There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.
Neil GershenfeldThe real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.
Neil GershenfeldFor a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.
Neil Gershenfeld