As of October 2014, Csikszentmihalyi is officially the ERA Chair in Human-Computer Interaction and Design Innovation at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI).

The EU’s ERA Chairs pilot initiative gives a helping hand to Europe’s less developed universities and other research organisations wanting to compete at a global level. Outstanding researchers are known to have a decisive and positive impact on the culture and performance of research institutions. Yet issues such as a lack of research funding and access to resources can make these researchers hesitant to move to promising institutions.

ERA Chairs seek to create the conditions and opportunities needed to attract high-quality researchers and research managers, helping them move to and engage with interested universities and research organisations. The aim is to improve research excellence at the institutions and put them on the path to success and recognition.

A meeting of minds

Csikszentmihalyi would be the first to concede that he is not your typical researcher. He describes himself as “an artist, designer, technologist and dude”, and is driven by using technology for social good. A case in point is a project he is taking with him to Madeira: RootIO is an attempt to make community radio networked, interactive, scalable and yet inexpensive for rural communities in Africa. The stations remain small so that they retain relevance, for example through discussions on local topics — “if the stations become large, the people become smaller”.

Some might raise eyebrows at a move from Los Angeles to one of Europe’s most isolated regions. But for both Csikszentmihalyi and the President of M-ITI, Nuno Jardim Nunes, it is a good fit. “I think Chris likes the weirdness of M-ITI,” says Nunes. “We have a tradition of hiring weird people.”

Prof. Nuno Jardim Nunes

© Nuno Jardim Nunes

“MITI is a little bit ‘zany’,” says Csikszentmihalyi. “And that’s very important.”

What do they mean? Computing is already so advanced that combining it with art and design has been the logical next step for M-ITI for some time, says Nunes. For Csikszentmihalyi, the diversity within the M-ITI staff, which combines artistic, economic and engineering backgrounds, is the start of this zaniness. “They are reimagining our relationship with technology and have a particular focus on sustainability and the environment. I can’t help but imagine that some of this is because of Madeira’s unique natural beauty,” he says.

Being zany in engineering is “critical”, says Csikszentmihalyi. Otherwise creativity is stymied and it is impossible to see engineering’s full potential. “Traditional engineering only explores a small slice of the pie in what engineering can do, and M-ITI is hospitable to imagining technology from a more humanistic perspective,” he says.

In MITI, Nunes also believes that Csikszentmihalyi has found a place where he feels he can genuinely make a difference — an insight that Csikszentmihalyi happily confirms. And if graduates from his old MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) group are anything to go by (he was director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media between 2008 and 2011), Madeira will soon be producing its own crop of socially minded and highly successful entrepreneurs.

Previous protégés from Csikszentmihalyi’s MIT team include:

• The CEO of Adafruit — a website where electronics enthusiasts of all ages and abilities can learn about electronics (Adafruit was ranked 11^th US manufacturing company in 2014);
• The founder of sourcemap, which visualises supply chains, incorporating social, environmental and operational risks;
• The man behind betweenthebars.org, which publishes blogs written — often by hand – by US prisoners without internet access;
• The founder of TXTmob, a free service used by activists to organise themselves by sending text messages quickly to fellow activists. TXTmob has been cited as having influenced the creation of Twitter.

“We were able to take the spirit of entrepreneurship that you might find in Silicon Valley, Boston or Berlin and orient it to social good or social justice,” says Csikszentmihalyi, clearly proud of his team’s “outsized impacts”.

Csikszentmihalyi will maintain his links with US universities after his move to Madeira, which both he and Nunes hope will be an impetus for change. “We have a lot to learn from how research is done in the US,” says Nunes.

Csikszentmihalyi refers to a marriage between European values – one of the key factors drawing him to Europe – and the speed, agility and interdisciplinarity of US research. M-ITI already works this way, he says, but he hopes a closer relationship will bring new momentum to M-ITI without changing its core principles.

The vision

Both Nunes and Csikszentmihalyi are clearly very ambitious. Nunes believes that M-ITI can become the leading centre for design for global change.

Csikszentmihalyi has a clear plan on how to get there. Over the first two years, he plans to bring in state-of-the-art tools that will strengthen M-ITI’s platform for social and cultural experimentation, and to continue impacting art and culture through technology. He won’t be pushed into saying now what those technologies will be, though: “I want to find out what technologies Madeira would like to see rather than asking them to accept second hand goods from Silicon Valley.”

One focus could, however, be oceans — an interest shared by the ERA Chair and the MITI president. Csikszentmihalyi wants first to understand coastal communities’ reliance on the oceans and how decisions on resources are made. The next step will be to make these decisions more transparent.

After five years, Csikszentmihalyi hopes M-ITI will be seen as a strong platform for experimentation and co-design — ‘co’ because he plans to involve the communities affected by technologies. “I want to open up opportunities for all sections of society,” he enthuses.

While Csikszentmihalyi wants to learn more about Madeira before committing to a 10-year plan, he clearly hopes to better fuse the social sciences and humanities with the natural sciences in order to produce platforms for interaction between the two.

The pull factor

Csikszentmihalyi’s appointment is already proving an attraction, as Nunes had foreseen. The Institute is busy recruiting people from an impressive list of international applicants that the MITI president does not think it would have been able to attract otherwise.

Nunes paints a gloomy picture of research funding in his country, which has been hit particularly hard by the global economic downturn. M-ITI has lost several of its best researchers to other countries. “Portuguese universities cannot hire … we lack funding. We need to be able to give people prospects.”

He and Csikszentmihalyi have already worked together on one grant proposal, and Nunes hopes that the Csikszentmihalyi factor will attract other funding as well, eventually leading to financial stability.