With its campus looking across the broad expanse of the Charles River to Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology inhabits block after block after block. In contrast to the pretty preppiness of the redbrick Harvard campus further along the river, MIT is determinedly utilitarian. Softened by May flowering trees and shrubs, it is shocking to the Irish eye in its litter-free tidiness.
The Media Lab building, designed by I.M. Pei of Louvre pyramid fame, is a smooth white block on Ames Street, soon to double in size. Inside, a glass-roofed atrium spills light on the white tiled walls.
A walk through the labs of Media Lab is something akin to Alice's journey through Wonderland. Remove the glass stopper from a bottle reposing in a blue light: birdsong twitters. Remove the stopper from another bottle: music plays. The necks of the bottles are wired. The idea: to show that everyday objects can act as an aesthetically beautiful interface to a computer. In "the cube" - a large room with no natural light - there's enough Lego to make an entire class of school children ecstatic. It was here that the "Lifelong Kindergarten" group developed the programmable brick which is marketed as Lego Mindstorms. Upstairs, a hologram "projects" into the corridor, causing the uninitiated to step aside. Mr Java, the smart coffee maker, will pour you a cup of coffee, made to your taste, if you place your microchip-embedded mug underneath. He/it will also greet you by name and switch the radio to your favourite station - even better than the Mad Hatter's tea party. The silver stitching on the Levi's jacket is really a keyboard, while the movement of the salt and water molecules in Playdoh can be tracked by sensors embedded in a flat surface and used to generate music.
Two sets of wooden rollers are in effect "tangible telephones", allowing people to interact with a shared physical object, thereby building up a sense of each other, in the same way as a handshake might convey information. The personal-information architecture group is working on a portable device which allows for continuous personal health monitoring. With a suitable sensor, it can also allow for geographical tracking. Everywhere there are brightly coloured toys and furniture. Low red couches allow for informal meetings. Lunches seem to be mostly brown-bag affairs. The emphasis is on co-operative creativity.
According to researcher Joseph Kaye (the man behind Mr Java and other smart kitchen appliances), Media Lab gives researchers the freedom to pursue what might, elsewhere, be perceived as crazy ideas. "There is a very strong drive to create and explore. It's exciting, but it's also exhausting," he says. In the office of press liaison Alexandra Kahn, the whiteboard bears the following inscription: "An Taoiseach = Tea-shock". For MIT's Media Lab is coming to Dublin in the guise of MediaLabEurope.
The Irish centre will initially focus on new approaches to Internet-related technologies and applications, including e-commerce, and on interactive and multimedia applications. Media Lab opened its doors in MIT in 1985, with the original idea being to take both human interface and artificial intelligence research in new directions. In his seminal book Being Digital, Media Lab director and digital guru Nicholas Negroponte wrote that the "new wrinkle was to shape them by the content of information systems, the demands of consumer applications, the nature of artistic thought". The idea was marketed to the broadcasting, publishing and computer industries as "the convergence of the sensory richness of video, the information depth of publishing and the intrinsic interactivity of computers. Sounds so logical today, but at the time the idea was considered silly."
The New York Times reported that one unidentified MIT senior faculty member thought the people affiliated with the venture were "charlatans". The founding faculty members of Media Lab became a Salon des Refuses, attracting those who were elsewhere considered too radical in their thinking. The group included Nicholas Negroponte, Jerome Weisener (former MIT president), a filmmaker, a graphic designer, a composer, a physicist, two mathematicians, and a group of research staff who "among other things, had invented multimedia in the preceding years", according to Negroponte. MIT's Media Lab is today regarded as the Holy Grail of multimedia. With an annual revenue of some $32 million, 180 students and 30 faculty and research staff, it is one of the three largest labs on campus, says Professor Glorianna Davenport, the principal research associate in the interactive cinema group. She will also be a director of MediaLabEurope.
Most of Media Lab's projects fall into three areas: "Digital Life", "News in the Future" and "Things that Think". Digital Life addresses the connection between bits (the computer sort), people and things in an online world. The News in the Future group focuses on the description of news by and for computers; observation and modeling of consumer behaviour; presentation and interface design; and application. Things that Think explores ways of moving computation from desktops or laptops and adding intelligence to objects that are first and foremost something else - smart doorknobs or toasters or shoes. Kahn says 90 per cent of Media Lab's funding comes from 170 corporate sponsors. Eircom has recently sponsored Media Lab to the tune of £5 million. The sponsors do not initiate or direct research, but they may contribute ideas or technical expertise. And the pay-off? If a product or process is patented, sponsors have a two-year window in which they may license that product before it is offered on the open market. Sponsors may see the work of research groups before it has been patented.
The sponsors help to keep the work grounded, Kahn says. So, Alice might leave this particular wonderland having programmed the white rabbit to work as her cuddly cyberslave, while the Queen of Hearts might find herself emblazoned as a warning device on a credit card, shouting "off with her head" when she detects the fingerprints of an unauthorised user.
