Bianca Datta spends a lot of time with objects. We all do, but not like her; she designs them, makes them, thinks about them, and responds to questions from prying interviewers about them.
Bianca is a product designer and first-year graduate student in the MIT Media Lab’s Object-Based Media group. I wanted to learn a bit about her design sense and the ways she relates to objects in particular, so I showed her seven objects that each sparked a conversation about different aspects and stages of her life.
I started off easy. Bianca is from Maryland—Montgomery County, not Baltimore, which most people mistakenly assume (or maybe they just don’t know any other cities in Maryland). She explained her home state as a “microcosm of the US,” which, looking at the state’s map, she attributed in part to its geography. The peninsula, the panhandle, and the two major metropolitan areas each form their own identity.
Bianca then set off to Philadelphia to study at Penn’s School of Engineering. She knew that she wanted her work to have energy applications, and started off focusing on chemical engineering, but later found a home in Penn’s materials science lab as a Materials Science and Engineering major. She claims that chemical engineering didn’t work out because she is “not into math or physics,” which befuddled me. It’s all relative.
Bianca has many Penn mugs (all gifts) and paraphernalia, and when I ask which is her favorite, she ponders for a while: “that’s really tough. I have so many.” She settles on a hoodie that she got for being a residential advisor, which she likes not only for the color and comfort, but its associations; it reminds her of home, as well as camaraderie with her fellow RAs.
The mug itself also had significance: “I am really big on tea,” she says (she was late to our meeting because she was getting coffee). She associates tea with her family, and uses it as a way to connect with people; as an RA, she would offer tea to students to encourage them to stay and talk. Nowadays she organizes many of the Media Lab teas.
At Penn, Bianca took a formative product design class that led her towards her current work. One of the projects in that class was Dormitron, an RFID-operated door, which would replace your dorm’s traditional key with an RFID chip, making your dorm’s door work like the key card in the campus entrance, or a bit like a hotel room.
Bianca first downplayed the project by saying “every year somebody does an RFID thing [for the class],” and mentioned that there are still barriers to wide adoption due to security liabilities. But she also insisted that her team’s product was better designed than others. Although she regrets not being able to participate in the product’s actual fabrication, it was her first opportunity to go from idea to product.
Bianca spent one college summer in Minneapolis working for 3M, which introduced her to the corporate working world as a materials engineer. She was simultaneously impressed with the range of 3M and with their level of trust in her expertise and experience.
Her summer at 3M convinced her to go to graduate school, maybe to postpone the red tape (or poster tape?) of major corporations, and because she found that the most interesting work at 3M was being done by people with PhDs. It seemed like a good sign.
Although she was not working on improving 3M’s poster tape, she did have strong opinions: “I hate command hooks. They’re useless and always fall off the wall.” She points to 3M as proving that generic products are not all the same; her 3M sticky-notes stayed on longer and left less residue than the non-branded alternatives. Still, she notes, it’s not always worth the added cost.
Along with Partnews RA Alexis Hope, Bianca designed a digital input/output device during the famed Media Lab class “How to Make Almost Anything.” The project was initially an excuse to try out the Processing programming environment, which allows for interesting visual effects. If you press a button, the background changes; this allowed them to switch between a “moon” view and a “sunrise” view for the object.
Bianca’s final and favorite How to Make project was a nap pod called DUSK, which she tells me currently exists and lives in the Media Lab, so I plan to find it and sleep in it tomorrow. For her the project was exciting because she made it from scratch; it was “in my head, and now it’s real, and its big, and I get to use it.”
This book was on Bianca’s otherwise defunct Goodreads page, so she was surprised that I’d found it. On one hand Goodreads was just a “one-off thing” for her, but on the other, “this book is all about what I do.” It is a popular-scientific approach to materials and objects, with successive chapters on cement, paper, grass, and so on. Bianca’s current research examines how human beings relate and connect to materials; for instance, why we view some materials as stable, friendly, and durable, while others are considered foreign or cold. So this book is right up her alley.
Unsurprisingly, Bianca prefers paper reading over screen reading, which gives off the illusion of being “less serious.” But like most people, she makes plenty of concessions for the sake of digital convenience.
Bianca read Stuff Matters at Cambridge’s local Book Club for the Curious. As a first-year student, she felt like this connected her to the city and community. Whether tea mugs, hoodies, or books, Bianca associates her favorite objects with their social functions and associations. As an expert in things, her favorite things are the ones that connect her to her favorite people.
