Center for Civic Media

The Center for Civic Media develops new tools and strategies for fostering civic engagement and strengthening social bonds in local communities. The Center takes technologies that have proven so powerful for virtual communities, and re-envisions and re-engineers them to enhance civic participation at a local level, providing new ways for local residents to organize and share information for the purpose of democratic deliberation, neighborhood collaboration, and political action.

Education Arcade

The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. Its research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players. Its mission is to demonstrate the social, cultural, and educational potentials of videogames by initiating new game development projects, coordinating interdisciplinary research efforts, and informing public conversations about the broader and sometimes unexpected uses of this emerging art form in education.

E-Lab: The Laboratory for Public Engagement with Science

The E-Lab provides a home for members of the MIT community (and others) to engage issues of science communication in colloquia, events, conferences and other venues. E-Lab research and production activities will also generate opportunities for MIT undergraduates and graduate students to work on science communication projects in the rapidly evolving media environment. It has a three-part mission comprised of:

• Research: studying effective public communication of science, technology, and medicine in the emerging media environment
• Development & Production: testing, making, and disseminating new ideas in science communication within the broad public arena
• Educational Enrichment for MIT Students: generating new courses and providing research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students.

HyperStudio

The HyperStudio explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of education and research in the humanities. Its work focuses on questions about the integration of technology into humanities curricula within the broader context of scholarly inquiry and educational practice. The HyperStudio conceptualizes, develops, and deploys innovative media applications in close collaboration with scholars, educators, students, and developers. The HyperStudio is sponsored by Foreign Languages & Literatures in close collaboration with the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Literature Faculty.

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab

The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts -- "phantasmal media" -- enabling new forms of human creative culture while empowering users. Imagination computing systems use artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques as expressive resources for new forms of interactive narrative, gaming, online identity, software art, and new forms of expressive digital media.

Mobile Experience Lab

The Mobile Experience Lab seeks to radically reinvent and creatively design connections between people, information, and places. Using cutting-edge information and mobile technology, the Lab seeks to improve people's lives through the careful design of meaningful experiences. Our multidisciplinary team researches and designs new technologies, carefully considering their impact in societies, spaces, and communities.

MIT Open Documentary Lab

The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings technologists, storytellers, and scholars together to advance the new arts of documentary. Drawing on MIT's legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the Open Documentary Lab is a place of generative dialogue between media makers, technologists, and scholars. By participating in Lab activities, visiting artists and aspiring media makers not only explore the potential of new technologies, they collaborate with MIT researchers to shape the storytelling practices of the future.

MIT Game Lab

Play, as expressed in games, is the most positive response of the human spirit to a universe of uncertainty.

At the MIT Game Lab, we explore the potential of play as it is amplified by new technologies. Combining the inventiveness of MIT engineering and computer science, the pedagogy of the MIT Education Arcade, and the research and development of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the MIT Game Lab brings together scholars, creators, and technologists to teach, conduct research, and develop new approaches for applied game design and construction.

Ranked by the Princeton Review as the #2 Game Design Program in North America, the MIT Game Lab maintains MIT's role as a leader in the study, design, and development of games. The Lab's goal is to explore, educate, and engage the public by creating groundbreaking games, interactive online courses, and new applications to real world challenges.

The Trope Tank

The Trope Tank is a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, dedicated to developing new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by considering the material, formal, and historical aspects of creative computing. The Trope Tank studies, translates, and develops electronic literature (including interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, and digital poetry), video games, hobbyist programming, and demoscene productions, focusing on computing's engagement with language and poetics.