Neri Oxman: belief

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful and brilliant human beings I’ve ever gotten to know. For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales from the microscale to the building scale. Now she’s continuing this work at a very new company for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products working with nature, not against it. On a personal note, let me say that Neri has for a long time been a friend and someone who in my darker moments, has always been there with a note of kindness and support. I am forever grateful to her. She’s a brilliant and a beautiful human being. Oh, and she also brought me a present, War and Peace by Tolstoy and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It doesn’t get better than that. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Neri Oxman. Let’s start with the universe. Do you ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful things at multiple scales? I do. And I think of nature in that way in general. In the context of design, specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn’t anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales. Do you think there’s an intricate ways in which there’s a connection between humans and nature?…

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