Join evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen to explore a new dawn of natural history, practiced by community scientists in their own urban jungle. Schilthuizen will be joined in conversation by Boston College Assistant Professor Courtney Humphries.

Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that's exactly what Menno Schilthuizen did — one instance in the evolutionary biologist's campaign to take natural science to the urban landscape where most of us live today. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat — and maybe in the process do the natural world some good.

Special welcome remarks provided by the Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director, MIT Museum and Professor of the Practice of Science, Technology and Society, MIT, Michael John Gorman.

Copies of The Urban Naturalist will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.

Join acclaimed designer and bestselling author Kevin Bethune and MITdesignX Faculty Director Svafa Grönfeldt as they explore a nonlinear approach to navigating design's nuances in pursuit of meaningful innovation.

In Nonlinear, Kevin Bethune shows us that we can reject trodden paths of digital or physical product creation by taking advantage of a nonlinear approach. To unlock meaningful innovation that breeds new and novel outcomes, he writes, teams need to embark on a journey into the proverbial forest of ambiguity, the result of a rapidly converging, dynamic, and exponentially changing landscape. The journey is less about getting it right or wrong, and more about using the information we have at our disposal to understand our choices and unlock new learning.

Copies of Nonlinear (MIT Press, 2025) and of Reimagining Design (MIT Press, 2022) will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.

Join MIT Professors David Mindell, Suzanne Berger, and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Simon Johnson to discuss Mindell's new book, The New Lunar Society, on how we can create our industrial future with inspiration and lessons from the originators of the industrial revolution. Special welcome remarks provided by Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director, MIT Museum and Professor of the Practice of Science, Technology and Society, MIT Michael John Gorman

Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In The New Lunar Society, David Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on the eighteenth century when first principles were formed at the founding of the Industrial Revolution. While outlining the new industrialism, he tells the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes. Those principles were collaboration, the marriage of practice and scientific knowledge, and the belief that the world could progress through making things.

Copies of The New Lunar Society will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.

This event will be recorded by C-SPAN. Please let an MIT Museums staff person know if you do not want to be filmed.