How MIT students are transforming the art of narrative

If storytelling was once confined to a single medium — a tale told, for instance, in the pages of a book — the past few decades have seen narratives spill into different platforms and media, spreading across everything from comic books to films to fan-created websites. Scholars such as Henry Jenkins called this “transmedia,” referring to the way a single fictional universe might expand into multiple formats in the digital age. Now, with the rise of virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), the transformative possibilities of these all-enveloping story worlds has only grown. 

The Transmedia Storytelling Initiative (TSI), a project led by Professor Caroline A. Jones, an art historian, critic, and curator in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture, is dedicated to providing a hub where MIT students and faculty can explore the technical, aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions posed by transmedia — particularly with the advent of immersive virtual environments. Now in its third year, with a generous grant from David and Nina Fialkow, the initiative has produced courses and workshops for students, and is now hosting its first-ever exhibition at MIT — with a related symposium — that explores the new opportunities presented by the media of the future. 

Telling new stories

From a rudimentary cell phone video to the most cutting-edge AR production, the exhibition, "Unbounded: Transmedia Storytelling @ MIT 2019-2021," features video loops documenting 3D and other projects, along with installations and immersive extended reality (XR) and projection works by over 40 MIT students. 

In the exhibition, which takes place in both the physical gallery and online, MIT students use film, VR and AR, interactive web experience, publications, and art installations to tell multidimensional stories. The use of multiple media forms, Jones says, allows students to tell parts of stories, or tell similar stories in different ways — creating different entrance points into the work. Conceived by students in a range of MIT departments — from architecture to comparative media studies to urban planning to computer science — the work explores everything from road-tripping across America to the claustrophobia of lockdown. 

In some pieces, students meditated on the nature of virtual existence and the ways in which we live and create alongside machines. Yaara Jacoby developed an eerie split-screen work depicting her “digital twin” in a small workspace during the pandemic lockdown. Vijay Gautham Rajkumar’s psychedelic abstract film, generated from AI-generated maps and scored to a melancholy jazz soundtrack, is projected from the gallery at night. Kwan “Queenie” Li created a VR installation and accompanying booklet about the connections between machine dreaming and the very human experience of insomnia. 

Li also worked with Megan Prakash, Wu Li, and Kii Kang to create an AR piece about the 2020 Occupy City Hall protests, as part of the Transmedia-sponsored course Virtuality and Presence taught by Cagri Zaman, director of the School of Architecture and Planning Virtual Experience Design Lab, and Professor D. Fox Harrell, director of the Center for Advanced Virtuality.  

For Li, the benefit of using augmented reality to portray something like the City Hall demonstrations is that it delivers the experience of civic protest into a viewer’s private space. “You can see, in your very familiar bedroom, protest signage that actual people hold in the streets, and this will also overcome a certain stasis of the archive,” she says. “How can we make an archive interactive? If we can make it more embodied, people can participate in it.”

Other works also used the possibilities of virtual production to illuminate social issues. Lauren Gideonse and Adriana Giorgis traveled together during the pandemic, producing a complex narrative about mapping, history, erasure, and what survives over time in the American landscape, while Melissa Teng and Lily Xie collaborated with community members in Boston’s Chinese-American community to make an interactive website that highlights the conversations that take place around the intimacy of the kitchen table. 

Creating virtual community

The Transmedia Storytelling Institute provided funding and support for students to develop their projects. Over the course of the summer, student grantees met with faculty and reviewers, who offered constructive criticism on their projects as they were developing. Through these workshops, students from different disciplines were encouraged to experiment in modes outside their normal comfort zones.

“I'd say, ‘You're making a comic book, which is great, but I'm going to challenge you to make a video on your process. And you've never done that, but I think it's a useful skill for you to stretch into,'” says Jones. Especially during the isolation of the pandemic, these regular sessions offered an important virtual community for transmedia production. The overarching goal of the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, Jones says, is to create a kind of vibrant ecosystem, a place where practitioners from many disciplines can collaborate and learn from one another. 

Inside the metaverse 

In addition to the exhibition, the symposium Boundary Conditions: Architecture, Simulation, Cinema explored the connections, past and present, between virtual production and architectural simulation. Since the beginning of cinematic history, the film medium has traded in facsimiles. While 19th century audiences were mesmerized by George Méliès’s fantastical short film “A Trip to the Moon,” contemporary viewers are similarly introduced to brand new forms of perception presented by metahumans, virtual reality, and deepfakes.

Bringing together filmmakers, scholars, scientists, and artists working in XR, the symposium investigated how these immersive story worlds blur the lines between documentary and fiction, the simulation and the real. In the panels, participants discussed how elements of narrative such as time, space, character — even the idea of “liveness” itself — might be radically redefined with emerging technologies. 

Hacking transmedia for the 21st century

Today, Jones believes, transmedia storytelling has transcended its original definition. Whereas before the idea of transmedia was predominately tied to commercial industries — Jenkins used the example of the “Matrix” franchise as an example of this form of storytelling — Jones believes that these narrative modes can be creatively reappropriated to probe today’s pressing questions. “We're now at a point where [transmedia] means that you take the existing software, the existing platforms, and the existing games and you hack them,” she says. 

As we delve further into the metaverse, the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative provides the crucial opportunity for MIT students, faculty, and researchers to think critically together about how and why we tell the stories we do. “For me, transmedia storytelling is an open question. It's a question about where is it going on, and how is the platform getting tweaked to tell a more authentic story?” Jones says. “The ‘trans’ for me is definitely a phrase that I want to mean ‘transformation.’”

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3 Questions: Tolga Durak on building a safety culture at MIT

Environment, Health, and Safety Managing Director Tolga Durak heads a team working to build a strong safety culture at the Institute and to implement systems that lead to successful lab and makerspace operations. EHS is also pursuing new opportunities in the areas of safe and sustainable labs and applied makerspace research. 

Durak holds a BS in mechanical engineering, a MS in industrial and systems engineering, and a PhD in building construction/environmental design and planning. He has over 20 years of experience in engineering and EHS in higher education, having served in such roles as authority having jurisdiction, responsible official, fire marshal, risk manager, radiation safety officer, laser safety officer, safety engineer, project manager, and emergency manager for government agencies, as well as universities with extensive health-care and research facilities.

Q: What “words of wisdom” regarding lab/shop health and safety would you like to share with the research community? 

A: EHS staff always strive to help maintain the safety and well-being of the MIT community. When it comes to lab/shop safety or any areas with hazards, first and foremost, we encourage wearing the appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) when handling potentially hazardous materials. While PPE needs depend on the hazards and the space, common PPE includes safety glasses, lab coats, gloves, clothes that cover your skin, and closed-toe shoes. Shorts and open-toe shoes have no place in the lab/shop setting when hazardous materials are stored or used. Accidents will and do happen. The severity of injuries due to accidental exposures can be minimized when researchers are wearing PPE. Remember, there is only one you!   

Overall, be aware of your surroundings, be knowledgeable about the hazards of the materials and equipment you are using, and be prepared for the unexpected. Ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that can happen during this experiment or procedure?” Prepare by doing a thorough risk assessment, ask others who may be knowledgeable for their ideas and help, and standardize procedures where possible. Be prepared to respond appropriately when an emergency arises. 

Safety in our classrooms, labs, and makerspaces is paramount and requires a collaborative effort. 

Q: What are the established programs within EHS that students and researchers should be aware of, and what opportunities and challenges do you face trying to advance a healthy safety culture at MIT? 

A: The EHS program staff in Biosafety, Industrial Hygiene, Environmental Management, Occupational and Construction Safety, and Radiation Protection are ready to assist with risk assessments, chemical safety, physical hazards, hazard-specific training, materials management, and hazardous waste disposal and reuse/recycling. Locally, each department, laboratory, and center has an EHS coordinator, as well as an assigned EHS team, to assist in the implementation of required EHS programs. Each lab/shop also has a designated EHS representative — someone who has local knowledge of your lab/shop and can help you with safety requirements specific to your work area.  

One of the biggest challenges we face is that due to the decentralized nature of the Institute, no one size fits all when it comes to implementing successful safety practices. We also view this as an opportunity to enhance our safety culture. A strong safety culture is reflected at MIT when all lab and makerspace members are willing to look out for each other, challenge the status quo when necessary, and do the right thing even when no one is looking. In labs/shops with a strong safety culture, faculty and researchers discuss safety topics at group meetings, group members remind each other to wear the appropriate PPE (lab coats, safety glasses, etc.), more experienced team members mentor the newcomers, and riskier operations are reviewed and assessed to make them as safe as possible.  

Q: Can you describe the new Safe and Sustainable Laboratories (S2L) efforts and the makerspace operational research programs envisioned for the future? 

A: The MIT EHS Office has a plan for renewing its dedication to sustainability and climate action. We are dedicated to doing our part to promote a research environment that assures the highest level of health and safety but also strives to reduce energy, water, and waste through educating and supporting faculty, students, and researchers. With the goal of integrating sustainability across the lab sector of campus and bridging that with the Institute’s climate action goals, EHS has partnered with the MIT Office of Sustainability, Department of Facilities, vice president for finance, and vice president for campus services and stewardship to relaunch the “green” labs sustainability efforts under a new Safe and Sustainable Labs program.

Part of that plan is to implement a Sustainable Labs Certification program. The process is designed to be as easy as possible for the lab groups. We are starting with simple actions like promoting the use of equipment timers in certain locations to conserve energy, fume hood/ventilation management, preventative maintenance for ultra-low-temperature freezers, increasing recycling, and helping labs update their central chemical inventory system, which can help forecast MIT’s potential waste streams. 

EHS has also partnered with Project Manus to build a test-bed lab to study potential health and environmental exposures present in makerspaces as a result of specialized equipment and processes with our new Applied Makerspace Research Initiative.  

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Climate modeling confirms historical records showing rise in hurricane activity

When forecasting how storms may change in the future, it helps to know something about their past. Judging from historical records dating back to the 1850s, hurricanes in the North Atlantic have become more frequent over the last 150 years.

However, scientists have questioned whether this upward trend is a reflection of reality, or simply an artifact of lopsided record-keeping. If 19th-century storm trackers had access to 21st-century technology, would they have recorded more storms? This inherent uncertainty has kept scientists from relying on storm records, and the patterns within them, for clues to how climate influences storms.

A new MIT study published today in Nature Communications has used climate modeling, rather than storm records, to reconstruct the history of hurricanes and tropical cyclones around the world. The study finds that North Atlantic hurricanes have indeed increased in frequency over the last 150 years, similar to what historical records have shown.

In particular, major hurricanes, and hurricanes in general, are more frequent today than in the past. And those that make landfall appear to have grown more powerful, carrying more destructive potential.

Curiously, while the North Atlantic has seen an overall increase in storm activity, the same trend was not observed in the rest of the world. The study found that the frequency of tropical cyclones globally has not changed significantly in the last 150 years.

“The evidence does point, as the original historical record did, to long-term increases in North Atlantic hurricane activity, but no significant changes in global hurricane activity,” says study author Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “It certainly will change the interpretation of climate’s effects on hurricanes — that it’s really the regionality of the climate, and that something happened to the North Atlantic that’s different from the rest of the globe. It may have been caused by global warming, which is not necessarily globally uniform.”

Chance encounters

The most comprehensive record of tropical cyclones is compiled in a database known as the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). This historical record includes modern measurements from satellites and aircraft that date back to the 1940s. The database’s older records are based on reports from ships and islands that happened to be in a storm’s path. These earlier records date back to 1851, and overall the database shows an increase in North Atlantic storm activity over the last 150 years.

“Nobody disagrees that that’s what the historical record shows,” Emanuel says. “On the other hand, most sensible people don’t really trust the historical record that far back in time.”

Recently, scientists have used a statistical approach to identify storms that the historical record may have missed. To do so, they consulted all the digitally reconstructed shipping routes in the Atlantic over the last 150 years and mapped these routes over modern-day hurricane tracks. They then estimated the chance that a ship would encounter or entirely miss a hurricane’s presence. This analysis found a significant number of early storms were likely missed in the historical record. Accounting for these missed storms, they concluded that there was a chance that storm activity had not changed over the last 150 years.

But Emanuel points out that hurricane paths in the 19th century may have looked different from today’s tracks. What’s more, the scientists may have missed key shipping routes in their analysis, as older routes have not yet been digitized.

“All we know is, if there had been a change (in storm activity), it would not have been detectable, using digitized ship records,” Emanuel says “So I thought, there’s an opportunity to do better, by not using historical data at all.”

Seeding storms

Instead, he estimated past hurricane activity using dynamical downscaling — a technique that his group developed and has applied over the last 15 years to study climate’s effect on hurricanes. The technique starts with a coarse global climate simulation and embeds within this model a finer-resolution model that simulates features as small as hurricanes. The combined models are then fed with real-world measurements of atmospheric and ocean conditions. Emanuel then scatters the realistic simulation with hurricane “seeds” and runs the simulation forward in time to see which seeds bloom into full-blown storms.

For the new study, Emanuel embedded a hurricane model into a climate “reanalysis” — a type of climate model that combines observations from the past with climate simulations to generate accurate reconstructions of past weather patterns and climate conditions. He used a particular subset of climate reanalyses that only accounts for observations collected from the surface — for instance from ships, which have recorded weather conditions and sea surface temperatures consistently since the 1850s, as opposed to from satellites, which only began systematic monitoring in the 1970s.

“We chose to use this approach to avoid any artificial trends brought about by the introduction of progressively different observations,” Emanuel explains.

He ran an embedded hurricane model on three different climate reanalyses, simulating tropical cyclones around the world over the past 150 years. Across all three models, he observed “unequivocal increases” in North Atlantic hurricane activity.

“There’s been this quite large increase in activity in the Atlantic since the mid-19th century, which I didn’t expect to see,” Emanuel says.

Within this overall rise in storm activity, he also observed a “hurricane drought” — a period during the 1970s and 80s when the number of yearly hurricanes momentarily dropped. This pause in storm activity can also be seen in historical records, and Emanuel’s group proposes a cause: sulfate aerosols, which were byproducts of fossil fuel combustion, likely set off a cascade of climate effects that cooled the North Atlantic and temporarily suppressed hurricane formation.

“The general trend over the last 150 years was increasing storm activity, interrupted by this hurricane drought,” Emanuel notes. “And at this point, we’re more confident of why there was a hurricane drought than why there is an ongoing, long-term increase in activity that began in the 19th century. That is still a mystery, and it bears on the question of how global warming might affect future Atlantic hurricanes.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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Silicon Valley beckoned, but he went home to Delaware

During his first year at MIT, Max Williamson felt lost and unsure of his long-term goals. By spring, he faced what felt like a career-altering decision: pursue a coveted summer computer science research position at MIT or return home to Delaware and intern for his senator.

His friends thought he was crazy to pursue public service over a high-paying career in Silicon Valley. However, after working hands-on with local communities in Delaware while also learning the tangible, human impact of policymaking, Williamson knew he made the right choice.

The technical side of policy

Now a senior majoring in computer science and electrical engineering with a minor in public policy, Williamson sees his technical background and coding skills as important assets in the policy arena. They have equipped him with the tools to tackle big, structural problems with an engineering mindset, and have allowed him to make contributions in a variety of policy areas.

During his summer internship in Senator Chris Coons’ Delaware office, Williamson supported the constituent advocacy team, helping people with everything from filing taxes to avoiding eviction. He was exposed to a wide range of public policy issues in the process, but was particularly struck by a lack of access to computer science education in his hometown.

Recognizing how lucky he had been to receive exposure to computer science through his charter school in Delaware, Williamson wanted to support other students in his home state. Through the PKG Center at MIT, he worked with community centers in the state to start a program dubbed CoDE, teaching young people the fundamentals of computer science. Williamson has also taught computer science in Italy as a part of MIT’s Global Teaching Labs program, instructing students on the basics of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Williamson also used his computer science background when he found himself at the forefront of his county government’s Covid-19 response efforts. He worked as a special projects manager for New Castle County, tasked with overseeing around $8 million in federal and charitable funds, which culminated in the launch of a Covid-19 testing and genomics lab at Delaware State University. His role was to facilitate communication between key players in the operation, such as consultants, lawyers, contractors, and county and university staff. Although he was initially unfamiliar with specific medical science policies and regulations, Williamson’s problem-solving skills helped him to engage with experts, digest a large amount of information, and learn what he needed to know. Over the next several months, he and the team scaled the lab to process thousands of tests each day, which allowed the university to host all of its students for in-person learning last spring.

Williamson has also been involved in electoral politics. After working as a fellow with Massachusetts for Biden in the winter of 2020, Williamson founded MIT for Biden, which mobilized students to vote for his hometown hero. Later, he took the fall semester off from MIT to serve as the data director for Senator Coons’ reelection campaign.

However, while he enjoyed working in politics and on domestic policy issues, Williamson has recently been drawn to tackle problems on a more global scale.

A global focus

Williamson moved to Washington last summer to work for Coons again, this time as a foreign policy legislative fellow. Soon he found himself drafting letters to cabinet officials, holding meetings with nongovernmental organizations, and preparing Coons for meetings with ambassadors and foreign ministers. He believes his exposure to local social policy problems has helped prepare him to address global development issues. Ultimately, he wants to focus on foreign assistance policy that seeks to remove barriers to people’s fundamental needs, such as access to health care and education.

Williamson has also worked to facilitate conversations and find common ground with his peers at MIT. He is currently the director of outreach for Civic Synergy, an organization that seeks to bring students across political divides together to have meaningful conversations about current political issues. “If I can get students from different ideological camps to come together and learn to hold substantive conversations about the thorny issues my generation faces, then that’s a win for me,” he says.

Williamson sees Civic Synergy as an opportunity to get students interested in public service. He wants to reinforce the connection between STEM-based careers and social impact, showing students in engineering and other STEM-based fields how they can impact social change and policy, even if they don’t realize it. “As engineers, we can and should make meaningful, positive differences in public policy,” he says.

In April 2021, Williamson was named a Truman Scholar, which funds graduate study for students pursuing leadership careers in public service. He hopes to use the scholarship to pursue either law school or a master’s degree in public policy. On either path, he hopes to gain a more thorough academic understanding of the policymaking process before working in government again. In the future, he hopes to use his unique combination of skills and experiences to inform U.S. foreign assistance and national security policy.

Given the opportunities Williamson has been granted by MIT, he now feels a responsibility and a desire to pursue a career in public service. “I have had opportunities that very few people get to have, and I hope to use them to serve others,” he says.

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Scientists and musicians tackle climate change together

Audiences may travel long distances to see their favorite musical acts in concert or to attend large music festivals, which can add to their personal carbon footprint of emissions that are steadily warming the planet. But these same audiences, and the performers they follow, are often quite aware of the dangers of climate change and eager to contribute to ways of curbing those emissions.

How should the industry reconcile these two perspectives, and how should it harness the enormous influence that musicians have on their fans to help promote action on climate change?

That was the focus of a wide-ranging discussion on Monday hosted by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, titled “Artists and scientists together on climate solutions.” The event, which was held live at the Media Lab’s Bartos Theater and streamed online, featured John Fernandez, director of ESI; Dava Newman, director of the Media Lab; Tony McGuinness, a musician with the group Above and Beyond; and Anna Johnson, the sustainability and environment officer at Involved Group, an organization dedicated to embedding sustainability in business operations in the arts and culture fields.

Fernandez pointed out in opening the discussion that when it comes to influencing people’s attitudes and behavior, changes tend to come about not just through information from a particular field, but rather from a whole culture. “We started thinking about how we might work with artists, how to have scientists and engineers, inventors, and designers working with artists on the challenges that we really need to face,” he said.

Dealing with the climate change issue, he said, “is not about 2050 or 2100. This is about 2030. This is about this decade. This is about the next two or three years, really shifting that curve” to lowering the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It's not going to be done just with science and engineering,” he added. “It's got to be done with artists and business and everyone else. It's not only ‘all of the above’ solutions, it's ‘all of the above’ people, coming together to solve this problem.”

Newman, who is also a professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has served as a NASA deputy administrator, said that while scientists and engineers can produce vast amounts of useful data that clearly demonstrate the dramatic changes the Earth’s climate is undergoing, communicating that information effectively is often a challenge for these specialists. “That data is just the data, but that doesn't change the hearts and minds,” she said.

“As scientists, having the data from our satellites, looking down, but also flying airplanes into the atmosphere, … we have the sensors, and then what can we do with it all? … How do we change human behavior? That's the part I don't know how to do,” Newman said. “I can have the technology, I can get precision measurements, I can study it, but really at the end of the day, we have to change human behavior, and that is so hard.”

And that’s where the world of art and music can play a part, she said. “The best way that I know how to do it is with artistic experiences. You can have one moving experience and when you wake up tomorrow, maybe you're going to do something a little different.” To help generate the compassion and empathy needed to affect behavior positively, she said, “that’s where we turn to the storytellers. We turn to the visionaries.”

McGuinness, whose electronic music trio has performed for millions of people around the world, said that his own awareness of the urgency of the climate issue came from his passion for scuba diving, and the dramatic changes he has seen over the last two decades. In diving at a coral reef off Palau in the South Pacific, he returned to what had been a lush, brightly colored ecosystem, and found that “immediately when you put your face under the water, you're looking at the surface of the moon. It was a horrible shock to see this.”

After this and other similar diving experiences, he said, “I just came away shocked and stunned,” and realizing the kinds of underwater experiences he had enjoyed would no longer exist for his children. After reading more on the subject of global warming,  “that really sort of tipped me over the edge. And I was like, this is probably the most important thing for living beings now. And that's sort of where I've remained ever since.”

While his group Above and Beyond has performed one song specifically related to global warming, he doesn’t expect that to be the most impactful way of using their influence. Rather, they’re trying to lead by example, he said, by paying more attention to everything from the supply chains of the merchandise sold at concerts to the emissions generated by travel to the concerts. They’re also being selective about concert venues and making an effort to find performance spaces that are making a significant effort to curb their emissions.

“If people start voting with their wallets,” McGuinness said, “and there are companies that are doing better than others and are doing the right thing, maybe it’ll catch on. I guess that’s what we can hope for.”

Understanding these kinds of issues, involving supply chains, transportation, and facilities associated within the music industry, has been the focus of much of Johnson’s work, through the organization Involved Group, which has entered into a collaboration with MIT through the Environmental Solutions Initiative. “It's these kinds of novel partnerships that have so much potential to catalyze the change that we need to see at an incredible pace,” she said. Already, her group has worked with MIT on mapping out where emissions occur throughout the various aspects of the music industry.

At a recent music festival in London, she said, the group interviewed hundreds of participants, including audience members, band members, and the crew. “We explored people's level of awareness of the issues around climate change and environmental degradation,” she said. “And what was really interesting was that there was clearly a lot of awareness of the issue across those different stakeholders, and what felt like a real, genuine level of concern and also of motivation, to want to deepen their understanding of what their contribution on a personal level really meant.”

Working together across the boundaries of different disciplines and areas of expertise could be crucial to winning the battle against global warming, Newman said. “That’s usually how breakthroughs work,” she said. “If we’re really looking to have impact, it’s going to be from teams of people who are trained across the disciplines.” She pointed out that 90 percent of MIT students are also musicians: “It does go together!” she said. “I think going forward, we have to create new academia, new opportunities that are truly multidisciplinary.”

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3 Questions: Can we fix our flawed software?

Sometimes, software is just like us. It can be bloated, slow, and messy. Humans might see a doctor if these symptoms persist (maybe not for messiness), but rarely do we push a flawed software program to go see its developer time and time again. 

The answer to why our software is flawed is ensnared in a web of reliance on flashy hardware, limits of a “code-and-fix" approach, and inadequate design. MIT Professor Daniel Jackson, who is the associate director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), looked at the existing limitations to create a new framework to improve how our programs function. His theory of software design takes a human-centered approach that views an app as a collection of interacting concepts. “The Essence of Software,” Jackson’s new book, draws on his many years of software research, including designing Alloy, an open source language and analyzer for software modeling.

Q: Bugs. Security flaws. Design flaws. Has software always been bad?  

A: Software is actually better than it ever was. It’s just that the power and functionality of software has grown so rapidly that we haven’t always been able to keep up. And there are some software products (Apple Keynote, for example) that are close to perfect — easy to use, flexible, with almost no bugs. My book offers an approach that will empower everyone to make software that good.

Q: In your new book, "The Essence of Software," you introduce a theory of software design that demonstrates how a software system "can be viewed as a collection of interacting concepts." How does this overturn conventional wisdom?

A: First, conventional wisdom sees user experience primarily in the user interface — its layout, colors, labels, etc. Concept design goes deeper, to address the fundamental mechanisms that the programmer builds and the user experiences.

Second, most apps have large areas of overlapping functionality, but existing approaches don’t recognize that, and developers build the same pieces of functionality again and again as if they were new, without taking advantage of the fact they’ve been built many times before. Just think about how many social media apps have implemented up-voting or comments or favorites, for example. Concepts let you identify these reuse opportunities and take advantage of accumulated design wisdom.

Q: The year 2021 was one of the worst years for data breaches. Boeing 787s have to be rebooted every 51 minutes to prevent "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios." Can your approach help with these kinds of security and safety issues? 

A: A high proportion of security and safety issues come from a lack of clarity in the design. Concepts can help with that. More directly, concepts can ensure that users actually understand the effects of their actions, and we know that many disasters happen because users do the wrong thing. In the area of security, getting the user to do the wrong thing (such as granting access to someone who shouldn’t have access) is usually the easiest path to taking control of a system. So, if you can design an app to make it harder for users to do things they’ll regret, you can mitigate this problem.

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MIT ID cards go digital

MIT community members have a new and easier way to navigate campus life at the Institute: the MIT Mobile ID, a digital version of the MIT ID card for iOS and Android devices. Developed prior to the pandemic and released by Information Systems and Technology (IS&T), the MIT Mobile ID can be used just like a physical ID. A simple wave of your device — an iPhone, Apple Watch, or Android phone — near a reader is all it takes to open a door or pay for a coffee. 

“The Mobile ID has made my life so convenient on campus overall this semester,” says Danielle Allison, a junior in mechanical engineering. “I can scan into buildings using my watch when my hands are full, and I have easy access to my TechCash and Pharos balances with a single tap.”

In fact, if you routinely walk around with your phone in your hand (or an Apple Watch on your wrist) the MIT Mobile ID will take on the same functionality that your physical MIT ID card does on campus, making it quicker and easier to do routine things such as accessing buildings and parking facilities, paying for food and beverages, and releasing Pharos print jobs. Moreover, if you keep your MIT Mobile ID in your Apple Wallet, you will also be able to view your TechCash and dining dollar balances. 

"Throughout the pandemic, our community has been absolutely incredible as they have embraced a variety of new protocols that have helped to ensure the health and safety of the MIT campus,” says Mark V. Silis, vice president for information systems and technology. “The MIT Mobile ID was developed in an accelerated effort as part of the MIT Atlas program's continuing commitment to transforming the campus experience for our faculty, students, and staff."

Rapid adoption

After an invitation-only initial pilot phase, the MIT Mobile ID was announced to members of the undergraduate Class of 2025 during Orientation kickoff on Aug. 29. Adoption was swift, with about half of first-year students enabling their digital ID on day one. 

As initial transaction data showed the Mobile ID was being used successfully across campus, IS&T proceeded with the full community rollout in mid-September. Since then, adoption and use has been strong. Currently, more than 14,000 community members have enabled their digital IDs. In October, Mobile IDs were used for almost 50,000 transactions (other than building access), more than doubling use in September.

Pre-Covid planning

In conjunction with the Department of Facilities, IS&T began planning for a digital version of the MIT ID back in September 2018. Before digital IDs could be offered to community members, a number of systems and devices would require upgrades or replacements.

Specifically, thousands of access card readers across campus would have to be upgraded. A new application to replace legacy physical access control software that Institute “gatekeepers” have used for decades to grant individuals access to specific spaces would need to be developed. Finally, engineers would have to design, test, and deploy the Mobile ID across a variety of devices. 

Card reader replacement began in late 2019 and the rollout of the MIT Mobile ID was initially targeted for community-wide release in 2020. Work was proceeding as planned when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Responding to pandemic challenges and opportunities

To safeguard the health and well-being of the community during the pandemic, MIT established requirements for those who access campus, including regular Covid testing and health attestations. With entry to Institute buildings restricted to those satisfying these requirements, ID cards quickly became vital to mitigating the effect of Covid and making life on campus as safe and seamless as possible.

However, this posed a new challenge, as MIT’s comprehensive measures to manage spread of the virus required issuing physical IDs to many additional people, including all vendors, contractors, and suppliers who supported campus operations. As campus began to reopen and with a commitment to the 2021-22 academic year being fully in-person, a more efficient and practical alternative to printing and managing so many plastic ID cards was needed. A digital ID could speed the onboarding process for new community members, allow for quicker and easier contactless interactions, and enable faster entry to campus spaces, since many people often have their phones in hand.

An additional challenge was determining how to deploy a digital ID across a variety of devices. Fortunately, there was a clear and convenient solution: the MIT Atlas mobile app. The Atlas app has become an essential tool for MIT community members during the pandemic, allowing them to keep up with health screening requirements to access Institute buildings and spaces, declare travel plans, upload vaccination information, and invite visitors to campus. As such, it was a natural platform for deploying the MIT Mobile ID.

A team effort

While the pandemic increased the urgency and scope of the digital ID project (for example, card readers would have to be added to many more building entrances), modernization planning and work done prior to Covid meant that IS&T and its partners didn’t have to start from scratch. As a result, much was completed in the 18 months from the pandemic outbreak to the start of the current school year.

“Teams from the Department of Facilities and IS&T did an incredible job upgrading more than 4,700 card readers, as well as hundreds of access control panels and intrusion alarm systems, at more than 120 buildings across campus,” says Marco Gomes, IS&T’s senior director of infrastructure operations. 

Additionally, Gomes noted, team members completed this work while also performing various other critical activities in support of MIT’s safe return to operations. Thanks to those efforts, campus access is now fully integrated with the Covid Pass system, with the MIT Mobile ID playing a central role. 

Future enhancements

While the MIT Mobile ID already offers many useful features, in the coming months IS&T and its partners across the Institute will continue to enhance and improve its functionality, including enabling the Mobile ID to be used as a T pass once the MBTA has enabled digital credentials.

In the meantime, MIT community members and affiliates should be sure to keep their physical ID cards, especially for the purposes of identification as well as for riding on the MBTA system. As cards may get lost or damaged, IS&T has made it easier for people to get a new or replacement card using the new self-service card-printing kiosk in the entryway of E17 at 40 Ames Street.

“We envision that the MIT Mobile ID will become an integral part of our campus fabric and help support our community in their efforts to keep us healthy and safe during these challenging times,” says Silis.

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