In his first column for US wired, in 1993, Nicholas Negroponte refused to be distracted by HDTV -- predicting instead the ways a digital revolution would alter how we consume content. Now, in a historic return to the magazine, he explains why MIT's Media Lab is so vital.

The digital world creates convergence, overlap and blur in previously separate, distinct and crisply defined areas. Simple definitions, such as being inside or outside something, being part of or not part of something else, being for or against just about anything... all of these are suddenly subject to reinterpretation.

Today, "either/or" is "both/and" in so many different ways. All things digital commingle where and when they never have before.

Examples: work and home, reader and author, education and entertainment, container and content.

The medium is not the message. The message is the message and can be rendered in many ways. For example, books are not about paper, but about narrative, created with the basic DNA of digital life, binary digits. Since 1948 we have called them bits (most people think the word is much older).

Whatever the post-digital world may be, we know it is a fuzzy world, with blurred definitions and overlapping disciplines. As recently as ten years ago, academic and research aspirations included being interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, words usually used to describe the avant-garde of higher education. Today, by contrast, the very idea of disciplines is coming apart, in favour of a less compartmentalised and a more imaginative and more creative world. Said differently, perspective is more valuable than IQ.

Salon des Refusés

The idea to build the Media Lab first came up in the autumn of 1979. It was generally considered a fool's errand. Nevertheless, the process of doing it, of pulling together the constituent parts, was frictionless. MIT had no schools or departments that laid claim to education, journalism, graphics, film, animation or human-computer interface design. So putting them all under one roof was easy.

But why bother?

The answer is simple and was simple, even all those years back. "Computers are not about computing, but everyday life." This 32-year-old statement is, hands down, my most widely quoted.

By extension and less quoted then and now, new ideas in computer science would come from the applications, not from basic science.

New ideas would emerge from creative uses and users, from a heterogeneous collection of edgy, unorthodox people. In the case of the Media Lab, those people came from various parts of MIT, from architecture to physics, from music to maths. In some cases those same faculties were no longer welcome in their home departments. In that sense, the founding faculty was a veritable Salon des Refusés. Misfits.

In October 1985, we moved into a brand new building, specially designed by IM Pei. At the opening ceremonies, Steve Jobs was our keynote speaker and Martha Stewart was our caterer. Michael Crichton spoke at the event as well. Did we know where we were going? No. But we knew it would be orthogonal to the mainstream, contrarian and follow an "omelette theory of life".

What I mean by that is: the pre-digital world was like a fried egg, with that very crisp line between yellow and white. But in a future era of bits, as I said before and believed then, these bits would commingle and create a very porous world. Life would become an omelette, instead of a fried egg. Over the next 27 years life did just that.

Solutions without problems

Over the course of that period a new economic model for funding research evolved around shared intellectual property. Simply stated, companies were members of a club versus sponsors of "directed research". Members had privileges; all members had the same ones. From the lab's point of view, adding members had a low incremental cost and faculty worked on projects of their choosing. The reason this worked was sheer numbers. The lab was filled with solutions without knowing the problems. Seriously.

We were not solving problems, but inventing solutions and developing technology, in many cases for its own sake. Like a gold mine, companies just had to find it.

Cyberneticist Warren McCulloch characterised the difference between a dog and a human. When pointing, he said, the dog looks at the tip of your finger and the human looks in the direction in which you are pointing. Media Lab projects pointed. Quod erat demonstrandum. Said differently: the best vision is peripheral vision.

Some sponsors made millions by looking in that direction. Others did not. The same project that was viewed with delight by one company might be viewed as boring to another. But what all companies saw was a passion, in faculty and students, living proof that love is a better master than duty.

Two giants influenced the Media Lab: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. Minsky cofounded the field of artificial intelligence and Papert laid the foundation for learning in the digital age in his book, Mindstorms. Together they brought not only deep thinking but the idea of thinking about thinking itself.

Both men believe that computer programming is a way for children to learn about thinking and that the iterative process of debugging (a computer program) is the closest approximation a child will get to understand and see his or her own learning. This view of education, so-called constructionism, lived in the lab from the earliest days. Call it learning by doing. However, this simple idea all but fell off the table over the past quarter century of educational technology, while people and companies made more and more applications to be "consumed" by children and teachers alike.

Today, programmes such as Khan Academy, Coursera and MIT's own edX are, in my opinion, blindly focused on teaching, not learning.

Course correction is needed. Pun intended.

Innovation versus invention The Media Lab is about ideas, about inventions, about breakthroughs in science. These should not be confused with entrepreneurship or innovation, two equally important but different elements of a vibrant society and strong economy. Not all ideas make startups and almost all startups make small ideas. While the current trend in academia, especially in business schools, is to be entrepreneurial, it can lead to small thinking -- and usually does.

When I think of the Media Lab, what it has done and what it should do in the future, I remind myself that normal market forces are important, but not enough. Some things will not happen in an economy driven only by markets. And that is the main reason you need a Media Lab. If industry can do what we are doing, we should not be doing it.

Nicholas Negroponte is the chairman emeritus of MIT's Media Lab. He was the first investor in Wired magazine in 1992, after founder Louis Rossetto pitched him at TED. A $75,000 investment for ten percent of the magazine led to a regular back-page column.

This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK