Next Frontier: Convergence of Physical, Digital and Biological
Carlo Ratti, professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives a sense of how this (Convergence
of Physical, Digital and Biological ) will
impact the lives of the people and how the lab is trying to anticipate the
changes it will bring
Google is working on a driverless
car. So are Tesla and Uber. And BMW and Audi. Not so far into the future, cars
will be driving us to our destinations without any help from humans. As these
driverless cars whiz by, they will have the power to detect other vehicles,
pedestrians, avoid collisions, accelerate, slow down doing away with the need
for traffic lights and possibly even waiting at junctions.
“Mumbai,“ says Carlo Ratti,
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “can then
theoretically run with 20% fewer cars.“
Ratti is director of the SENSEable
City Lab at MIT, which is studying the impact of the convergence of the
physical and digital on people and cities and anticipating the changes it will
bring. Self-driving cars, for example, will make carpooling and even
car-sharing much easier. Many people may choose not to own a car and instead
just use a ride from the existing pool. “The reason why we have companies like
Uber and Airbnb now is because real-time information sharing is now possible
with cell phones,“ he points out.
“We are doing a lot of mathematical
analysis of what the consequences will be...There will be a blurring of private
and public transporta tion,“ adds Ratti, who is an engineer and architect by
training.
Some of what's happening now were
lab experiments 10 years back, he recalls. The lab had experimented with
studying cities in real-time in 2006 based on cell phone signals.It had also
done ride-sharing experiment similar to Uberpool called Hubcabs.
The next frontier, which the lab is
now experimenting with, is the convergence of not just the physical and the
digital but of the physical, digital and bio logical.
The SENSEable lab is working with
MIT's bioengineering lab to predict epidemics be fore they happen. It is
studying microbi omes groups of mi croorganisms croorganisms present in
humans to predict diseases.
Microbiomes are known to behave dif
ferently in diseased people and by using small robots to study sewage and
through it the micro biomes in an aggregat ed manner, it can monitor the
collective microbiome and health of a neighbourhood.
“Most of what we do is a workable
demo to show some thing is fea sible. We provide a proof of concept,“ says
Ratti, who believes it's important to have ideas even if there is no customer.
The Superpedestrian, a startup from
the lab valued at $100 million, has designed a wheel called the Copenhagen
Wheel that turns any bicycle into an electric bike.
The neat battery-operated device
fits on the back wheel of a bicycle and senses when the cyclist needs an
additional boost such as while pedaling up an incline and kicks in with
that extra power. It can also capture some of that kinetic energy when the
cyclist brakes and store it up for when it's needed.
“All the technologies that made the
first iPhone were there but the brilliance of Steve Jobs was to put them
together in a different way and change the world,“ says Ratti about design. The
44-year-old, who also has design studio in Italy, Carlo Ratti Associati, was
recently invited to give a talk to top leaders at the Godrej group.
Not all the stuff he designs is
serious, though. The Makr Shakr, a design innovation from his studio, became a
business idea quite by accident.
His studio designed an installation
a robotic arm that mixed customized cocktails based on people's preferences
that could be specified using a mobile app which became such a hit that it
has now been spun off as a startup.Its first customer is the Royal Caribbean
International, which operates cruise liners.
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N SHIVAPRIYA MUMBAI
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ET9MAY15
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