MIT Media Lab lime-green tile hack

Which brings up another good point: they don't do hacking like they used to around here, but the Media Lab building as you cross the street from the chemical engineering building — has anyone noticed the artwork on the outside? They built the building and the students started calling it the bathroom-tile building because of just these square pieces of gray anodized aluminum. MIT likes to be famous, and they are sort of famous in the Boston Globe for having outdoor artwork — Henry Moore sculptures and things like that. If you walk around campus, most of you ignore these things, but we have a lot of expensive artwork on campus. It's too heavy to take away. The Great Sail actually has a function — to prevent the wind tunnel going under the Green Building. They commissioned an artist to come up with some artwork for the Media Lab, and she did. If you read the MIT hack books, this is in there. She came up with three tiles — red, blue, and yellow. She took primary colors and made three tiles, and they're there on the building. The students saw this and decided to add a fourth — lime green. This is a pretty innocuous hack. It took several weeks before anyone who had any knowledge of what her art was noticed it. And when they did, she hit the ceiling. The funniest thing about the whole thing was her reaction, okay. It wasn't that great a hack, it was pretty simple, but her reaction made the whole thing so much more worthwhile.