Keynote Speaker
Neil Gershenfeld
The Design of Design
The Design of Design
The (literal) mother of all design problems is the evolution of life. At its heart is an essential abstraction, the encoding of developmental programs in one of the oldest parts of the genome. Biological morphogenesis differs from engineering design in searching over codes that don't just describe a thing, they become the thing. I will discuss how a computation can communicate its own construction by aligning these representations, and explore the implications of anyone being able to make (almost) anything, anywhere.
Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. He's the founder of a global network of over two thousand fab labs in 125 countries, chairs the Fab Foundation, and leads the Fab Academy.
He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Designing Reality, Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS.