Michael Shanks
Professor of Classics
As an archaeologist, Michael is fascinated by the genealogy of things – where things come from, by long-term perspectives on change and innovation, human making and creativity. His research has taken in the building of prehistoric monuments in northern Europe (megaliths and mortuary practices), art and manufacture in the early cities of the Mediterranean (ancient Greek perfume jars), life at the edge of the Roman empire (he currently directs the excavation of Vinovium, a Roman town in the English/Scottish borders), as well as contemporary design (his archaeology lab did the research behind the Chrysler concept car of 2009; he also spent a year early in his career on the design of beer cans!).
His archaeology lab at Stanford, Metamedia, has pioneered the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate the collaborative multidisciplinary networks that are needed for design research. It is a media lab because if you want to think about material things and processes, as archaeologists do, you have to write and talk about them, visualize, turn them into media. And archaeologists don’t just reflect on the past: they get out in the field, dig stuff up, piece the past back together, and may even experiment in the replication of artifacts and past experiences (he oversees a working Roman kiln on campus). Michael has long collaborated with the European performance company Brith Gof and other contemporary artists on the topic of the presence of the past, and in deep-mapping historical senses of place. As a Director of Stanford Humanities Lab, he championed experimental research and development in transdisciplinary Arts and Humanities, building bridges to a bigger picture on our contemporary cultural condition. A key theme in his current projects is the future of The Archive and The Museum.
Michael thinks that the Humanities should inform human-centered design, that the storehouse of human history and experience represented by the Humanities should be the context within which we practice design thinking. He joined CARS (Center for Automotive Research at Stanford) in 2010 as Director of the Revs Program, a project exploring the archaeology and history of the automobile as a window on human-centered design and engineering, and where a car museum becomes a design studio.
