Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-82). / The Viscous Display is a tangible, mobile, flexible display device that explores the exchange of social information through transient public interfaces. Shaped by principles of so-called 'underground public art', the Viscous Display is conceived as a novel communication medium, where symbolic graphic messages can be shared in public spaces. Similar to stickers that are left in public spaces and pheromones that are left by ants in colonies, the Viscous Display is designed as a mobile artifact that is meant to enable participants to leave traces of activity by picking them up, interacting with them, and placing them in various locations. As a consequence, digital information/artifacts can also be left around public spaces via the Viscous Display for people to stumble upon. This thesis will describe the approach and process of designing, constructing and testing the Viscous Display project. The Viscous Display aims to create landscapes that are charged with the traces and messages of others that have inhabited that same space. This work contributes to a vision for changing spatial metaphors in public space. / Lily Shirvanee. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-99). / Social patterns are observable in real-world interactions as visual cues. Online, however, there are few visual cues available that can be used to see and understand social patterns. In this thesis, I suggest that many of these social patterns are still present in our interactions online in text chat; they are merely encoded in the textual interactions. This thesis presents Coterie, a visualization of the conversational dynamics of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. Through Coterie, viewers can see the social patterns that underlie the text interactions between conversants. Using the chat messages posted to an IRC channel by users, Coterie builds statistical models for individual and channel-level interaction based on existing real-world sociometric models. Coterie also automatically separates out conversations using a conversation model based on a word usage algorithm. This information is then presented to the viewer through a novel display based on models for real-world small group interaction, which allows the viewer to see historical patterns of user interaction, such as a user's verbosity, as well as channel-level patterns, such as cohesiveness. The visualization is evaluated based on how well it makes such patterns visible, and further directions for its development are presented. / Dana Sean Spiegel. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis I present a set of interactive portrait experiences that strive to create an intimate connection between the viewer and the portrayed subject; an emotional experience, one of personal reflection. My interactive portraits extend traditional photographic portraiture in two ways: adding motion and interaction. I present seven interactive portraits prototypes that react to viewer's presence and gender, as well as portraits that react to neighboring portraits. I demonstrate how interaction design decisions influence the viewer's experience and give Design Guidelines for the design of intimate interactive experiences. I ground my work in a theoretical framework called the "subject-object continuum", created for the art of portraiture (Brilliant, 1987). I show the relevancy of this framework for photographic portraiture, modern interactive portraits and intimate interactive experiences. Designers and artists follow (or consciously break) design guidelines when creating visual experiences. For example, photographers must train themselves to recognize the influence that light and composition have on the viewing experience of their portrait. / (cont.) In the same way, designers and artists of interactive experiences must inform themselves about the influence that different interaction techniques have on the viewing experience of their interactive experience. In my thesis I focus on two design factors: (1) the style of the interaction and (2) the viewer's expectations. I evaluated these design factors using interactive portraits prototypes, and based on my findings, developed a set of design guidelines that can inform interaction designers and portraiture artists about the design factors relevant for intimate interactive experiences. / by Orit Zuckerman. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007. / Page 64 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [62]-[63]). / Interest in electric vehicle drive units is resurging with the proliferation of hybrid and electric vehicles. Currently emerging key-technologies are: in-wheel motors, electric braking, integrated steering activators and active suspension combined with embedded sensors and real time computation. These electric vehicle drive units have the potential to go beyond current applications and lead to a novel vehicle architectures and a new vehicle culture. Building upon the research in the Smart Cities Group at the MIT Media Lab I propose to implement a novel mechanical and electric robotic wheel technology and the associated control and drive software in a fully functional concept vehicle. I will make use of a modular design for wheel robots which I developed through prior iterations at different scales combined with applied automotive technologies. This platform provides a realistic and scalable test-bed for evaluating the proposed technologies and will ultimately serve building a full scale concept vehicle. / by Peter Schmitt. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-153). / This thesis describes the processes of teacher learning and explores the associated changes that take place in classrooms. It describes the Adventures in Modeling Workshops, which we designed and created to introduce teachers to the process of conceptualizing, building, and analyzing their own models of complex, dynamic systems. The Workshops facilitate the growth of a modeling culture among teachers by giving them the tools and the ability to pose, investigate, and answer their own questions. This research examines the development, sustainability, and impact of that culture. It describes how participation in a modeling culture can contribute to a scientific way of thinking, for both teachers and their students, and can help teachers bring authentic science practice into high school classrooms. Employing technological tools developed at the Media Lab, we crafted an introduction to scientific modeling for teachers. These tools, used in concert with a constructionist pedagogy of design and creation, enable teachers to become full-fledged practitioners of modeling. Our workshop structure supports teachers as they learn to act as scientists, creating and exploring models of phenomena in the world around them, evaluating and critiquing those models, refining and validating their own mental models, and improving their understandings. This work serves as a proof of concept for a structure and methodology that increases teachers' individual capacities and helps them integrate aspects of their learning into their own classes. It examines the role that new media plays in supporting new ways of thinking and enabling explorations of new domains of knowledge. It also serves as a platform for examining the details of three components of educational change: 1) the development of technology-enabled materials and activities for teacher and student learning, 2) the construction of a scientific culture among teachers through learning about, gaining fluency with, and exploring modeling technologies, and 3) the paths toward implementation of new content and educational approaches in teachers' classrooms. The results of this project provide one benchmark for evaluating the potential that new ideas and technologies hold for facilitating lasting change in America's classrooms. / Vanessa Stevens Colella. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-83). / Despite advances in search technology, few software systems have been developed which accurately categorize multimedia files. The most successful systems for searching images, sounds, or movies rely on keyword annotation to provide meaningful search terms for non-text documents. Unfortunately, such systems usually require the author to enter the keywords manually, a task that is commonly neglected, or is executed poorly. This thesis proposes an approach to document categorization called Interaction Harvesting, wherein systems establish document relationships based on organizational and curatorial cues, harvested from the mouse and click gestures of an online community. Specifically, the spatial and temporal proximity and placement of documents are taken as indicators of document similarity. We propose an expansion technique whereby such proximal documents exert weighted keyword influences on each other. We hypothesize that these approaches will form a document classification framework that relieves some of the difficulty of the annotation process, while providing keyword-equivalent retrieval performance. / by Noah S. Fields. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-140). / by Bruce Mitchell Blumberg. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). / This thesis presents several new percussion instruments that explore the ideas of musical networks; playing, recording, and developing musical material; continuous control over rhythm and timbre; pressure sensing; and electronic / acoustic hybrids. These instruments use the tools of electronics and computation to extend the role of percussion by creating new ways for people to play percussion alone, together, and in remote locations. Two projects are presented in detail. The Beatbugs are a system of eight hand-held networked instruments that are designed to let children enter simple rhythmic motifs and send those motifs to be developed further by the other players. Results from three workshops and performances are discussed. Preliminary results are also presented for the Remote Drum Network, a system that lets people play drums together over the internet even in high latency situations by synchronizing their audio streams and delaying them to match each player's next phrase. / by Roberto Mario Aimi. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77). / The Village Voice project is a study of the efficacy of a localized ontology in the dissemination of narrative. It seeks to understand how community members can articulate their lives in ways that allow each other to reflect on the makeup of their overall community, and how they represent their community's needs to those outside of the group. I utilize a knowledge model, or ontology, created by community members as a foundation for representing and retrieving story fragments (video clips). The focus of this thesis will be to study the methodology by which such a knowledge model can be elicited, and the relative benefits of representing stories by this mechanism versus the standard database technique of keyword indexing. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this ontology-driven narrative system within the real-world context of a local community of Somali refugees (Jamaica Plain, MA). / by Ramesh Srinivasan. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-123). / This thesis introduces a programming environment entitled Share that is designed to support and encourage loosely bound cooperation between individuals within communities of practice through the sharing of code. Loosely bound cooperation refers to the opportunity members of communities have to assist and share resources with one another while maintaining their autonomy and independent practice. We contrast this model with forms of collaboration that enable large numbers of distributed individuals to collaborate on large scale works where they are guided by a shared vision of what they are collectively trying to achieve. Our hypothesis is that providing fine-grained, publicly visible attribution of code sharing activity within a community can provide socially motivated encouragement for participation as well as pragmatic value of being able to better track downstream use and changes to contributions that an individual makes. We shall present a discussion of loosely bound collaborative practice in various creative domains and the technological and social factors that contribute to the salience of these forms of cooperation today as well as discussing the motivational factors associated with open source development and how they differ in the case of cooperating individuals who do not share a project. We will also present an overview of the design of our tool and the objectives that guided its design and a discussion of a small-scale deployment of our prototype among members of a particular community of practice. / by Yannick Mahugnon Assogba. / S.M.