Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.

Imagine a kind of system where you have lightweight electric vehicles relatively small battery capacity, and then picking up charge wherever they park. You never have to worry about filling up your car, never go to the gas station, never plug it in, never do any of these things.

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.

We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn't seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn't seem necessarily to give us power over them.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.