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MIT Media Lab group unveils Living Knitwork Pavilion at Burning Man 2023

2023-09-14T11:42:00-04:00

A group of designers, artists, and technologists from MIT have unveiled details of a pavilion delivered by the team for Burning Man 2023. The Living Knitwork Pavilion is described by the group as “an architectural-scale interactive 3D knitted textile shade structure that leverages electrically and optically-active yarns and explores photochromism by day and light-movements interaction at night.”

Image credit: Irmandy Wicaksono/MIT Media Lab

The modular pavilion comprises a dodecagonal pyramid, measuring 18 feet in height and 26 feet in width. Crafted from 3D knitted yarns that are both optically and electrically active, the pavilion senses movements and changes its color and luminescence in response, creating a unique optic experience across the day and night.

Image credit: Irmandy Wicaksono/MIT Media Lab

The pavilion is formed of twelve petals, each embedded with functional yarns. The yarns can ...

MIT researchers create strong, ultra-light architected materials using kirigami techniques

2023-08-24T14:02:00-04:00

Researchers at MIT have developed a lightweight architected material inspired by the cellular structures found in natural materials such as honeycombs and bones. Produced with techniques borrowed from the Japanese kirigami paper-cutting technique, the strong metal lattices are lighter than cork while also holding customizable mechanical properties.

Image courtesy of the researchers via MIT

Using kirigami techniques, the MIT team led by Professor Neil Gershenfeld of the Center for Bits and Atoms has produced plate lattice structures on a larger scale than was previously possible. The structures are described as "steel cork" by Gershenfeld due to their lightweight nature combined with high strength and stiffness.

“To make things like cars and airplanes, a huge investment goes into tooling. This manufacturing process is without tooling, like 3D printing. But unlike 3D printing, our process can set the limit for record material properties,” Gershenfeld said in a statement.

Image courtesy...

MIT Media Lab designs and tests modular tiles for self-assembling space architecture

2022-05-16T11:50:00-04:00

The MIT Media Lab has shared insights into their pioneering project to build habitats in outer space. Named TESSERAE, the project seeks to create a highly-engineered tile which can be used as a building block for self-assembling, adaptive, reconfigurable structures.

Artist's render of TESSERAE spaceship. Credit: MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative (Artist's Render courtesy of Igor Neminov)

Rather than the traditional method of transporting fixed, rigid habitation modules into outer space, creating structures such as the International Space Station, the team behind TESSERAE believes that their modular, self-assembly method can lower payload weight and reduce construction complexity, while also broadening the possibilities of what future space architecture may look like.

TESSERAE assembly concept: Flat-packed for launch, tiles released to swirl and quasi-stochastically self assemble, target geometry, constellation of multiple docked TESSERAE modules. Credit: Ariel Ekblaw

Each TE...

MIT Media Lab director, Joichi Ito, resigns as extent of financial connections to Jeffrey Epstein widens

2019-09-07T16:46:00-04:00

Mr. Ito stepped down less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures officials at the lab took to conceal the relationship with Mr. Epstein, who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges. Mr. Ito sent a copy of the resignation email to The New York Times after repeated requests for comment.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” Ito wrote in an email to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost Martin A. Schmidt, according to The New York Times.

The New Yorker report, written by investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, can be found here.

MIT Media Lab leadership under scrutiny for financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein

2019-09-05T19:00:00-04:00

MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito has faced pressure to resign after revealing that he took research funding from financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negroponte, who cofounded the Media Lab in 1985 and was its director for 20 years, said he had recommended that Ito take Epstein’s money. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeated, more emphatically, “‘Take it.’”

Both Joichi Ito, MIT Media Lab director, and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, have come under scrutiny in recent days as news that a portion of the lab's funding was donated by convicted sex trafficking billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, MIT Technology Review reports.

Epstein, who reportedly donated at least $525,000 to the MIT Media Lab, died by suicide in August while awaiting trail for a series of new sex trafficking-related charges.

Honey, I Shrunk the Objects: MIT researchers develop system for shrinking objects to nanoscale

2018-12-19T14:07:00-05:00

Researchers at MIT have developed a way to shrink objects to nanoscale. Using a technology called implosion fabrication, the method allows objects to be 3D printed at a scale smaller than what one can see with a microscope. "It’s a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern with nanoscale precision,” explains neurotechnology professor and lead researcher Edward Boyden.

The technology has far-reaching implications and has potential applications in many fields, from optics to medicine to robotics. For example, researchers are hoping to use this technique to make smaller and better specialized lenses for cameras, cell phones, microscopes and so on.

The way it works is "a bit like film photography," describes Daniel Oran, a graduate student and one of the paper's lead authors. First, a latent image is formed by exposing a sensitive material in a gel to light, says Oran. Then, by attaching materials such as metal or DNA to the structure, researchers are able to shrink...

Neri Oxman: Architecture's modern day Wonder Woman

2018-10-08T16:08:00-04:00

What makes Dr. Oxman, the scientist, so unusual, said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, is her aesthetic sense. “She’s not afraid of formal elegance,” Ms. Antonelli said. “The reason why she is a gift to the field of architecture and design is that her science works, her aesthetics work, and her theory works.

Tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Dr. Neri Oxman's larger than life approach to architecture and design has continuously turned heads. Her impact in the world of architecture has led her to various breakthroughs in understanding the relationship and possibility between nature and the built environment.

Coining the term, material ecology, Dr. Oxman and her motley crew at MIT has turned MIT's Media Lab into a fantastically eccentric playground. Through digital fabrication, synthetic design, and computational design Dr. Oxman and her team have developed amazingly beautiful and technically provocative multifunctional structures you would find in a science fiction novel.

According to Dr. Oxman, "we treat design more like a gardening practice." The use of organic materials like ground up shrimp shells and silkworms are the natural stars in h...

MIT Media Lab's new method of 3D printing allows for advanced complexity

2018-06-20T14:34:00-04:00

MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group has invented a new way to 3D print any object, regardless of how complex it is, with color and shape as detailed as a photograph. It’s the equivalent of traditional CMYK printing, but in 3D. The results are stunning.

MIT Media Lab has come up with a new method of 3D printing that allows for much more complex models and typologies. Such complexity was previously not possible as all pieces of a model had to be connected with no floating parts in space. With this new method, different materials are used to create a solid transparent block that encapsulates the complex model allowing for detached parts to "float" inside the transparent material.

Data-collecting benches are making their way into cities

2017-07-17T16:47:00-04:00

A pair of USB ports on a console on the front of the bench provides juice from the solar panel mounted at lap level between the seats. Who wouldn’t want to hang out at a bench like this? It certainly catches the eye of passersby. What these kids might not realize, however, is that this bench is watching them back.

"Smart" benches are spreading—recently a series of them, manufactured by Soofa, was installed in a tiny neighborhood park next to I-77 on the north end of Charlotte, North Carolina with the intent of the neighborhood's analysis and redevelopment.

Soofa, founded in 2014 by three graduates of MIT Media Lab, is one of a handful of companies designing data-collecting street furniture. Their solar-powered benches register Wi-Fi enabled devices within 150 feet of them, sending data back to an office building in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the sensors can't access personal information from your phone, they pick up and remember your devices' MAC address. The technology allows cities and urban planners to count users of various public spaces, identifying when and for how long they're visited, and potentially optimizing their design.

"The line between collecting data for a valid public purpose and the unreasonable surveillance of private citizens can be tough to tease out. Beyond c...

A unified approach to grown structures

2014-12-01T15:29:00-05:00

The video shows 15 different variations of one computational growth process. Based on this process we created a series of 3D printed wearables in cooperation with Prof. Neri Oxman from the MIT Media Lab.