This talk will not be webcast.
All talks at the Media Lab, unless otherwise noted, are open to the public.
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Physical transformation is all around us, constant and ubiquitous. Yet design remains focused on the object as an essentially static thing. How can the designer understand transformation itself as a parameter that can be shaped, crafted, and optimized?

All talks at the Media Lab, unless otherwise noted, are open to the public.

All talks at the Media Lab, unless otherwise noted, are open to the public.
Join us on Twitter: #MLTalks

Co-Presented with the MIT Press.

Tom Steinberg is founder of MySociety.org, a project based in the UK which has built a slew of sites that help people report problems with and gain service from their local and national government. As their website says, "Using our services, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time, over 65,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, over 120,000 people get emailed about things that happen in Parliament, and at least 77 tiny hats have been knitted for charity."

Blogged:

• Matt Stempeck, Research Assistant, Center for Civic Media
• Ethan Zuckerman, Director, Center for Civic Media

Information markets benefit the communities they serve by facilitating electronic distributed exchange of information. Further benefits include enhancing knowledge sharing, innovation, and productivity. This research explores innovative market mechanisms to build long-term sustainable incentives that many existing platforms fail to provide, while encouraging pro-social behavior. A key advantage of this research is direct application of information economic and macroeconomic theory to design of social software.

The rapid progress of urbanization on earth leads to modern cities, which provide people with a comfortable life; but urbanization is followed by big challenges, such as traffic jams, increasing population, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing is emerging as a concept where every sensor, device, person, vehicle, building, and street in the urban areas can be used as a component to probe city dynamics to further enable city-wide computing for coping with these challenges.

Media Lab alumna Ayah Bdeir will discuss how she started littleBits, an open-source kit of electronic modules that snap together with magnets for prototyping and play. Bdeir will talk about the LittleBits technical platform, an entirely analog, modular, "object-oriented" hardware platform. On the heels of her recent TED talk, she will discuss the idea of turning interaction into building blocks, and providing the ability to program behavior without having to write any code.