Research Group Projects and Descriptions

Human society is thoroughly immersed in a vast network of communicated information, consisting of media artifacts and procedural structures. Our technologies have become mobile, our story-making fragmentary, our impressions of meaning dynamic. How can we benefit from these changes, while navigating and engaging with these novel aspects of the modern life? Media Fabrics research focuses on a new paradigm: a semi-intelligent organism where lines of communication, threads of meaning, chains of causality, and streams of consciousness converge and intertwine to form a rich tapestry of creative story potentials, meaningful real-time dialogues, social interactions, and personal or communal art and story-making. The media fabric paradigm shapes how we see media construction, exchange, performance, and reflection. It is characterized by six critical attributes: it is connected, integral to our everyday lives, improvisational, mindful, synergistic, and open to self-reflection. As information manipulation becomes something more complex and more personal—as if in "conversation with an audience"—participants dynamically transcend their roles as creators, editors, and audience, continuously weaving and navigating original paths within the media fabric.

The project explores how to best engage design collaborators in an ongoing dialogue following a design charette process. A video record of the charette is recorded, parsed, posted, and transformed into an active web of meaning so that salient ideas and themes can be followed through the many phases of discussion. Initial processing is human intensive; however the intention is to apply common-sense technology in the future.

Alumni Contributor(s): Laura Elizabeth Nichols

This new version of the original online Confectionary project is open and extensible. Designed for constructing and exchanging mediated personal stories, the software invites participants to create story compositions by assembling video, text, image, and audio content within a two-dimensional collage interface. Participants can make use of flexible privacy controls. They publish their stories to a collaborative library and can create a sequence of multiple Confectionaries using the make-path feature. New work involves adaptations for multicultural and international use in schools.

Alumni Contributor(s): Aisling Kelliher and Kwasi Nti

Papert's World invites colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family of Seymour Papert to contribute rich-media stories about his life, his research, and research that he inspired. Participants use the rich-media story authoring and publishing tool, Confectionary, to collaborate on a "media scrapbook" collection. The site is continually updated with useful features such as a shared media library.