Last Thursday was spent visiting, lecturing and workshopping at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. The Media Lab is similar in scope and mission to NYU’s ITP, where I teach. It operates at the intersection of design, media and technology. My host, Leah Buechley, is an Assistant Professor there. Leah was also our collaborator on the LilyPad XBee wearable radio system. Her lab is called the High-Low Tech Group. The High-Low Tech is focused on engaging a diverse audience in designing and building technologies for themselves, something I feel pretty great about.
While there I had the pleasure of meeting Jennifer Jacobs, who is working on the expression of identity through technology, Emily Lovell, whose doctoral work examines craft and technology for educational resource design, Jie Qi who is ingeniously blending electronics and computation with paper craft, Sam Jacoby a student interested in the relationships between traditional hand-work and computation, and David Mellis who is working create tools and examples that help people to design, build, and program personally crafted electronic devices, when he’s not writing the Arduino software as a member of the core team.
I shared my Fun with XBees talk about the cool things people are doing with XBee radios and the iDigi cloud platform, immediately followed by a full workshop in basic wireless sensor networking that was open to the entire Media Lab. With the basics under their belt, my next class there will probably focus on Internet-connected devices hooked up to cloud computing. Here’s a few snapshots from the first workshop:
