Looking Outward – 08

Molly Wright Steenson has studied artificial intelligence and its relation to architecture. In her talk at Eyeo in 2017 she goes back to the origins of artificial intelligence and explains how this process is new at all. She’s a professor here at CMU in the School of Design. She studied Architecture at Princeton and then got a master’s in environmental design at Yale. As a historian she studied artificial intelligence and traced how it’s poured over into various aspects over the last 50 years. She describes herself as a writer, professor, historian, and designer. Most recently she works as a professor researching the “history of design, architecture, computation and artificial intelligence.” Steenson studies the past very deeply in order to understand how the topic will affect the future. Specifically, in her Eyeo talk she highlights the importance of the history of artificial intelligence by understanding the ideas of influential people within the field since the beginning. She looks at three architects, Cedric Price, Nicholas Negroponte, and Christopher Alexander, that connect to artificial intelligence. One more recent project that’s interested me is her connection of the internet to the pneumatic postal service starting in the late 19th century. In her essay, “A Series of Tubes”, she goes into depth about the history of the internet and computation, going as far back in time to the beginnings of the postal service. The way she presents her ideas is really effective because she shifts people’s perspective from all the things they presently hear on the topic and boils it down to the history of her ideas. In this way she connects the audience to a larger context of the topic and creates a base understanding that supports her beliefs. I could learn from this on my own projects by digging deep into the roots of my topic or issue, understanding the complexities within the history to see the underlying connections that would help reach an audience, giving them a larger outlook before going into specifics. 

Website Link: http://www.girlwonder.com/

Essay Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/780725