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Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Space Exploration Initiative

Space Exploration Initiative
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City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
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Theme | CityScope

City Science researchers are developing a slew of tangible and digital platforms dedicated to solving spatial design and urban planning c...
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Mediated Atmosphere

The Mediated Atmosphere project envisions a smart office that is capable of dynamically transforming itself to enhance occupants' work ex...
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ChampScope

Virtual CityScope Champs-Élysées is an interactive and immersive platform that explores the future of Paris’ most important street.
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Conformable Decoders

Converting the patterns of nature and the human body into beneficial signals and energy
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Poetic Justice

Exploring new forms of social justice through art
Publication Research

Master Planning and Space Architecture for a Moon Village
Article Research

This crazy sculpture is made by an MIT-engineered machine that 3D prints biopolymers to replace plastic

Aguahoja—a winner of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards—rethinks the paradigm of recycling.
Project Research

Wanderers

The Wanderers were unveiled as part of the exhibition: ‘The Sixth Element: Exploring the Natural Beauty of 3D Printing' on display ...
Project Research

Living Mushtari

How can we design relationships between the most primitive and the most sophisticated life forms? Can we design wearables embedded with ...
Article Research

MIT professor Neri Oxman is as otherworldly as her creations

"We, as architects of the built environment, are entering an era where we’re designing for survival.”
How to build characters that have the everyday common sense, the ability to learn, and the sense of empathy that one finds in animals such a
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Hundred Dollar Laptop
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Digital Life
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Project Research

Proxymix: Influence of spatial configuration on human collaboration

Proxymix is a visualization tool to understand the influence of spatial configuration on human collaboration. This agent-based model at t...
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Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
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Scalable Cooperation

Reimagining human cooperation in the age of social media and artificial intelligence
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Beyond the Cradle

Beyond the Cradle
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Silk Pavilion II

What are radically sustainable methods for knitting, making and building in the age of the Anthropocene? How can humankind and members of...
Article Research

Neri Oxman grows tools for the future at new MoMA retrospective

“My team and I stand in the crossroads, challenging some of the processes that designers face at the intersection of biology and technology"
Article Research

New approach to sustainable building takes shape in Boston

A five-story mixed-use structure in Roxbury represents a new kind of net-zero-energy building, made from wood.
Project Research

Living Distance

Living Distance is a mission and a fantasy realized, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. Carried...
Article Research

Neri Oxman and Sir Norman Foster on the future of design

The venturesome Oxman talks experimental materials and lunar habitation with the renowned architect.
Article Research

Dezeen Awards names Aguahoja I design project of the year

Aguahoja I shows how nature can help us to design new materials, highlighting the relationship between nature and technology.
Project Research

The Deep Image of the City

How do you image a city that doesn't exist? DeepScope is a novel platform for interactive, real-time, and setup-less urban design vi...
Article Research

The most futuristic building in New York—currently on view at MoMA—wasn’t made by humans

To build a new pavilion in midtown Manhattan, the architect Neri Oxman employed 17,000 silkworms.
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TESSERAE: Self-Assembling Space Architecture

Overview: How will we build the coming generations of Space Architecture—the modules, space ships, and space stations that will ensc...
Project Research

Aguahoja

Programmable Water-Based Biocomposites for Digital Design and Fabrication across ScalesAguahoja is an exploration of nature’s design spac...
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Totems

Biodiversity on planet Earth is under momentous threat, with extinction rates estimated between 100 and 1,000 times their pre-human level...
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Glass II

Optically transparent and structurally sound, glass has played a significant role in the evolution of product and architectural design ac...
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Mediated Matter

Designing for, with, and by nature
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CityScope Volpe

CityScope Volpe is demonstrating most of the urban planning, analysis, and prediction features developed for the CityScope project. The s...
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Object-Based Media

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
Article Research

MITdesignX selects 2020 cohort

Ten multi-disciplinary teams join MIT’s design entrepreneurship accelerator.
Project Research

Moon Village

In 2015, the director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), Jan Wörner, introduced the concept of the “Moon Village.” Inspired by t...
Post Research

Zero Gravity Flight 2019

This mission included participation from several departments at MIT and outside collaborators from across the globe.
Project Research

AR Enhanced Wall Plants: Escape Pod

An environment of plants and mirrors that extends beyond the terrarium walls. 
Project Research

Persian Domes for Human Space Exploration on Mars

The Lut Desert of Iran is one of the most similar regions to Mars. Close to that area, there are vernacular adobe architectures that are ...
Project Research

[bike] swarm

As bikes navigate city streets after dark, they are often equipped with lights. The lights make the bikes visible to cars or other bikers...
Project Research

City Science Lab Andorra

Andorra and the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab are taking on the challenge of turning Andorra into an “Internationally ...
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CE 2.0

CE 2.0
Publication Research

CityScope: A Data-Driven Interactive Simulation Tool for Urban Design. Use Case Volpe

Alonso, L., Zhang, Y. R., Grignard, A., Noyman, A., Sakai, Y., ElKatsha, M., ... & Larson, K. (2018, July). Cityscope: a data-driven interactive simulation tool for urban design. Use case volpe. In International Conference on Complex Systems (pp. 253-261). Springer, Cham.
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Personal Robots

Building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better
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Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
Article Research

Neri Oxman has all the answers

Mediated Matter head Neri Oxman talks to ELLE about her work.
Project Research

MoCho: Mobility choices and societal impacts

MoCho (short for "Mobility Choices") is a CityScope module focused on mobility choices and societal impacts. This tool helps pr...
Project Research

Gemini

Gemini—an acoustical “twin chaise"—spans multiple scales of the human existence extending from the warmth of the womb to the stretches ...
Project Research

DCP: Digital Construction Environment

The Digital Construction Environment is the first architectural-scale structure fabricated with the Digital Construction Platform (DCP). ...
Article Research

Dezeen Awards 2019 design longlist announced

The Dezeen Awards 2019 design longlist includes two projects from the Mediated Matter group.
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Water-Based Additive Manufacturing

This research presents water-based robotic fabrication as a design approach and enabling technology for additive manufacturing (AM) of bi...
Project Research

Maiden Flight

Maiden Flight is an autonomous biological laboratory environment designed for studying the impact of space flight on the sole reproductiv...
Project Research

City Science Lab Aalto

Aalto University, Finland, and the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group are co-developing a version of the MIT CityScope platform for urban...
Project Research

Telepresent Drawings in Space

This project asks, how can we transmit experiences across space and time? The launching point of the project is to create a drawing that ...
Article Research

Six suborbital research payloads from MIT fly to space and back

Space Exploration Initiative research aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard experiment capsule crossed the Karman line for three minutes
Post Research

Six suborbital research payloads fly on Blue Origin New Shepard

The projects on board the Media Lab's first suborbital rocket flight
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TESSERAE: Suborbital launch test

On May 2nd, 2019 we launched three TESSERAE v2 hardware tiles into space and back! They rode to just over 100km (past the Karman line) on...
Project Research

Spatial Flux: Body and architecture in space

Structurally, zero gravity means that we do not have to contend with architecture's greatest arch-nemesis, gravity. This opens up a new w...
Project Research

CityScope PlayGround: MIT East Campus

This project depicts the design, deployment and operation of a Tangible Regulation Platform, a physical-technological apparatus made for ...
Article Research

Space is poised for explosive growth. Let’s get it right.

Before low-earth orbit is clogged with hotels, satellite traffic, and debris, we should plan for the extra-planetary community we want.
Project Research

Escape Pod

The esc-Pod  (or Escape Pod) is an exploratory platform for researchers investigating moments of refuge within our bustling work liv...
Publication Research

Self-Assembling Space Habitats: TESSERAE design and mission architecture

Ekblaw, Ariel, and Joseph Paradiso. “ Self-Assembling Space Habitats:TESSERAE Technology and Mission Architecture for Zero-g Construction ” To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference (2019).
Project Research

Orbit Weaver

Gravity anchors all existence on Earth.It pulls a chaotic world to one single point in every moment of life. Even though gravity is every...
Project Research

FIBERBOTS: Design of a multi-agent, fiber composite digital fabrication system

FIBERBOTS is a digital fabrication platform fusing cooperative robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated mate...
Project Research

FindingPlaces

What is FindingPlaces?In reaction to the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of refugees in the city of Hamburg (DE) in 2015, the Lord Ma...
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Project Research

Amoetecture

Amoeba Wall: a context aware wall system. Amoetecture is a set of amoeba-like dynamic spatial elements, including transformable floors, c...
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Project Research

Amoeba Wall: A context-aware wall system

Amoeba Wall: A context aware wall system: Amoetecture is a set of amoeba-like dynamic spatial elements, including transformable floo...
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Project Research

Silk Pavilion

The Silk Pavilion explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales.The primary ...
Project Research

Spaces that Perform Themselves

As we generally experience on earth, there is no space without sound and there is no sound without space. Building on the understanding o...