By David Rowan
Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT’s Media Lab –-
Joi Ito, 46-year-old director of MIT's Media Lab since last September, has just selected the faculty's newest outpost: the troubled streets of downtown Detroit. "I was in a rough neighbourhood there yesterday, where there are miles and miles of bombed out buildings, and it just blows your mind to see a bunch of kids building urban farms," he says back in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They have no streetlights. If you connect a streetlight to the grid, it gets controlled by the city and regulated. So they're thinking, how can we create solar-powered low-cost streetlights, as that will lower crime? They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
This is the easiest way to go. It's not scholarly, but it's reminding users that the images have been created by others and granting permission to be used.