See the Future
If you think it's a high-tech world now, just wait.
Watch the waves of Cambridge commuters spill out of the Porter Square subway station in the evening: They whip out cellphones as soon as the third escalator ride delivers them to daylight, as if they have to recheck their coordinates, geographic and social, after the subterranean trip home. In the future this cellphone check will be close to a reflex motion. The connections between the digital, wireless world and an urban crossroads like Porter Square will be that much richer.
Two local theorists – William Mitchell, professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at MIT and the director of the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group, and Eric Gordon, an assistant professor in the department of visual and media arts at Emerson College, envision a world 10 years from now that feels more like the one from The Jetsons.
Using Porter Square as their model setting, this is how they imagine life in 2017:
