Perhaps you’ve never heard of MIT’s Design Intelligence Lab, which might easily be confused with MIT’s Design Justice Movement, both being spawns of MIT’s celebrated Media Lab.

Designers steeped in the humanities, arts, and social sciences are doing their part to Build a Better World™ by launching projects like NARRATRON, an interactive projector that augments hand-shadow puppetry with AI-generated storytelling, VBox, an AI-powered radio for musical exploration and group vibrations, AIncense, a praying device powered by ChatGPT to amplify self-motivation through ritual, and Be the Beat, an AI-powered boombox that suggests music based on a dancer’s movement patterns.

Move over, MIT’s 105 Nobel Prize winners.

The new MIT has moved beyond mundane accomplishments like inventing GPS, microwave radar systems, the World Wide Web, CRISPR, magnetic core memory, public-key cryptography, time-sharing operating systems, packet switching, and scientific breakthroughs too numerous to mention.

The latest contribution to world betterment is a sustainable, geopolymer, low-carbon footprint virtue signaling lamp built to honor Climate Justice Diva Mary Robinson and her defunct Climate Justice Foundation. Unlike so many other NGO’s, Mary’s was dedicated to providing “advocacy” for the poor, the disempowered, and the marginalized.

May this lamp illuminate the struggle to secure global justice and equity for the two billion people still cooking over charcoal, crop waste, and dung fires, denied access to fossil-fuel based electrification as advocates ask them to wait for renewable nirvana.