MDR study project 2005-2006

The media and design research focus area (MDR) of the Media Lab organizes a study project during the study year 2005-2006. The study project is an organized whole that takes students through a research, design and development (RD&D) process, while offering also taught modular activities (some of them evaluated and credited separately) that contain lectures, assignments and hands-on workshops. The study project is offered with two complementary, parallel strands:

1 (made@home): design for new media practices in the private everyday life of the family

2 (Mediaspace Design) focusing on designing new journalistic/non-fiction media formats and practices for a converged digital mediaspace

Both strands have a distinct approach and direction, but also share several activities and modules. Students of the two strands will form groups that belong to one of the strands, but they will also work together in certain common hands on workshops and courses.

Objectives:

• Immerse students in a set of applications and social practices relating to digital media;
• Provide insights and knowlede of a specific RD&D process and its theoretical and cultural backgrounds;
• Introduce students to RD&D methods appropriate for this field
• Offer support for realizing concept design with periodical critiques and tools/skills for advanced design thinking
• Offer a community of interested peers, experts, advisors and stakeholders with whom students can work for several months

Outcomes

• a finished RD&D project (pilots, demos, interventions or prototypes)
• an exhibition in the spring/summer of 2006
• an evolving mediaspace that describes and documents the work

Topic descriptions

made@home:

Families and homes have been always the playground for new evolving practices of producing and sharing media. With digital technology, the way how home videos, photo albums, children’s drawings, travel reports, postcards, letters, tapes etc. are produced, exchanged and shared is evolving. Families and homes are appropriating existing tools and "designing" new tools, effectively reinventing the way traditional home made media is understood and used.

How this is happening? What are families doing with media and what they could do latter? How a practice is born and develops along with the tools? What kind of a relationship might evolve between designers and those that live with the designs?

mediaspace design:

The media environment is changing because of digital convergence, and evolving from distinct channels into a seamless mediaspace. The Mediaspace Design project will explore these changes, study them and their societal significance critically, and develop experimental productions that experiment with and demonstrate interesting new audiovisual media possibilities.

Some of these are: navigable video and audio, evolving programs, collaborative annotation and editing, social processing and recommendation, peer-to-peer distribution and open content production.