Mapping the Media Lab

Interactive, art direction

Hover over a research group and watch the map light up: every project connected to it, every theme it touches, every unexpected thread linking it to work happening elsewhere across MIT. The MIT Media Lab at any given moment comprises upward of 30 research groups, dozens of active projects, and a set of cross-cutting themes that cut across all of them in ways that are not always immediately legible, even from the inside. Mapping the Media Lab was commissioned by then Media Lab director, Dava Newman, as a tool for making those connections visible, first as an analog community project rolling out new research themes to students and researchers, and then as this interactive digital ecosystem map, presented as a touchscreen display during member events and as a way for member companies to discover which corners of the Lab's work intersected with their own interests.

The map was built in Kumu with information architecture by David Sweeney and Chia Evers, and art directed by me. Nodes representing groups, projects, themes, and initiatives illuminate their connections on hover, inviting the kind of exploratory, associative navigation that mirrors the Lab's own anti-disciplinary spirit. There is something in the logic of this piece that connects back to the diffusion limited aggregation work I made in graduate school: the pleasure of a system that reveals its own underlying structure through play.

+ Programming: Jeff Mohr/Kumu
+ Information Architecture: David Sweeney, Chia Evers
+ Art Direction: Olivia Verdugo

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