Creative Synthesis

Collaborative Communications is our semi-regular collaborative newsletter. It functions as an overview of the ongoing collaborative activity and offers some features of collaborative members, updates, and reports on research, education, and artistic endeavors. If you’d like to get it in your email just go ahead and register as a collaborative member.

Branching Out

September 1st marks the day that the collaborative will branch out from its origins at MIT’s Media Laboratory and begin operating as an independent 501(c)(3) organization. We’re excited about the opportunity to get out in to the world and put our ideas on research, education and art in to practice. We hope you’re as enthusiastic as we are - some great things are coming up and we’ll be sure to let you know what’s going on.

Fundraising Initiatives

We’re beginning serious fundraising efforts here at the collaborative. You may have already noticed our web based donations for small scale fundraising. Additionally we’re finalizing documents for a large scale private fundraising effort. We plan to secure enough funding to develop the infrastructure necessary to pursue our research initiatives and grant opportunities. We’ll be sending out an additional mailing shortly containing the funding sheet, and we’d like your help in passing it along to possible donors.

Research: Recycling Ramp-up

We’re getting ready to launch several new recycled research projects at the Recycling Center. The Personal Zeitgeist has been in use for collaborative members, and as a stand alone install. We plan to test a hosted version of the zeitgiest as a recycled research project. The data collected by the zeitgeist will be used to build user profiles for user centered design. This gives us the opportunity to make a useful data collection, as well as test a different way to do recycled research experiments. We’re also testing our Graph Gear visualization tool in public before we retool it for a recycled research project. Stay tuned for that.

In addition to our efforts, we’re looking to expand recycled research beyond the collaborative. Any project that makes sense with open source software, open data, and iterative research and design is a good candidate for a recycled research project. If you know any research projects or software projects that would make sense, let us know and tell them you think they should be recycling their research.

Education: “High” Quality Research Pilot

We’ve completed a pilot case study for our “High” Quality Research program which takes High School level students and puts them in a University level research environment. The results with our latest test student Forrest continue to confirm that high school students possess both the drive and the technical skill that put them on part with undergraduate research assistants, at least in some respects. The Collaborative plans to continue with the program and branch out to include a larger number and variety of students.

Artistic: Kameraflage Kaptures Attention

Collaborative Connor Dickie continues his research into the intersection of ubiquitous technologies, fashion, and corporation with kameraflage. The web has been abuzz with overwhelming interest in the technology after kameraflage fashion is featured on hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs as well as newspapers and television.

Collaborative Updates

We’re working on some new facets of our web infrastructure at the Collaborative. We’ve already launched Creative TV, under the direction of Collaborative Leonardo Bonanni. Creative TV is a featured selection of video content about art and technology. We hope to continue to exclusive content, such as the featured videos on the XO Laptop and E-Ink flexible display. Complimenting this in the near future will be a full collaborative discussion forum and public facing code repository. These initiatives will help expand the collaboration and transparency of our work.

Web Curation:Our web curator, Shae Davidson, continues to do an incredible job cataloguing and commenting on acts of creative synthesis, transparency, activism, art and science that occur every day on the web. If you have any suggestions or comments for Shae, feel free to let him know.

Featured Collaborative: Leonardo Bonanni

Leonardo Bonanni is a PhD student in the Tangible Media Group at the Media Lab. He has a background in sculpture, architecture and industrial design as well as an MS from the Media Lab spent working on the kitchen of the future. He is interested in augmenting our interaction with the physical environment through innovative HCI, product and material design.

Upcoming: Leonardo will be teaching the class Futurecraft: Emerging Processes of Object Design at the MIT Media Lab (together with Amanda Parkes and Hiroshi Ishii). He asks the question: Why do we make things the way we do? Futurecraft investigates the product design paradigm, and considers what new practices and cultures of product design can arise when design and craft become one. For more on Leonardo, visit Leo.Media or his blog, Hyperexperience.