Apr 26, 2011 6:40 PM

Wired.com Q&A: New MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito on 'Context and Connection'

Joichi Ito, tapped as only the fourth director of the MIT Media Lab, says having a bio that seems “scatterbrained” will make the 25-year-old institution — already famous for its unorthodox research approach — seem just like home. Ito is a well-known thinker, writer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, with a broad record of achievement across […]

Joichi Ito, tapped as only the fourth director of the MIT Media Lab, says having a bio that seems "scatterbrained" will make the 25-year-old institution -- already famous for its unorthodox research approach -- seem just like home.

Ito is a well-known thinker, writer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, with a broad record of achievement across disciplines. He's also a college dropout -- and there is something appropriate about this as well.

After all, many of the most celebrated figures of the digital revolution -- from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Paul Allen to Larry Page to Sergey Brin to Mark Zuckerberg -- left school for pursuits that would define digital culture.

Ito -- who is known as Joi, pronounced "Joey" -- replaces Frank Moss, who stepped down last year. The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicolas Negroponte, who played a key role in the early days of Wired magazine.

A former CEO of Creative Commons, Ito sits on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, the international human rights group Witness, and Global Voices -- a network of bloggers from around the world shedding light on under-reported regions.

It's this eclectic background -- and a track record as an activist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist -- that made Ito a compelling choice to run the Media Lab, where the mission is to apply "an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life."

Wired.com caught up with the 44-year-old Ito, who is currently in Jordan, for a Skype interview Tuesday. Ito said he's going to focus on "context and connection" as he oversees a diverse group of scholars, researchers and students at the Media Lab. Ito currently lives in Dubai, but will be moving to Boston full-time in the fall.

Wired.com: Why did you join the Media Lab?

Joichi Ito: If you look at my bio, it looks like I’m completely scatterbrained and unable to focus on anything. The Media Lab has institutionalized this "interested-in-everything," interconnected, "the more out-of-bounds, the better," interdisciplinary approach, together with a crazy, open way of thinking about everything.

It felt like home.

It felt like something I’d been trying to hack out a way to do on my own, and then I found a place where it was OK to do it. The fact that MIT appointed me, even though I don’t have a college degree, shows a certain amount of flexibility on their part, and that made me feel safe.

Wired.com: What's your goal at the Media Lab?

Ito: I try to surround myself with really smart people who are really deep at what they do, and my value is to provide context and to connect them to other people. It’s about connecting really specific people with really specific things and other people, in the right context, at the right time. You can only do that if you’re working with people who are really deep at what they do and are open to being connected.

Wired.com: In traditional science, we're taught to do one thing and do it very well. You've done a lot of things very well. What's your view on the balance between specialization and generalization?

Ito: What you don’t want is a bunch of people who read the headlines of all the newspapers and just consume everything that everyone else is consuming and then call themselves generalists. That’s not useful.

They know everything that everybody else already knows and they’re probably going to come up with the same thoughts. When you go deep on anything, you start to find nuances that other people don't know. And it's those nuances that really start to help you open black boxes and say, "Wait a second, can we think about it this way?"

For example, it turns out that if you use material other than silicon crystals you can completely change the behavior of a computer chip, but we don’t open that black box anymore because we’re so stuck on the engineering of chips. Or have you ever thought about connecting tissue specialists with prosthetics robotics? There’s a kind of alchemy that goes on.

There is a general spirit of interdisciplinary work at the Media Lab that makes it very different.

We have one of every kind of really important academic that we think we need, and we’re going to add more. The idea is that each of these academics is responsible for being deep enough in their own fields to be able to contribute to the interdisciplinary work that we do. But they need to be connected to their field, because they're the conduit to their particular network.

Wired.com: It's been 25 years since the Media Lab was founded. What is its role in society in 2011?

Ito: Right now Silicon Valley is really good at risk-taking and being agile, but not that good on being long-term, because the nature of venture capital and the public markets forces you to think about revenues and exits quite early. So you can have a great idea and knock it out of the park, but very quickly you're going to be focused on revenues.

By contrast, the Japanese railway system is proud that they were able to build Tokyo station 100 years ahead, so that 100 years later they can still add more lines. They're all about long-term planning. But they can't really take risks and can't really innovate themselves out of a box in the short-term.

What the Media Lab has is the ability to be agile but long-term.

Photo courtesy Joi Ito/Flickr.