There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed

TL;DR

Kevin Slavin discusses his career path from sculpture student to founder of Area Code (location-based games) to MIT Media Lab faculty to director at The Shed. He argues that the core value of cultural and academic institutions is providing a sense of continuity and a “synchronizing signal” that connects people.

Key insights

• Universities are hard to change because tenured faculty preserve the core sensibility, and 15 universities per year go bankrupt in the US due to an outdated model.
• Cultural and academic institutions provide a sense of continuity between an individual and a larger set of people and ideas, filling the void left by abandoned churches and changing work patterns.
• Slavin’s only formal education is sculpture; everything else he learned by being sufficiently interested and engaging brilliant people in other disciplines.