In a lot of ways, the real learning at RISD happened after-hours when you're working side by side with your colleagues.

Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you're providing the customers. It's another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.

We built a basic website, and Air Bed and Breakfast was born. Three lucky guests got to stay on a $20 airbed on the hardwood floor. But they loved it. And so did we. We took them on adventures around the city.

Every apartment I've ever lived in has had a space to make, create, and get stuff done within eyesight of my bed.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

When I was a baby, my mom used to have a dance school, and she used to teach classes there. We didn't have money for a babysitter, so she always brought me with her to the dancing school. Back then, I was already watching and listening to Michael Jackson for a long time.

The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.

My mom was a single mother, raising my sister and me. My mom has an incredible talent for living in the world without traditional structure, and her friend, who was in advertising, put me in a commercial when I was five. It was just to make money.