Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process […]
Tag: M.I.T
In “Globalization 3.0,” Friedman contends, people from far-flung places will become principal players in the marketplace […]
All that’s required to achieve sustainability, says Rebecca Henderson, is to clean up your current operations and/or rethink the business. “That’s easy,” she says — with a smile. Henderson has spent much of her career trying to help firms embrace and survive such transformations. She and her colleagues have analyzed why businesses get stuck in their ways, and how they can break free to act boldly around the challenge and opportunity of sustainability […]
In an exclusive interview with the Chartered Institute of IT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke about the latest on the semantic web, his view on the advent of artificial life forms on the internet, the biggest barriers to enabling the information society for all, where the mobile web is going and more […]
We’ve already seen MIT researcher Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense projector-based augmented-reality system in some cool demos, but he just gave a TED talk and his latest ideas are the wildest yet. At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.
Not so long ago, Tim Brown recounts, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion […]
In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize […]
Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. M.I.T. engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.
In this talk, David Merrill gives us an overview of his research on a number of novel platforms for accessing and manipulating digital content. These systems use expressive gesture and visual attention as inputs, explore multi-user interaction, and leverage our understanding of physical materials. I will focus on my most ambitious project and Ph.D. topic, Siftables, a tangible interaction platform that gives physical embodiment to information and digital media items. The system utilizes sensing, graphical display, embedded computation and wireless communication to free interactions with digital content from the desktop environment. Siftables points the way toward a new generation of interactive tools that bend to our needs, rather than bending us to meet their limitations.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counter-intuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions […]