In 1995, I visited the home of the late, great designer Paul Rand, who had designed the iconic logos of IBM, ABC, and NeXT. I still vividly recall him opening a letter and chuckling while reading it: "Mr. Rand, I love your design for the CBS logo." He was laughing, of course, because the design wasn't his: it was the work of the late, great designer William Golden. But Rand was far from annoyed by the misattribution. "If you live long enough, people will think you did everything," he told me. He was in his 80s at the time.

In 2001, when I was a young MIT faculty member overseeing the Media Lab Aesthetics and Computation Group, two students came up with an idea that would become an award-winning piece of software called Processing--which I am often credited with having a hand in conceiving. Processing, a programming language and development environment that makes sophisticated animations and other graphical effects accessible to people with relatively little programming experience, is today one of the few open-source challengers to Flash graphics on the Web. The truth is that I almost stifled the nascent project's development, because I couldn't see the need it would fill. Luckily, Ben Fry and Casey Reas absolutely ignored my opinion. And good for them: the teacher, after all, isn't always right.