MIT Design Lab

At MIT, the Design Lab exists within a context of broad-based technological innovation and builds upon the unique advantages offered by this setting. It pursues research, executes practical design and art projects, and engages in scholarship and criticism.

The Laboratory is organized as a collection of multidisciplinary research and project teams unconstrained by the traditional boundaries between the design, planning, and engineering professions and disciplines.

Generally, the Laboratory’s projects engage new technologies and their potential to enable fresh and highly effective solutions to problems of significant social, economic, and cultural importance. The Lab is particularly interested in the emerging possibilities afforded by: new information technologies; new material, fabrication, and construction technologies; new ways of providing functionality at micro and nano scales; new techniques for engineering biological materials and structures; and new planning and management strategies. We are concerned not only with the design of individual products, systems, buildings, and urban areas, but also with the roles these elements play in larger urban, regional, and global systems and their long-term sustainability.

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History of the MIT Design Lab

The MIT Design Lab was co-founded in 2006 by William J. Mitchell and Federico Casalegno, who served as associate director.

Between 2006 and 2010, the MIT Design Lab was a constellation of various MIT research groups. Through the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, created in 2004 with Bill, Dr. Casalegno has kept continued to engage in advanced design research and celebrate design within MIT.The Design Lab, previously part of SA+P, is today within CMS/W, SHASS. we aim to keep pushing forward with Bill’s ideas, embedding the “DNA” of his extraordinary vision into our work and building on those ideas to expand our unique approach to design into solving new problems and addressing new challenges.