Using design to interpret the past and imagine the future | MIT News
Some of designer Jacob Payne’s projects bring new, futuristic products – such as zero-gravity shoes for astronauts, and ceramics embedded with electronics – using technological tools and processes of digital fabrication, material design, and interaction. Some projects go back centuries, considering the challenge of preserving and rebuilding Black architectural heritage.
Payne graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in architecture and environmental studies, then worked briefly at architecture firms in New York and Los Angeles. He decided to pursue a professional degree to become a licensed architect and experiment with different types of design. He started the MIT Master of Architecture (MArch) program in 2023, and aims to graduate in January 2027.
“I have especially valued the freedom of learning to make my own way,” Payne said. “Although the MArch program requires certain classes each semester, I was able to find a way to combine the degree in a way that reflected my interests.”
Payne says she is grateful for how her experience in the program has allowed her to work on design projects at a variety of scales – from small-scale industrial and product design classes, to large-scale classrooms in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He is a participant in the Design Intelligence Lab and has worked as a teaching assistant in MIT’s wood shop for architecture, helping students integrate digital design techniques into hands-on work. Payne says she appreciates the opportunities she had outside of college, including working at a furniture and product design company in Barcelona called MISTI and spending a summer working at experience design company 2×4 in New York.
Rediscovering the structures of the past
Through his graduate classes, Payne became particularly interested in the study of the various forms of vernacular architecture in America, particularly in the American South. During his second semester, he took class 4.182 (Brick x Brick: Drawing a Particular Survey), taught by Assistant Professor Carrie Norman, director of the department of architecture major and minor undergraduate programs. As part of the curriculum, the class traveled to Tuskegee University to research the history and works of Robert R. Taylor, the first Black graduate of MIT (1892) and the first black licensed painter in America.
Following the class, Payne continued to work on models and drawings that recreated important Tuskegee buildings. He built models of Taylor’s original 1896 Tuskegee University Chapel, which was lost in a fire in 1957, and the subsequent chapel built in its place in 1969, designed by Paul Rudolph in collaboration with Tuskegee University. He also produced a set of speculative drawings that reconstructed Taylor’s 1896 chapel, using the few surviving materials (including several photographs and one sketch), Historic American Buildings Survey standards, and specified details.
“A lot of the work was figuring out how to better understand and reconstruct historic places with limited information,” Payne said. “I think it’s important not to treat the past as static or unchanging – because there’s a lot we don’t know, that hasn’t been explored.”
Payne received the 2025-26 L. Dennis Shapiro (1955) Fellowship in the History of the African American Experience of Technology. He is currently looking at different types of buildings in the American South, with a particular focus on “juke joints,” buildings that emerged during the Jim Crow era. These were intended as private social spaces for Black people to meet, dance, sing, and play blues music – at a time when they were often banned from most institutions. With very little literature left to use in this research, Payne says, the challenge is to identify which current architectural and design methods can be used to better understand and visualize these spaces.
“As his mentor, I’ve watched Jacob create a body of work that treats architectural representation as both a record and a repair, finding lost and neglected Black cultural practices as important expressions of Black local agency,” said Norman. “Through drawings, models, and imaginative reconstructions, he expands the tools of the discipline to include histories of cultural identity and heritage.”
Integrating AI to design the future
Although much of Payne’s research is rooted in the past, he is also interested in artificial intelligence and its new implications for the future. Last spring, he took class 4.154 (Space Architecture) and learned how to design for the specific challenges of working in space. Together with his team, he designed a shoe system for astronauts that could attach to spacecraft structures with mechanical, rotating soles, and other inflatable ankle supports.
In addition, Payne took a class on linguistics majors taught by associate professor of the discipline Marcelo Coelho, director of the Design Intelligence Lab. “Designing products that incorporate large language models involves thinking about how people can interact with AI in the virtual world,” Payne said. “We are able to create new experiences that challenge the ways people think about what AI will look like in the future.”
In class, Payne and his team worked on a project using AI in the kitchen, creating a countertop device called Kitchen Cosmo. The camera at the top scans the ingredients placed in front of it. The user can enter information such as how many people will be eating the meal and how much time is available to prepare the meal, and the device prints the recipe.
Payne also worked on a project with Coelho for the Venice Biennale: a lamp that used geopolymers – a more sustainable alternative to concrete or other throwaway materials. Because this ceramic material does not need to be fired in a kiln to solidify, it can have electrical components embedded within it. Payne now continues to work on AI research and product development in the Design Intelligence Lab.
“Jacob is a unique inventor who deeply integrates the ‘mens et manus’ of MIT [‘mind and hand’] ethos by approaching product design and interaction with an interesting combination of intellectual rigor and high-quality, hands-on craftsmanship,” said Coelho. “He is equally comfortable thinking about ideas about the cultural implications of artificial intelligence and the technical functionality and artistic details needed to bring his ideas to life.”
