Futures Past: Design and the Machine was a three-day conference on the institutional and intellectual history of research and visions for design and the machine in the second half of the 20th century, and its relationship to emerging roles of technology in design. I co-organized the conference with the excellent colleagues Olga Touloumi and Duks Koschitz, with the advisorship of Prof. Terry Knight, George Stiny, and Nicholas Negroponte. The conference was structured around conversations among protagonists of early efforts to incorporate computers, information technologies, and communications engineering in the design process, and paper sessions with scholars, researchers, and historians of these visions. Futures Past took place at the MIT Media Lab on November 2013, and gathered over 150 attendees. Among many other participants, was the MIT Architecture Machine Group (photo above) that pioneered ideas of interaction and participation in design during the 1970s.
For more information, including videos and photos of the event visit http://futurespast.info