Center for Civic Media
The MIT Center for Civic Media creates and deploys technical and social tools that fill the information needs of communities. Bridging two established programs at MIT—one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change—the Center for Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.
Community Innovators Lab
The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth.
Education Arcade
The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. TEA’s research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players. TEA’s mission is to demonstrate the social, cultural, and educational potentials of videogames by initiating new game development projects, coordinating interdisciplinary research efforts, and informing public conversations about the broader and sometimes unexpected uses of this emerging art form in education.
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a five-year research initiative that addresses important challenges faced by the global digital game research community and industry, with a core focus on identifying and solving research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore’s digital game industry.
MIT’s HyperStudio – Laboratory for Digital Humanities explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of education and research in the humanities. HyperStudio focuses on questions about the integration of technology into humanities curricula within the broader context of scholarly inquiry and educational practice.
Imagination, Computation and Expression Lab
The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” — enabling new forms of human creative culture while empowering users. Imagination computing systems use artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques as expressive resources for new forms of interactive narrative, gaming, online identity, software art, and new forms of expressive digital media.
Media Lab: Center for Future Storytelling
The Center for Future Storytelling at the Media Lab is rethinking storytelling for the 21st century. The Center takes a new and dynamic approach to how we tell our stories, creating new methods, technologies, and learning programs that recognize and respond to the changing communications landscape.
The MIT Mobile Experience Lab seeks to radically reinvent and creatively design connections between people, information and places. Using cutting-edge information and mobile technology, the lab seeks to improve peopleʻs lives through the careful design of meaningful experiences.
Tidmarsh Farms – Living Observatory
The Living Observatory is an initiative for documenting and interpreting ecological change that invites people, individually and collectively, to better understand the relationships between ecological processes, human lifestyle choices, and climate change adaptation. Living Observatory focuses on land-use change at Tidmarsh Farms, as this property goes through a large-scale river and wetlands restoration. The project fosters inquiry-based collaborations between scientists, technologists, designers, artists and the public to develop local geo-coded observations using a range of environmental, acoustic and imaging sensors. These diverse data sets will be used to construct an evolving 3D documentary environment that can be navigated to explore land-use transformation using physical, biological and chemical change indicators, acoustic and light-based resonances, as well as video sequences of human decision-making that frame the land use transformation.