theme for 2024-2025

Many thanks for submitting theme recommendations this past spring. We considered input from alumni, faculty, and industry advisors, and are pleased to share that the studio theme is…

Water: Challenges to Ecology, Industry, and Culture

Water is foundational to natural, industrial, and social systems, spanning geographies, scales, and cultures in its significance. An essential building block of biological life, it is also indispensable to the technical processes underpinning modern civilization. Yet today, issues of water consumption, quality, scarcity, and legal rights are stressing our hydrologic systems as never before.

Drawing on the insights of subject matter experts and building on our own design research, the MDE studio will search for moments of systemic intervention and transformation to address some of these pressing issues.  From small-scale medical issues to large-scale political, legal, and economic challenges, we will visualize the challenges associated with water today and imagine and prototype interventions for a better and more sustainable tomorrow.

MDE is Growing—New Students, Faculty, and Modules

As mentioned, we have the largest-ever incoming cohort. Check out some of the student profiles. In line with scaling, we’ve also hired a number of new faculty. These faculty will support the expansion of studio to three sections and the introduction of a new Integrative Frameworks model.

While the entire cohort will be together for Frameworks I, the spring semester will split into modules, with students taking two of four modules. Those four modules will cover…

• Product Design
• Product Management
• Social Impact Design
• Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship

We’re thrilled to welcome the following people to the team.

Justin Cook—STU 1231 and 1232
Justin W. Cook is the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Complexity (CfC) at Rhode Island School of Design. The CfC is a cutting-edge platform for research, experimentation, and problem-solving that tackles multifaceted challenges defying reductionist approaches. Under Cook’s leadership, CfC engages in multiyear, multi-organization research projects on diverse topics ranging from nuclear disarmament to the opioid crisis. In addition to his academic roles, Cook is the founder of Integrated Design Cubed, LLC (IDCubed), a company addressing climate and housing crises through sustainable, modular mass timber buildings. He also leads Commonwealth Advanced Projects LLC, providing strategic design consulting to organizations such as Google, Fidelity Investments, Knight Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, IBM, and the UN. From 2008 to 2018, Cook was Senior Lead for Strategy at the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, where he focused on strategic design, urban systems, decarbonization, impact investing, and the future of education.

Monique Fuchs—STU 1232
Monique Fuchs is a strategy advisor, innovation leader, and executive coach helping organizations and leaders to design future opportunities, activate innovation, and put new ventures in motion. She is also Entrepreneur-in-Residence with DesignX/The Morningside Academy for Design at MIT, working with startup cohorts globally. Most recently, she explored as Supermind Architect at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT, designing parameters for innovative organizations in light of emerging technologies.Previously, Monique was the Associate Vice President, Innovation +Entrepreneurship at Wentworth Institute of Technology. She also co-designed Future ThinkTanks with local and global industry partners, governments, and communities for positive change in the built and human environments. She has coached hundreds of founders and senior executives for MIT, Harvard, and across industries and has worked in profit and non-profit sectors in the US and Europe.

Melanie Hoff—STU 1231
Melanie Hoff is an artist, organizer, technologist, and educator committed to cultivating spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to reveal how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. They teach about sex, technology, and social cybernetics Yale University, New York University, and have shown work at the New Museum, the Queens Museum, and elsewhere. Melanie has co-directed two art and technology organizations, School for Poetic Computation and Hex House.

Gina Lucarelli—PRO 7232
Gina Lucarelli built and stewards the world’s largest social innovation lab network on sustainable development through the United Nations Development Programmes Accelerator Labs, 91 social innovation labs embedded in the United Nations Development Programme. A systems thinker, designer, and fixer, she leads, learns from, and creates space for experiments that tackle complex development problems and the new categories and opportunities they create. She has focused her human rights and sustainable development work on Asia, Eastern Europe, and most recently Africa. She writes, talks about, and is always looking for ways to tap into collective intelligence, learn from grassroots knowledge, and drive continuous R&D to transform the systems that will determine whether future generations will be able to meet their development needs. Her speaking engagements include the School of International Futures, States of Change, Future of Good, Fwd50, MIT, Harvard Engineering and Design, Harvard Business School, and the Oxford University Rhodes Forum for Technology. Her work has been acknowledged in Apolitical’s Public Service Team of the Year in 2019, covered in the MIT Sloan Review (Summer 2020), analyzed as a Harvard Business School Case Study (Fall 2022), and depicted in For Tomorrow, an award winning documentary on grassroots innovation available on Amazon Prime (Release date September 16th, 2022).

Yuan Mu—STU 1231
Yuan Mu is a lead computational designer at Nike Innovation, where she specializes in designing wearable technology with a focus on advanced computational fabrication research. Yuan’s contribution has been recognized in several launched innovative products, including special items designed for the Paris Olympics. Before joining Nike, she gained valuable experience in architectural and 3D visualization offices in Los Angeles. Yuan holds a Master of Design Studies in Technology from Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Art History from the University of Arizona. In her spare time, she explores the intricacies of digital design and fabrication tools, continually expanding her skills and perspectives through various professional experiences.

Frank Nagle—PRO 7232
Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. He studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them. His research falls into the broader categories of the future of work, the economics of IT, and digital transformation and considers how technology is weakening firm boundaries. His work frequently explores the domains of crowdsourcing, free digital goods, cybersecurity, and generating strategic predictions from unstructured big data. His work utilizes large datasets derived from online social networks, open source software repositories, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage. Frank serves on the advisory board at Nexleaf Analytics and Alphamatician and advises other big data analytics startups. He currently advises the OECD Working Party on Innovation and Technology Policy and is on the European Commission/ Open Forum Europe Board of Experts for the Impact of Open Source on Technological Independence, Competitiveness, and Innovation in Europe. He has consulted for The World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, and various companies in the technology, defense, and energy sectors. He is currently a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Drake Pusey—PRO 7232
Drake Pusey specializes in building relationships based on empowerment, with almost 30 years of experience cross-pollinating ideas and practices from diverse industries. After working in app development, product management, and in brand, digital, and traditional marketing agencies, Drake founded Volition Project in 2014 to help brands empower their customers. As an Innovation Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (SEAS) and a mentor at the Harvard Innovation Labs, Drake helps student and alumni entrepreneurs turn inventions into products into businesses by understanding what their customers want to accomplish. He also serves as a Human Rights Commissioner in Arlington, in an effort to empower people in his community.

Swarna Kakodkar—PRO 7232
Swarna Kakodkar is a seasoned executive with over 15 years of experience leading teams to deliver innovative and impactful software products. She currently leads a product management team at Google, where her team builds customer interaction software that leverages machine learning to create innovative experiences for all Google customers. She previously led product and technical teams at Amazon Web Services. Prior to AWS, she held various roles at Facebook, where she oversaw the development of digital advertising products and global partnerships with some of Facebook’s largest customers.

Program and Student News

MDE students and alumni continue to impress us with their creativity, criticality, and creations. Here’s a peek at recent activities.

• Read the SEAS spotlight on Mimi Kigawa MDE ’23 and her startup, Zeph.
• Joachim Asare and fellow MDE students Hessan Sedaghat MDE ’25, Sangyu Xi MDE ’25 and Prachi Mehta MDE ’25 spent six months developing Enlight, a new browser extension to help the visually impaired. Full story. The project also took third place at the MIT Sloan Product Hackathon sponsored by Google.
• Read the Mittal Institute’s interview with Aman Kaleem MDE ’24 about the intersection of art and technology. In addition, Kaleem’s short film “Girls” featured at nineteen film festivals in 2023 and won at fifteen of the festivals.
  • “Girls” is a sci-fi film produced at MIT Media Lab, utilizing AI generative models within a gaming engine to create visually stunning, immersive landscapes, architecture, and characters. Set in the year 2050, it tells the story of two eight-year-old girls striving to maintain their friendship in a bleak future. Crafted entirely through synthetic means, the project pushes the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, showcasing the potential of generative algorithms in visual storytelling.
• Deepika Gopalakrishnan MDE ’24 took project testing to the next level with a zero-gravity flight.
• Alba, an MDE studio project by Binita Gupta MDE ’24, Deepika Gopalakrishnan MDE ’24, Priyanka Pillai MDE ’24, and Shravya Kanithi, won three awards in Spring 2024. Full story and awards.
• Binita Gupta MDE ’24 and Priyanka Pillai MDE ’24 were profiled in 2024 graduation features.
• UpStyle by Wenbo Zhang MDE ’24 and Yiqi Yan MDE ’24 won gold at the iF Design Awards.
• Vocadian, a health-tech startup by Yujie Wang MDE ’24, was named a runner-up at Future of Capitalism Competition in February 2024.
• Read the SEAS spotlight on Daniela Terán Endara MDE ’20 and using design to promote advocacy in Latin America.

Deepika in flight

Enlight Team members

Did we miss something?

Email us! Send an email to [email protected] if you have news for the MDE website or would like to see a specific topic addressed in our next newsletter. You can also submit news through the new alumni page.

Until Next time!

Info booth at the DRS conference

MDE Studio Exhibit, Spring 2024