smg.media.mit.eduSociable Media Group - MIT Media Lab

main page people projects papers classes applying MIT Media Lab NEWS Read Creative Networks: Socio-Technical Tools for Loosely Bound Cooperation (8 mb). A recently completed thesis about the design of a new tool to better support the notion that creative individuals create in the context of communities and how we can better enable cooperation among individuals while allowing them to maintain individual agency. . . Connections is open! This is an exhibition at the MIT Museum of work by the Sociable Media Group, featuring interactive spaces, data portraits, and "Metropath(ologies) ", a new art installation about living in world overflowing with information - a world in which you are both subject and audience. The exhibit will run through August 2009. Here is a thoughtful review of the show and an interview about the ideas behind it - and another interview here and here , and some interesting blog entries. Our new Instant Messanger designs, Signs is now available for the public as a beta product. It works with all the major IM networks, but introduces its new features only when you’re speaking to other Signs users. Read all about it in the paper we are publishing at HICSS 2009! We have released Mycrocosm . Mycrocosm is a web site that makes it possible for people to use statistical graphs for expressive social communication. In particular it provides an alternative to purely text based micro-blogging software. Try it!. . During the roflcon event here at MIT, we deployed backchan.nl - our tool for supporting audience and panel interactions in conference situations. It worked great at roflcon - you can read about people’s experiences with it at Wired and NPR ’s Bryant Park Project ( 1 , 2 ). Our pictures of the event are available here , and our conference paper about the tool (and our experiences using it in earlier conferences) can be found here . . After showing our mixed reality game Stiff People’s League at Ars Electronica 2007 , we have produced a video that shows the game, how it works, and what we think is interesting about the project. Check it out in large (150mb) , medium (60mb) , and small (40mb) versions. . Read Virtually Trustworthy, our article in Science about avatars and trust. We’re developing 3D spaces where form follows function , such as meeting rooms where the floors aid decision making, tasks are literally handed out, and the minutes of the meeting grow overhead. Read more about this project at Technology Review . . We are developing tools and theories for analysing and designing social network sites. We seek to understand questions ranging from "will such sites transform society by enabling the rise of Social Supernets ?" to " Is Britney Spears Spam?" . Recently completed thesis projects include Echologue , Medina , and Transformative Copying . . Echologue is an interface for public space interaction, designed to heighten the viewers’ awareness of particular qualities of the space and its other inhabitants. . Medina is a social network site for collaborative communities. It explores ways to represent the skills people can offer, the projects they need help with, and the limits of their time. . Digital copies are usual exact replicas of their source. Yet sometimes it is useful for copies to grow, change, or simply record their accumulating history. Our Facebook application, Infinite Animation , is an example of such "Transformative Copying". . CLASSES Interested in identity, social design, the future of public space? take MAS 961 Designing Sociable Media this spring, Tuesdays 10-noon . Learn more about the theory behind our work: take Signals, Truth, & Design , next offered fall 2008. . SMG is exhibiting two pieces at the ISEA ZeroOne Festival in San Jose, August 7-13, 2006. Chit Chat Club is set of three inhabitable human-scale sculptures that come to life when a remote visitor logs into them. Pasts and Presents is a video installation that shows the recent history of an active space along with its current state, much as the ripples in a pond mark the effects of a recent event on the water’s surface. . ^M ^M Try out our new environment for discussing news and current events by writing directly on top of news arti cles! Try Webbed Footnotes now! ^M ^M . ^M ^M Converse with distant friends in a coolly abstract graphical space - try Chat Circles live! . If there is not enough snow outside for you, bring some lovely flakes to your screen with Francis Lam’s Snowflower demo . END OF OLD NEWSABOUT SMG The Sociable Media Group investigates issues concerning society and identity in the technologically mediated world. We address such questions as: How do we perceive other people on-line? What does a virtual crowd look like? How do social conventions develop in the networked world? Our emphasis is on design: we build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated...