I had built a lab that had to do with the human-computer interface. So, we did all these things that were considered crazy that time. … We were in the school of design, we had a certain license. License to be weird.

Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte, (born December 1, 1943, New York City, New York, U.S.), American architect and computer scientist who was the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and founded One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Negroponte gained fame with his book Being Digital (1995), which predicted a future in which digital technology becomes an intimate part of everyday life.

Negroponte launched the MIT Media Laboratory in 1985. The lab was founded in response to the growing role of computers in modern life and had a mandate to raise funds and find creative ways to develop new digital media technologies. Controversially, the lab grew out of MIT’s School of Architecture rather than out of its School of Electrical Engineering, which housed the computer science department. By 1987 the lab was engaged in developing technologies such as speech recognition, electronic music, holography, advanced television, electronic publishing, and computer games. The lab attracted such high-tech luminaries as computer scientist Alan Kay, cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence philosopher Marvin Minsky, and computer scientist and mathematician Seymour Papert to conduct its research. It adopted an unusual “demo or die” credo, demanding that students and faculty not simply publish their technical research but also demonstrate innovations to the lab’s corporate sponsors.

Further FunThinking

Nicholas Negroponte TED 2006 : One Laptop per Child