The MIT Media Lab is prepared to discover and create new innovations to address the dual challenge of improving our climate through affordable and sustainable energy sources and practices, and to develop each person’s capacity to live a life of health and wellbeing.

By way of the MIT Media Lab's Future Worlds collective research theme, the Media Lab aims to address the dual challenge of energy and climate by drawing on a unique combination of disciplines, from science to engineering, to design and the arts, and of fields of expertise from oceans to space and from genetics to cities. Moreover, by both collaborating with academic partners at MIT and across the country, international governments, NASA's Science Activation Program, and nonprofits, and by drawing on transformative technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, supercomputer visualizations, and powerful immersive experiences, the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all—the sentient, natural, and cosmic—worlds may flourish.

Through our targeted innovations for health and wellbeing, our Connected Mind + Body research theme, and Fluid Interfaces and Affective Computing groups, explore mental health concerns and the emotional connection between humans and machines, showing that they mutual benefit each other in offering hope for complicated emotional concerns that humans face in daily life.

We are designing tools, methods, and systems that connect rather than divide people to create a healthier democratic society in our Center for Constructive Communication. The MIT Center for Constructive Communication brings together researchers in AI, computational social science, digital interactive design, and learning technologies with software engineers, journalists, political scientists, designers, and community organizers to explore and address the effects of deepening social fragmentation in the United States.

At MIT, in efforts to address the dual challenge of climate and energy, the Media Lab’s research aligns with that of the MIT Climate + Sustainability Consortium in the specific areas of data visualizations, transportation modes + cities, nature-based solutions, and social-economic dimensions. In addition, the Media Lab also tackles the expansive environmental domains of oceans and space, domains largely overlooked with it comes to monitoring the effects of and the solutions for energy and climate.

The following examples demonstrate how the Media Lab both complements and adds to the work of the MCSC. 

MIT Climate + Sustainability Consortium seed project (D. Newman, Co-PI)

Climate Pocket for All: Climate Pocket for All (CP4All) enables fast and local climate projections with scientific machine learning. It is also a tool for practical, future climate planning, for characterizing climate risk, and for gauging societal understanding and response.

The Earth Intelligence Engine: The Earth Intelligence Engine (EIE) includes research and prototype development centered on weather and climate analysis, forecasting, and advanced data visualization that supports rapid, effective decision-making and long-term, strategic planning and operations for USAF. The EIE also creates benchmark, Media Lab-ready environmental datasets designed to promote AI advancements that benefit society at large.

Earth Mission Control: Aimed at fostering a deeper understanding of climate change, Earth Mission Control is designed to be an immersive, AR/VR data visualization platform. The platform is designed to create an environment whereby users can view and interpret Earth's "vital signs" through various intuitive modalities, facilitating a more natural form of learning.

Earth Data Revolution: In collaboration with the World Economic Forum, Earth Data Revolution focuses on harnessing the power of Earth intelligence, derived from EO data, to facilitate informed decision-making by business and government leaders.

Transportation Modes + Cities

City Science: The City Science research group proposes that new strategies must be found to create the places where people live and work in addition to the mobility systems that connect them, in order to meet the profound challenges of the future.

Click on the boxes below to explore a selection of City Science projects.

Nature-Based Solutions

Candlewax Rockets: The Space Enabled research group has been conducting projects that explore the use of paraffin and beeswax for small satellite missions. The benign nature of paraffin and beeswax compared to the toxicity and carcinogenicity which characterize currently-used propellants, such as hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, make paraffin an especially strong candidate for new entrants to the propulsion community.

Underwater Cameras: The Signal Kinetics research group has invented the world's first battery-free wireless underwater camera. Powered by underwater sound, this technology paves the way for massive, continuous, and long-term ocean deployments with many applications including marine life discovery, submarine surveillance, climatology, maritime archeology, geology, space exploration, aquaculture farming, and underwater climate change monitoring.

Social + Artistic Dimensions

Dual Energy-Climate Challenge: Meeting the dual-challenge—accommodating escalating global energy demand while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions—requires a careful balance between ensuring energy security, fostering economic development, and preserving environmental sustainability. Under the Future Worlds research theme of the MIT Media Lab, our work uses a transformative, cross-disciplinary approach to this significant issue, leveraging Earth Observation data to gain a deeper understanding of the energy-climate nexus, and consequently enriching our analysis and solutions framework. In working with industry experts and policy-makers across developed and developing regions, the project extends to long-term strategic planning to influence decision-making across the energy sector.

Overstory Overture: Addressing climate change is told not only through data and scientific argument but equally, and perhaps more powerfully, through storytelling and the arts. At a deep emotional and spiritual level, by way of the performative and musical arts, the symphonic production of Overstory Overture drew out humanity's embedded interconnectedness with nature and the need for a deeper sensibility to nature's own impetus to sustain itself. 

Health + Mental Health: We develop systems that support  health and wellbeing, with a special focus on mental health, using technologies  such as wearables, brain computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

Emotional Wellbeing: The Affective Computing research group creates and evaluates new ways of bringing together Emotion AI and other affective technologies in order to make people's lives better.

More on the research of the Center for Constructive Communication.

For more information, contact the Media Lab’s Director of Development, David Cave, at dcave@media.mit.edu or 617-324-3786.

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