William John Mitchell

William John Mitchell (15 December 1944 – 11 June 2010) was an Australian-born author, educator, architect and urban designer, best known for leading the integration of architectural and related design arts practice with computing and other technologies.

Early life and education Mitchell was born on 15 December 1944, in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. He earned an undergraduate degree in 1967 from the University of Melbourne with a major in architecture and was awarded master's degrees from both Yale University (a Master of Environmental Design in environmental design in 1969) and the University of Cambridge (in 1977 with a major in architecture).

Career Mitchell headed the architecture and urban design program at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles starting in 1970. He was named the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and director of the Master of Design Studies program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1986 and was named as Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 1992. His 1977 book Computer-Aided Architectural Design and his 1990 work The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation and Cognition were credited by The New York Times as having "profoundly changed the way architects approached building design". The building project became the subject of his 2007 book Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the 21st Century, which was written in a single weekend while he was at a Dublin hotel. Following Mitchell's death, the CityCar Project was continued under the direction of Kent Larson in the Changing Places research group at the MIT Media Lab.

Along with colleagues Kent Larson and Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mitchell is credited with first exploring the concept of a Living Laboratory as an approach that represents a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts.

Mitchell was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded seven honorary degrees.