Advancing civic well-being through design.
MIT Civic Design Initiative
Comparative Media Studies / Writing
SHASS, MIT
The rising complexity in the challenges of civic information and engagement facing public health, environment, mobility, and privacy regimes calls for a means of mounting collaborative research and innovation efforts across professional and community boundaries. The Civic Design Initiative is organized to offer solutions to complex problems by approaching design as an interdisciplinary and collaborative means of unpacking and mapping complex issues and using a repertory of state-of-the-art material and digital media as tools for inclusive prototyping and evaluation of novel and sustainable solutions.
The Civic Design Initiative, is a research group in Comparative Media Studies and Writing Department at MIT that aims to offer a unique place and platform to support new and continuing research that address one or more of the complex civic challenges we face today.
At CDI, we seek to advance three aspects of media-related research, including:
1. Introducing complementary methodologies that bring civic/humanities perspectives into the design or planning processes of science and technology initiatives dealing with climate change
2. Designing communication programs that work together with science and technology climate change research to extend their impact into communities that might not otherwise reach
3. Designing transmedia user-centered models of engagement and communication aimed at high impact portions of global urban and other at-risk communities (especially women and children) subject to global warming effects.