Research
Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
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City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
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Poetic Justice

Exploring new forms of social justice through art
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Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
Article Research

Empowering Cambridge youth through data activism

Mayor’s youth employment program brought local high schoolers to MIT this summer.
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MIT Center for Constructive Communication

MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Archived
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Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
Archived
Project Research

Actionable Auditing: Coordinated bias disclosure study

Algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, yet scholarship on the impac…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Civic Entertainment

Civic Entertainment is a project based at the Center for Civic Media that explores the intersection of civic engagement with film, televisi…
Archived
Article Research

The Synthetic Biology Community Builder

David Sun Kong speaks with NEO.LIFE about science, activism, and how biotechnology can empower ordinary people.
Project Research

RealTalk for Change Boston

A revolutionary new piece of civic infrastructure for more inclusive public input.Real Talk for Change is a collaboration between MIT’s Cen…
Article Research

Some Bostonians feel largely unheard. With MIT’s ‘Real Talk’ portal now public, here’s a chance to really listen

A database of community conversations in various Boston neighborhoods launches publicly on Monday.
Article Research

MIT’s ‘Real Talk’ campaign gives likely voters a voice in Boston’s race for mayor

Researchers enlist grassroots activists to engage “invisible” residents about the future of the city.
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RAISE

RAISE
Archived
Research
PlusMinus

PlusMinus
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Community Biotechnology

Community Biotechnology
Publication Research

Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Anti-Trust is Not Enough, Another Tech is Possible

Barendregt, W., Becker, C., Cheon, E., Clement, A., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Schuler, D., & Suchman, L. (2021). Defund Big Tech, Refund Community. Tech Otherwise. https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.e0100a3f
Archived
Project Research

CabildoxLatAm

CabildoxLatAm: A space for digital participation in Latin AmericaIn the face of the challenges that have emerged and been exacerbated&…
Archived
Publication Research

The Design of Pseudo-Participation

Victoria Palacin, Matti Nelimarkka, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, and Christoph Becker. 2020. The Design of Pseudo-Participation. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2 (PDC '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 40–44.
Publication Research

Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design

Becker, C., Light, A., Frauenberger, C., Walker, D., Palacin, V., Ahmed, S. I., ... & Nemer, D. (2020, June). Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020-Participation (s) Otherwise-Volume 2 (pp. 181-184).
Archived
Project Research

Kicks x Cliques

Leveraging sneaker culture to influence civic engagement. Marginalized groups have influence on digital platforms but are often unhear…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Let's play: Waste at MIT

Let's play: Waste at MIT is a game about trash; it’s also a game about understanding civic infrastructure. This project explores the use of…
Archived
Article Research

How Delhi Crime gave audiences a chance to reimagine the police force

Richie Mehta’s show balances negative media narratives of the Indian police & catalyses empathetic conversations on their working conditions
Project Research

Data for Refugees

Data for refugees is a big data challenge whereby Turk Telekom opens a large dataset of anonymized mobile phone records to research groups …
Archived
Project Research

votoMosaic

A tapestry where each pixel represents a pledge by an individual to vote. Anyone can participate and watch the growing and changing image t…
Archived
Article Research

Supposedly ‘fair’ algorithms can perpetuate discrimination

"We must provide a mechanism for civil society to be informed and engaged in the way in which algorithms are used."
Article Research

Defense of Amazon's face recognition tool undermined by its only known police client

So far Amazon’s frontline defense against advocates and academics has been: Researchers are setting the search parameters incorrectly.