Edith Ackermann

is Honorary Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille 1, France; Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture; and a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab. Previously, Ackermann was a scientific collaborator at the Centre International d’Epistémologie Génétique under the direction of Jean Piaget, Geneva; a senior research scientist at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, Cambridge, MA) and an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media laboratory, in Cambridge, MA.

 

Articles

Talent, intuition, creativity

On the limits of digital technologies

In an issue of the Austrian architecture magazine GAM entitled “Intuition & the machine”, guest editor Urs Hirschberg interviews developmental psychologist Edith Ackermann. Ackermann explains how imagining and realizing novel ideas engages aspects of the mind, body and self that we barely control. Learning, she says, is like the art of living itself, as it is about navigating uncertainties rather than controlling what we cannot predict. Which makes the question as to where digital technologies fit into these complex processes all the more exciting.

Read in Journals