Ryan Chin

Ryan Chin is a fourth-year PhD student at the MIT Media laboratory in the Smart Cities research group. He is building the car of the future – a foldable, stackable, sharable, electric, two-passenger city vehicle that rethinks urban mobility. This work, in collaboration with General Motors, takes into account problems of parking, congestion, energy efficiency, pollution, communication, and considers the best and most efficient uses of available resources in urban environments. In 2007 Chin lead a team of Media Lab students in the creation of the RoboScooter – a lightweight electric folding scooter designed as a clean, green mobility solution for today’s crowded cities. The full-scale working prototype was exhibited at the Milan Motorshow in November 2007. Both key projects serve as platforms for investigating urban design, mass-customization, personalization in product-development processes, and MIT Media Lab technological innovation. In 2007 Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group with Professors William J. Mitchell, Marvin Minsky, and Frank T. Piller with the task of improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Chin at MIT earned a master of science in media arts and sciences and a master of architecture; and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering and architecture from the Catholic University of America.