By Denise Brehm

Caitlin Morris, a PhD student and 2024 MAD Fellow affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, designs digital learning platforms that make room for the “social magic” that influences curiosity and motivation.

Subsequently, Morris has become involved in community-based learning in diverse ways: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Festival of Learning; she leads creative coding community meetups; and she’s been active in the open-source software community development.

“My years of organizing learning and making communities — both in person and online — have shown me firsthand how powerful social interaction can be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris said. “My research is really about identifying which elements of that social magic are most essential, so we can design digital environments that better support those dynamics.”