Tapping the wisdom of human-centered fields

When I last wrote to you in this magazine, I told you a bit about the MIT Collaboratives, an effort to spark new ideas and modes of inquiry and help the people of MIT solve global problems. Since then, we’ve launched the first collaborative, grounding it in the human-centered fields represented by our School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). We’re calling it the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, or MITHIC.

In broad terms, MITHIC is an endorsement of the quality of our faculty in these fields and an expression of how deeply we value the scholarly and artistic practices that expand our understanding of the things that make us human.

In a practical sense, it’s designed to help our scholars in human­-centered disciplines “go big.” MITHIC will give them the resources to pursue their most innovative ideas within their discipline, create opportunities for them to collaborate with colleagues outside it, and enable them to explore fresh approaches to teaching our students.

We celebrated the launch of MITHIC with a showcase of creative excellence. MIT faculty shared research that blends the humanistic with the technological, MIT students improvised on jazz saxophone, and in a keynote conversation, the acclaimed novelist Min Jin Lee talked about her dedication to putting the human at the center of her work.

Our faculty are wonderfully energized by MITHIC, and more than 100 have already taken part in the collaborative’s “Meeting of the Minds” events, organized to connect researchers across the Institute who work on similar ­topics—from cybersecurity to food security, climate simulations to the bioeconomy. 

There may never have been a more important time for society to make humane choices about new technologies. And I’m thrilled that at MIT we’ve created a collaborative powered by human insight to support our scholars, students, explorers, and makers in shaping a future of technology in service to humanity.