Research Group Projects and Descriptions

We define Design Ecology as the study of malleable design that is aware of and can seamlessly react to changing environments. This new approach to design will enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment. Our relationship with information should be appropriately situated in both spatial and social contexts; thus, while traditional design methods focus on single products and users, we believe that looking at the interplay between multiple people and multiple devices will yield significant results. To this end, we create visual communication that incorporates new display and computational technologies, novel software techniques, and perceptual and cognitive issues.

Giving little printed paper cards to each other to exchange contact information will very soon become obsolete, as all communication becomes digital. Nonetheless, we might still enjoy the ritual of handing over a nicely designed physical object when meeting someone new. And if so, we wouldn't want that object to be thicker or bigger than a business card is now. What will the business card of the future look like, considering emerging technologies such as QR codes, E-ink, and the ubiquity of cell phones and digital contact formats? How will the cards of the future communicate our occupations, status, prestige, and personality as business cards do today? And which new uses could we imagine?

Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. Today's mapping software is largely based on static data sets, and neither incorporates the time dimension in its display nor provides for real-time data streams. Cartagen helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. While we live in an environment of real-time and temporally situated information, the mapping tools we have are not adequate for viewing, composing, or using this data. Cartagen uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.

To celebrate the construction of the new building, E14, the public installation E14 1/2 seeks to capture the Media Lab community's vision for our new space and our future directions via audience participation with a large projection on the facade of the new building. We consider the Lab's role within the School of Architecture and Planning, as well as MIT, and how the new community of E14-E15 will be a center of learning, collaboration, and innovation across all disciplines.

Today's digital typography is more or less based on the format defined by movable type, with only a few parametric innovations. It has gone a long way, and surmounted many obstacles, to have similar visual features as printed type. At the same time, people are writing less and less with their hands, and the ancient art of handwriting—which was used and necessary to express many personal attributes—is dying out. We are exploring ways to keep written, personal expression a part of our digital life, as well as methods for our personal communication to continue to inherently express our personality, status, and current emotions. For example, in our digital lives, what will a signature look like, or a quickly scribbled love note? We are working with a new typographic format and experimenting with input devices inherent to human expression, such as gesture, voice, and body motion, to address these questions.

GLOP is a Web-based graphics framework for creating complex, non-linear animations and designs that respond and adapt to their environment. The GLOP environment aims to make interactive programming more accessible to a broader public by taking a novel visual approach to programming: users can explore and understand the behavior of graphic elements by interacting with them, and through easy access to the underlying code structure. We see GLOP as a more intuitive and powerful way to create interactive content both on and off the Web. The interface is built for collaborative work, providing interfaces on the desktop, larger public displays, and a variety of mobile devices, with drag-and-drop transfer among each.

One of the major barriers designers and artists encounter when programming digital media is the difficulty of translating the mental models of their interactive creations into a format and language that can be interpreted by computers. This problem arises because current software development environments demand a sequential format for code. In contrast, today's digital media is characterized by dynamism and interactivity, and creative individuals conceptualize these computational processes with a wide variety of mental models. MIDE proposes a new interface for visualizing, editing, and manipulating code. It seeks to enable a user-defined conceptual visiospatial representation of computation that complements the traditional text-based perspective, and by maintaining continuous relationships between the two, allow users to navigate code in multiple perspectives synchronously. Further, MIDE allows fluid transitions between different modes of computational representation and different levels of representational detail by enabling zooming and information abstraction mechanisms.