The class revolves around a single challenge: Design something that excites you, is designed to fit into and potentially improve people’s lives, and has real world measurable impact within the constraints of the term. Students gain hands-on experience in design processes while learning from research and industry about how to create and lead teams and organizations that support innovation. Last Fall, the Huffington Post dubbed it ‘Harvard’s real world obstacle course for practicing innovation‘. Come check it out.

First class: Tuesday, September 4th, 10am in Pierce Hall 301.

Experience Economies 6: Innovate or Die will include presentations by area artists Kelly Sherman and Catherine McMahon, New York City-based artist Mary Walling Blackburn, historian of science Jeremy Blatter, and a number of surprise guests.

UDPATE:  the event sold out in under one minute.  Please email experience.economies@gmail.com to get on the waitlist.  If you are interested in participating as event staff, please apply for a volunteer position!

Tickets are limited.  Each $10 ticket reserves one seat, which includes food and drink services throughout the course of the evening.

We are grateful for the support of our partners at the Berwick Research Institute,  Harvard i-lab, Continuum, Boston ArtScience Prize, and Industry Lab.

Click here to download our press release:  LAB_ExEc_pressrelease

One of Bostonʼs most agile and innovative cultural presenters, Experience Economies is a nomadic social event series where cultural producers are audiences to each other’s spectacles. Not a lecture and not a party, the events incorporate performance, presentation, discussion, scheming, drinks and food. Experience Economies welcomes experimentation, works-in-progress, audiences that want their spectacles to mess with them and presenters who need a space to make that mess.

Update: public event will take place on the evening of Saturday, February 18th.
Stay tuned for more details! If you would like to volunteer, sign up here.

What is Thrive?

Thrive is a one-day TEDx event presented by TEDxCambridge and hosted by The Laboratory at Harvard featuring short talks, performances, and demonstrations by some of the leading thinkers and doers in the Boston area. We will explore our brains and bodies, question the relationship between nature and nurture, and examine the different understandings of the good life as we ask: How can we live the longest and healthiest lives? When are we the most productive and creative? When do our minds, bodies and spirits flourish? How do we thrive?

What is TEDx?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created TEDx, a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

TEDxCambridge draws from the amazing wealth of innovation, passion and inspiration in Cambridge and the greater Boston area.

What will happen?
We will discuss media systems. Things like television, internet, magazines, blogs, etc. We will view them with several lens including consumption/production, parallel/serial, horizontal/vertical, local/global, centralized/distributed, community/personal. We will then discuss small actions and cover how any new or old computer can become a local information server, a shared public appliance. Using free software, we will go over several ways you can accomplish this. You can do some physical building of a structures to house your device and we can talk about local venues that might house your unit as well. From cafes, music venues, to occupy boston.

Where: Industry Lab coworking space. 288 Norfolk St, 4th Floor. Near Inman Sq, Cambrij.
When: 5 Wednesdays in November, 7-9pm. Nov 1,8,15,22,29

For more information click here

RSVP to dan:
broadcasterproject@plebiandesign.com

If you are interested but can’t make the time, you can still email and maybe some additional one-off sessions will be held at other times.

The xSpecies Adventure Club is a collaboration between Natalie Jeremijenko + Mihir Desai + is affiliated with the Environmental Health Clinic. The Boston field office of the EHC is operated by Artists in Context + is a platform for creatively engaging citizens in the critical environmental issues of our time. The Lab at Harvard is a new forum + platform for idea experimentation in the arts + sciences at Harvard.

Boston xSpecies Adventure Club Workshop: In the Water

The LAB @ Harvard 4 -5:30 p.m.

Join Natalie Jeremijenko and chef Mihir Desai for an adventurous workshop introducing several of the fascinating processes/techniques of molecular gastronomy, and how these allow us to explore the delicious complexity of natural and biological systems. Liquid nitrogen and safety glasses supplied. Included will be a bear hunt, for very small but most ferocious waterbears, and an introduction to the moods, characters and sometimes drunken behaviors of Daphnia, which reveal hazardous compounds in water from rivers, distribution systems and production drains—first defenders of human health.

Feel welcome to bring your own water sample to meet and greet your local waterbear, daphnia or other exotic aquatic neighbor.

RSVP to reserve your seats here:
cambridge workshop

**UPDATE** students can come for FREE!

And/or

Boston xSpecies Adventure Club

Dinner: Water as Food

The LAB @ Harvard 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.

The subsequent dinner will reveal its all in the water – water in production, transformation processes and the polymers, colloids, cellular biophysics and microclimates that drive our urban lives. These new food-based representations of water systems and water-complexes are incredibly tasty but also fruitful.  Explore the tart sweetness of yuzu, a japanese citrus for the frosty NorthEast, for instance, and its closed-system-no-watershed-degradation-intensive container growing. Trace water uptake through the organs of an animal, thru the terrestrial system and watch a human hatch as you munch on structural membranes that breath, contain water and deliver nutrients.  More than being simply what we eat, we are what we represent we are eating. And our capacity to improve our food systems critically rests on understanding their devilishly sumptuous details. Join the adventure.

Menu notes

centrifuged orchid root. lychee + macadamia gazpacho garnished with cocoa nibs + radish

ajwain + hickory flash-smoked salmon tartare, sous-vide 50c salmon + mushroom risotto

butter-poached kobe beef. veal tongue terrine. beet gel. bone marrow + bordelaise sauce

RSVP to reserve your seats here:
cambridge dinner

This year’s exhibition will highlight an original short film by South African artist William Kentridge developed for the 10th experimental exhibition at Le Laboratoire in a collaboration with Joseph Pellegrino University Professor Peter Galison, and various art and design projects by talented students from Harvard University and around the world!

Friday, September 23rd / 6-9 PM /// 52 Oxford St., Lower Level / Cambridge, MA  02138

The Lab @ Harvard kicks off its debut year as a curricular program of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with its annual Fall Exhibition of works-in-progress on September 23rd, 2011.  The Lab is an experiential education and exhibition program where Harvard students, in collaboration with students, artists, designers, and scientists from around the world, dream up projects with global social impact at frontiers of science.

Each year, The Lab exhibits the work of an internationally acclaimed artist or designer alongside early-stage work of students.  The program is catalyzed by a summer innovation workshop at our partner cultural center in Paris, Le Laboratoire, which brings Harvard students together with students from a network of similar artscience labs around the world (Dublin, Paris, Singapore, Dhahran, Oklahoma City, Boston, Minneapolis), and has led in recent years to the exhibition and development of innovations ranging from breathable foods to soccer balls that generate energy with a kick.

This year’s exhibition highlights the US premiere of an original film by South African artist William Kentridge, developed for The Refusal of Time exhibition at Le Laboratoire in Spring 2011 as part of a collaboration between Kentridge and Harvard Professor Peter Galison. The project explores changing notions of time—from absolutes to relativity and black holes– and will continue to develop leading up to the next documenta (13) in Kassel in 2012.   Student design projects exhibited this year all originated with the annual educational theme of The Future of Water, and range from fog-harvested water to plastic that dissolves into seeds.  Multiple Harvard student projects will be exhibited alongside selected projects from partner programs in Paris and Saudi Arabia.

Doors open to this year’s exhibition at 6PM, followed by a colloquium at 7PM entitled Learning with Kentridge – Thoughts on Experiential Education at Harvard. Speakers will include Peter Galison, Cherry Murray, and Susan Dackerman  with moderator David Edwards, Faculty Director of The Lab. The colloquium will be followed by the US premiere of the William Kentridge film The Refusal of Time, Prologue–Anti-Mercator and a reception and celebration starting at 8PM.

Light refreshments served.  Dress to impress.

Free and open to the public.

UPDATE:  Click here for the video from the 2011 Fall Exhibition!

Chinese artist and architect Ai Weiwei’s installation, Untitled (2011), memorializes the thousands of schoolchildren who died in the major earthquake in China’s Sichuan province in May 2008. A site-specific work of 5,335 identical school backpacks represents the exact number of children killed during the earthquake and in the subsequent collapses of poorly constructed school buildings. A related sound piece by the dissident artist, a voice recording reciting the names of the victims, titled Remembrance (2010), will play in the space. The counting of victims and collection of details about their deaths are the products of a “citizens’ investigation” conducted by Weiwei and his studio, leading to growing government censure, beatings, and the demolition of his studio in Shanghai.

In response to this project, metaLAB (at) Harvard (a new project hosted at the Berkman Center)  has created @aiww – One-to-Many with Ai Weiwei to engage visitors in the artist’s work and discuss his recent arrest.

Northwest Science Building, outside and B1 Level, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA Public hours: Monday–Friday, 7am–10pm, through May 17th.

Friday, April 29, 2011
7:30-9:30 pm
Big Ideas for Busy People
The Laboratory at Harvard, Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street

We are back by popular demand with Cambridge’s fast-paced answer to Ted Talks. Big Ideas for Busy People features 10 short, sharp talks by some of Cambridge’s finest – 5 minutes per talk, plus 5 minutes for questions – presenting a roller-coaster ride through some of the biggest, boldest ideas in science!

Alan Guth, One Universe or Many?
V F Weisskopf Professor and MacVicar Faculty Fellow; MIT Department of Physics
Sara Seager, Exoplanets and the Search for Habitable Worlds
Ellen Swallow Richards Professor; MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences
Jack Szostak, The Origin of Life
Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Colleen Cavanaugh, The Human Microbiome: We Are Not Alone
Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology, Harvard University
Dr. Donald Elliott Ingber, Human Organs-on-Chips: No More Animal Studies for Drug Development?
Director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University; Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology, Harvard Medical School & Vascular Biology Program, Children’s Hospital Boston; Professor of Bioengineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Robert Desimone, Shedding Light in the Brain
Director, McGovern Institute & Berkey Professor; MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research
Steven Pinker, A History of Violence
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology; Harvard College Professor, Associate of Mather House
Sanjoy Mahajan, Street-fighting Math and Science
Associate Director, MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory
Lisa Berkman, Health and Work: Work Redesign in a Time of Demographic Change
Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and of Epidemiology; Harvard School of Public Health
Amy Smith, How to Make a Million
Senior Lecturer; MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

A reception with all of the speakers will follow immediately after the last talk in the B-1 level of The Laboratory.
Cost: Free

If you can’t make it, you can watch a live webcast here!