Embracing Entropy

Ask Kipp Bradford to describe his engineering career, and you’re in for a wild and unpredictable ride. Over the last three decades, Bradford ’95, Sc.M. ’96 has — among other things — created tiny wearable devices for TV personalities; developed circuits and software for thousands of branded toys sold nationwide; and served as a technical advisor to Make Magazine, the go-to publication for DIY enthusiasts everywhere. Along the way, he’s taught at Brown, Harvard, Yale, and even MIT, where he was hired as a “professor of other” at the famed Media Lab — a position that asked him to spend two years trying to invent fields that didn’t yet exist. To put it plainly, his work has taken more turns than a lost New England driver.

As diverse as his experiences have been, though, Bradford traces his whirlwind of a career back to a single, unassuming moment in time: a summer he spent trying to avoid his sweltering bedroom in suburban Philadelphia. 

“We had this house with central air conditioning, but the thermostat was in my parents’ bedroom — and they were born and raised in New Orleans, so they had a very high thermal comfort point,” he said, laughing. “I'd come back from bike rides, and it'd be like 80 degrees in my bedroom, which was in the worst part of the house for cooling.” Since his parents wouldn’t turn down the temperature or let him put in a window unit, he decided to take matters into his own hands and build a solution himself. 

Bradford spent much of high school tinkering with water pumps, ice buckets, and early solid-state heat pumps — and although he never quite found a solution that worked, the attempts opened his eyes to the vast amount of scientific and engineering knowledge required to make a device as mundane as an air conditioner. 

“If you think about what goes into an AC to make it function, it involves electrical engineering, with electricity coming in and going through some voltage conversion; it involves motors to convert electrical energy into mechanical motion; there’s mechanical engineering to create a compressor; there are lubricants and refrigerants and all sorts of chemical engineering for the fluids; there’s thermal systems and thermodynamics,” he said. “It’s sort of where every field of engineering meets — all this magic combines to let heat flow against normal thermal gradients.”

In that sense, the humble AC is also an apt metaphor for Bradford’s career: all of his best work, he says, has combined elements of multiple disparate fields. It’s a pattern shaped in large part by his undergraduate experience at Brown, he adds: Although he studied biomedical engineering, he also felt compelled to learn as much as he could in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated topics, and found himself craving ways to make connections between them.

Immediately after his undergraduate degree, Bradford obtained a masters degree at Brown in biomedical engineering, then landed a job at Design Lab, a small engineering firm in Providence that catered to the commercial toy industry. Instead of 50,000 medical devices, Bradford spent each week producing new rapid prototypes of machines that could be used intuitively by anyone, effectively providing a crash course in human-centered engineering.

With more than a decade of experience under his belt at Design Lab, he set out to share his experiences with others, taking on teaching positions at Brown and RISD, a job as a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, a gig advising and consulting at the famed hardware incubator Highway1 in San Francisco, and central roles in multiple startups for products as diverse as hearing aids and ultralight golf clubs. By 2018, his professional life came full-circle with the launch of Gradient, a small company that focused on building window-mounted heat pumps. Bradford’s invention, which Time magazine named as its 2022 invention of the year, proved to be far more efficient and effective than a standard AC unit, while offering environmentally-friendly comfort to apartment dwellers.

Even with his long string of academic and commercial success, Bradford still hasn’t lost steam professionally. Today, he remains focused on growing his knowledge across disciplines, and said he’s become more interested in finding ways to pull multiple fields together to create something new and unique. In yet another career-changing move, he’s now chipping away at those questions as a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Princeton University, where he’s producing peer-reviewed research that merges biology, ecology, and thermodynamics. 

“I realized that I knew a lot about the engineering side of the equation, and a lot about the human comfort side, but not as much about the buildings themselves. So I started wondering, why do architects design buildings the way they do?” he asks. “Why do engineers build them the way they do? Why are people so uncomfortable in buildings, and why can't we design them better?” 

Bradford is quick to admit that his latest career move has led him into unfamiliar territory, but that, perhaps, is the point. He seems driven by an innate sense of academic exploration and curiosity, and is fed by a growth mindset that he says was instilled in him during his time at Brown. During his years in Providence, he adds, he learned to embrace obscure connections between seemingly disparate fields, and to follow those threads wherever they might lead — a trait that he encourages current undergraduates to embrace wholeheartedly.

“A close friend and classmate once said to me, ‘if you're getting straight A's, you're not taking enough classes,’” he said. “That’s great advice. Don't worry so much about grades; worry about what you’re taking away from your experience. What are you learning?  How are you enriching yourself? At Brown, you have this opportunity to absorb as much knowledge as you want from all these incredible people, and you might not have it again — so take full advantage of it.”