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Tech entrepreneur Thomas Siebel spent a lot of time in basements when he was a University of Illinois graduate student.
That's where computer labs were in the 1980s, with room-sized machines surrounded by students trying to figure out where the coding on their keypunch cards went wrong.
"Back then, they were pretty dull places," Siebel said, "before anybody conceived of the kind of design breakthroughs that we have in technology today."
Siebel, who has founded two leading software firms and worked with the likes of Oracle's Larry Ellison, is the driving force behind the UI's new Siebel Center for Design, scheduled to open in January 2020.
It's designed to pull together students from across campus to work on groundbreaking projects and solve real-world problems.
Siebel holds three UI degrees -- in history, business and computer science -- and donated $25 million toward the $48 million project, on top of $32 million he gave in 1999 for the UI's sleek computer science building that also bears his name.
Altogether, with endowed faculty positions and student scholarships, he and his wife have pledged $100 million to the university.
Siebel talked with The News-Gazette about the new project, his time at the UI -- including his first "mini computer" -- and his tech predictions for the future.
How did this project come about?
I approached the campus. I'm active in a number of university communities, and one of the trends we see, particularly at Stanford and Berkeley, and to a lesser extent at MIT, is a very, very, substantial interest in these design places, where people engage in ideation and creation and product design -- a lot of things that you touch or use or talk to or sit on. It's just a huge trend today.
This is a discipline that in many schools was in mechanical engineering. Without taking any shots at anybody, mechanical engineering in the last couple of decades hasn't been the most exciting place people want to go. It was computer science, electrical engineering, bioengineering, neuro-bioengineering, that kind of thing.
All of a sudden, we're seeing mechanical engineering just take off like crazy, due to these design centers. Everybody goes to them ... designing widgets and phones and new devices and consumer products....