Research Group Projects and Descriptions

Can animated playground props support and possibly enhance open-ended and physically active play in playgrounds? This project expands the repertoire of objects conceived specifically for children’s outdoor play environments. A category of playground prop called space explorer suggests new opportunities for children to experience their outdoor play environment.

A new set of conditions for the design of architecture and automobiles has emerged as a result of the digital revolution. Information technology, low-cost sensing, low-cost computation, CAD/CAM, and innovative materials have changed the rules. As a result, environments and products have greater variety, flexibility, embedded intelligence, and functionality. Mass customization has surpassed mass production. This research looks at developing customizable, intelligent environments beginning with the loft apartment and small car contexts. Such environments would allow for movable wall partitions, connectivity and interchangeability among electronic systems, flexible climatic control, complex spatial configurations, intelligent plumbing and mechanical systems, and adaptive packaging and integration of consumer products.

Tomorrow's networked car of the future is accessible to the physical and virtual resources of the city. Physical resources include parking, infrastructure, access to goods, and cultural/social amenities. Information resources include knowledge about how to access these resources, an understanding of how the city works, and increased connectivity to the city, cars, and the ebb and flow of their dynamic systems. The Car in the City project explores the creation of useful automotive applications through the development lens of user scenarios.

Alumni Contributor(s): Jonathan Gips and Philip Liang

The CityCar Chassis is a full-scale and modular testing platform consisting of four independently controlled "Wheel Robots," an extruded aluminum frame, battery pack, driver's interface, and seating for two. Each "Wheel Robot" is capable of over 120 degrees of steering freedom, thus giving the CityCar chassis omnidirectional driving ability such as sideways parking, zero-radius turning, torque steering, and variable velocity (in each wheel) steering. The four-wheeler also allows the CityCar design team to add a highly personalized body/cabin and swap in an eventual folding frame.

To explore the relationship between the car and the city, we have created a stackable, electric, two-passenger "CityCar." The one-way, sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. Vehicle stacks placed throughout the city will create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, citizens will have the flexibility to combine mass transit and individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them; like luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle from the front of the stack. The CityCar is not a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a new vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility. This design will eventually be developed into a full-scale show vehicle.

Alumni Contributor(s): Patrik Kunzler and Philip Liang

Design and modeling processes in architecture and the automotive industry have evolved along completely separate paths. This research project compares these processes in order to discover areas of potential translation or cross-fertilization. Areas such as aesthetics, software, tools, manufacturing, and fabrication have the highest likelihood of translatability.

Dialup Radio is an audiocentric, mobile-phone-based independent media service. It has been designed and tested with activists in sub-Saharan Africa, and is expected to be deployed in several locations in 2008.

Working with Juan Alberto Belloch, the mayor of Zaragoza, Spain, MIT developed a programmable water wall composed of digitally controlled solenoids that releases water droplets to create a dynamic, urban-scale intervention for Expo 2008. This project focuses on the potential of advanced communications and media technology in the public realm of the Milla Digital in the center of the old city of Zaragoza, rather than in its buildings and private development. The result is an urban design and digital framework, and specific proposals for digitally enhanced environments that will serve the learning, skill development, and social interests of Zaragoza's citizens, as well as making the city more attractive for business growth and tourism.

We are developing, with SYM and ITRI, an innovative concept scooter for the Milan Motorshow in November 2007. The goal of this design is to tackle the biggest problems in major urban centers: pollution, congestion, parking, and energy use. The scooter is a electric, foldable, and stackable motor-bike; it is part of a vehicle-sharing system that allows users to pick up a bike from a scooter stack and drop off at another stack anywhere in the city. The bike utilizes scooter-sized "Wheel Robots" that were developed for the CityCar project. The design team will develop innovative business and ownership models to help implement the scooter through pilot programs developed jointly by candidate cities.

Speakeasy is a community-based telephone service that connects multilingual volunteers, non-English speaking immigrants, and social service agencies.

TxTMob is a text-message service developed for political activists engaged in direct action and mass mobilizations. Approximately 6,000 protestors used TxTMob during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions of 2004. TxTMob was also used by demonstrators in Kiev during Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and by activists during George W. Bush's 2005 inauguration in Washington, DC.

We are experimenting with systems that blur the boundary between urban lighting and digital displays in public spaces. These systems consist of liberated pixels, which are not confined to rigid frames as are typical urban screens. Liberated pixels can be applied to existing horizontal and vertical surfaces in any configuration and communicate with each other to enable a different repertoire of lighting and display patterns. We are currently developing “urban pixels,” a wireless infrastructure for liberated pixels. Composed of autonomous, solar-powered units, the system presents a programmable and distributed interface that is flexible and easy to deploy. Each unit includes an on-board battery, solar cells, RF transceiver unit, and microprocessor.

We are exploring the potential of low-cost, networked sensing and actuation technologies to improve urban agriculture, promote public health, and foster deep connections between people and the natural environment.

Virtual Towing allows a city to rapidly collect and redistribute vehicles, by enabling a single driver to tow multiple vehicles without mechanically connecting them. Given the principles of one-way vehicle sharing in the City Car concept, the need to stabilize the city's vehicle fleet metabolism is critical to properly balancing vehicle demand and location. Virtual towing builds upon the (digital) wheel robot architecture and combines a multitude of sensing technologies in order to maximize security and efficiency. The key issues of adoption and system autonomy are being explored in this project. A small-scale, radio-controlled vehicle has been built to test the control of the wheel robots and will serve as a testing platform for virtual towing.

The mechanical components that make driving a vehicle possible—such as acceleration, braking, steering, and springing—are located inside the space of a hubless wheel, forming independent wheel robots and freeing the vehicular space of these components. Connected to the chassis are simple mechanical, power, and data connections, allowing for the wheel robots to plug in to a vehicle simply and quickly. A CPU in the vehicle provides the input necessary for driving according to the vehicle's dimensions or loading condition. The design of the wheel robots provides optimal contact patch placement, lower unsprung and rotational mass, omnidirectional steering, great space savings, and modularity, as the wheel robots can function appropriately on vehicles of different dimensions and weight. By "putting the whole car in the wheel," it is possible to separate production, service, and life cycles of the mechanical components of the car from those of its architectural components.

Alumni Contributor(s): Patrik Kunzler and Philip Liang

The Zero Car is a testing platform and chassis for the Wheel Robots project. Zero Car is a customizable and modular platform that houses the energy source (batteries), control system, and mechanical connections to smart wheel assemblies. The Zero Car will also be the future testing platform for our virtual towing simulation. Zero Car comes in multiple sizes: bicycle, tricycle, 4-wheels, and mini. The mini-Zero tests four omni-directional wheels attached to a chassis and wireless RC controller.

Alumni Contributor(s): Patrik Kunzler, Philip Liang and Eric F. Weber