Classwork: Technological Change and Innovation for the Built Environment

MIT is a living laboratory of technology and innovation, which makes it an ideal setting to learn about how technology and how it evolves. This class, more broadly, is about discovering the technological change and innovation that is disrupting the foundation of how we create the built environment. Through a series of educational workshops students will scout, catalogue and track new technologies by looking at new real estate uses, products, processes and organizational strategies. The key take-away for students will be to learn about technological change and arm themselves for a lifetime of innovation. And to make this knowledge truly impactful participants will contribute to an interactive educational experience, a so-called interactive webtool to enhance their own knowledge of technological change, provide that website for future students, real estate professionals and real estate decision makers

Technological change is constant and the lab continuously explores the technology, innovation and entrepreneurial frontier. As the lab gathers technologies and systematically studies their evolution, we can explore with our student body technologies that can impact the development of new and redeveloped real estate. Over the course of eight weeks, we technology scout across the MIT campus and find new real estate products, processes and uses that will inevitably by a part of our technological lexicon and just may make the built environment different for everyone.