Forum Network

Michael Silverman has been covering the Red Sox and Major League Baseball for the Boston Herald since the middle of the 1995 season.

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott.

Nicola Twilley is the author of the blog Edible Geography, a co-host of the Gastropod podcast, and a contributing writer at newyorker.com.

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen are London-based artists working around broad meanings of materials and systems of industrial production. They create objects, installations, and films that explore manufacturing processes as cultural, ethical, and political practices. Since graduating from the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art in 2008, they have been exhibiting and lecturing worldwide. Recent exhibitions took place at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna, Ernst Schering Foundation and HKW in Berlin, Jerwood Space in London, Fotomuseum Winterthur Zurich, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, amongst others. They are the recipients of several awards and commissions and their work is part of the permanent collections of MoMA and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.

Born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, Anab founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy's client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab's self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tanya studied technology and its socioeconomic impacts on rural economies at UCSD. Conducting a number of studies on financial technology advancements in Oaxaca, Mexico, she co-authored “The Economics of Migration”, published by the University of California. Shortly thereafter, Menendez joined the Google Strategy and Integration group advising on internal system operations. In 2011 Menendez partnered with Matthew Burnett on The Brooklyn Bakery to manage sales and operations. While at The Brooklyn Bakery, she came up with the idea to create a platform for entrepreneurs to be able to easily access American manufacturers. Combining her experience in operations / automation with Matthew’s experience in global manufacturing, they started Maker’s Row.

Rob Walker is a technology and culture columnist for Yahoo News. A contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times, he previously wrote the Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine, and Ad Report Card for Slate. His books include Significant Objects (co-edited with Joshua Glenn) and Buying In.

Ahmed Ansari is an assistant professor in the School of Social & Media Sciences at SZABIST, Karachi, where he teaches courses in interaction and game design, in the philosophy of technology, and in cultural theory. A Fulbright scholar, he has an MDes in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was involved in research on the applications of emerging technologies in healthcare and in informal learning environments. Since 2013 he has been busy trying to reform design education in Pakistan, helping redesign curriculums for local colleges and universities, and giving workshops and lectures on design thinking and research for local startups and NGOs such as the Pakistan Innovation Foundation. He has also been considering how artifacts and technologies are appropriated, reinterpreted, and even subverted in urban contexts, giving rise to new political and social forms of life in the South Asian city, and how current global and local design pedagogy and practice might be reconceived in new, radically political emancipatory forms that seek to further processes of decolonisation and the causes of the global working class.

More than twenty five years of experience designing and building projects in the UK, US and the Middle East. Projects include Urban Design, Affordable housing, Palaces, Civic Buildings, and Adaptive reuse. Bentley has been practicing sustainable design since 1990. Now an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Abu Dhabi, Bently has worked at An Anonymous Design Company in Bahrain, Battle Architects in Boston, The Classic Group in Lexington MA and more.

An architect and engineer by training, **Carlo Ratti** practices in Italy and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab. Ratti graduated from the Politecnico di Torino and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, and later earned his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has co-authored over 200 publications and holds several patents. His work has been exhibited worldwide at venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Design Museum Barcelona, the Science Museum in London, GAFTA in San Francisco and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ratti's Digital Water Pavilion at the 2008 World Expo was hailed by \_Time\_ as one of the Best Inventions of the Year. He has been included in \_Esquire's\_ Best and Brightest list, in \_Blueprint's\_ 25 People who will Change the World of Design and in \_Forbes'\_ People you need to know in 2011. Ratti was a presenter at TED 2011 and is serving as a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council for Urban Management.

Kent Larson directs the Media Lab's Changing Places group. Since 1998, he has also directed the MIT House\_n research consortium in the School of Architecture and Planning. His current research is focused on four related areas: responsive urban housing, new urban vehicles, ubiquitous technologies, and living lab experiments. Larson practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City, with work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, The New York Times, A+U, and Architectural Digest. His book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks was selected as one of the Ten Best Books in Architecture, 2000 by The New York Times Review of Books. Related work was selected by Time magazine as a "Best Design of the Year" project.

Jon Seydl directs the Curatorial department of the Worcester Art Museum, as well as the Conservation, Registration, and Collections and Exhibition Services departments. He is also the Museum’s curator of European art. Recognized for his specialty in 17th and 19th-century Italian art, Seydl last served as the Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos, Jr., Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Seydl’s other former positions include Program Specialist at the National Endowment for the Humanities Program, followed by Research Coordinator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2002 as Assistant Curator of Paintings before becoming an Associate Curator of Paintings in 2006. He came to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. Since then, he has reinstalled and thematically reinterpreted Cleveland’s entire collection of European Art as part of the Museum’s renovation and expansion project. Seydl has curated and co-curated many major exhibitions, including Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile (2005), Tiepolo Oil Sketches (2005), From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Painting from Dresden (2006), Rembrandt in America (2011-12), and The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (2012-13). Seydl wrote the catalogue for Tiepolo Oil Sketches (2005), which he curated at the Getty, and has co-edited two volumes of essays: Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951-1972 and Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 2013, the Association of Art Museum Curators awarded him the Outstanding Catalogue Essay prize for “The Last Days of Pompeii.” Seydl completed his BA in art history at Yale University and received his MA and PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. He specialized in 17th and 18th-century Italian Art and wrote his dissertation on images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the 18th century.