The MIT Media Lab brings art, science, engineering, and design into the same conversation.

We ask what the world could be, and build to find out. A research community and home to a graduate program at MIT, the Lab brings different kinds of minds to questions no single discipline can answer alone. For forty years, those encounters have led us to invent new ways to learn, question, create, and experience the world.

Electronic ink changed how we read. Scratch opened new ways for young people to create with code. Both were invented at the Media Lab. They're examples of our lasting ambition to give people new ways to learn, express themselves, and shape the world around them.

Rosalind Picard and Jocelyn Scheirer made a glove that turned changes in skin conductivity into light. An audience became part of the experiment. Then a visitor from Swatch asked whether the sensor could work on the wrist. Picard thought it wouldn't, until she tried it. The unexpected result changed what she thought the technology could become, and the questions she wanted to pursue.

Students bring their own histories, skills, and questions. Through graduate research in Media Arts & Sciences, they develop those questions alongside faculty and fellow researchers. They make things, challenge assumptions, and learn across disciplines. A prototype is not only an answer. It is a way to ask a better question.

Our mission: to create transformative technologies, experiences, and systems that enable people to reimagine and redesign their lives. We engage people everywhere in creative experiences integrating art, science, design, and engineering. Experimenting in the spaces where humanity and technology interface, we work with organizations and communities to transform people's dreams and ideas into reality through education, research, innovation, and inspiring creativity.

Our vision: to invent a better and more just future—by, with, and for all. Our community of students, researchers, faculty, and staff seeks to transform ideas into impactful new applications, fields, and movements by exploring imaginatively, experimenting iteratively, collaborating playfully, and analyzing critically. We will create opportunities for people to engage in creative exploration and envision better lives, communities, and environments.

Shared Values

• Working with excellence, integrity, and humility
  In our work and interactions, we bring honesty, transparency, respect, and self-accountability.
• Celebrating individuality and community
  We belong to a magical, quirky community, welcoming and caring for all forms of diversity, including cultural backgrounds and personal identities, thought, cross-generational experience, and field of research.
• Fostering and developing creativity
  We imagine, build, and inspire whole new ways to use imagination and original ideas in our work, the ways we think and act, the people and communities we impact, and risk-taking and pushing boundaries in research and innovation.
• Collaborating openly and actively
  We seek to build new research and working relationships with non-traditional collaborators within the Media Lab, across MIT, and globally from academia, industry, governments, NGOs, and foundations.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion aren't words we post; they're work we do every day, so we value and welcome every member of our community, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, religion, or any other part of who they are.

Membership brings your team directly onto the lab floor to solve intractable problems alongside world-class pioneers who defy traditional boundaries. Philanthropic gifts ignite the radical, open-ended research that redefines what humanity can create next, fueling breakthroughs that no standard budget would ever risk. Together, these forces drive tangible real-world impact while giving your organization a frontline stake in inventing a better world.