Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105). / After years of strict bans on the media, local radio in post-Taliban Afghanistan is undergoing an intense period of reconstruction. This thesis uses a multi-sited ethnographic investigation to examine local Afghan radio's various relationships with women in Afghanistan. In examining both the production and consumption contexts of local radio, it pinpoints areas of disjuncture that can and do lead to breakdowns in communications with the Afghan woman audience. Societal constructions of "cultured" tastes in the production room tend to obstruct female-friendly radio in favour of elite, male-oriented textual encodings. Consequently, women's radio transmissions are often at odds with the genre preferences and high levels of illiteracy of women in Afghanistan, failing to communicate with large segments of their intended audience. Radio producers face real and perceived penalties for disrupting cultural rules on what is and is not done on the air, thus the current system propagating ineffective women's radio is highly resistant to change. / by Sarah Kamal. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-80). / This thesis explores "meaningfulness" in videogames. Academics, journalists, and others who write about games often discuss the concept of meaning yet seldom define it clearly. I am focusing on a variation of this topic: what it means for a gaming experience to be meaningful--literally: full of meaning. Meaningfulness, as I define it, refers to the quality a videogame has when one considers it socially, culturally, or personally important. I attempt to answer the question: How do games become meaningful for players. I begin by stripping it down to the core ideas that interest me the most: narrative and emotion. Representing the debate over these terms helps illuminate the larger debate over meaningfulness. To accomplish this I examine different communities and their rhetoric. There are several major interpretive communities of games: academics, practitioners, journalists and consumers. The different ways these communities define narrative and emotion can be understood by examining their rhetoric. This reveals patterns that show the diversity of how meaningfulness is defined. The different ways players construct meaningfulness through rhetoric can be mapped. Doing so illustrates patterns and trends in logic that may not be apparent on the surface, and reveals certain clusters of people who are united by shared rhetoric. This methodology provides a framework to understand the forces shaping opinions over what meaningfulness is and is not in videogames. Identifying this framework and exploring its usefulness is the major project of this thesis. / by Matthew Jason Weise. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 112-118). / Two projects in scientific data sonification are presented. 'Quantizer' is a platform that enables composers to develop artistic sonification schemes using real-time data from the ATLAS detector at CERN. Three sample audio streams are available for real-time consumption by the public and the public engagement potential for the project is studied. 'Rotator' uses sonification as a practical tool for analysis of high dimensional data Users can swipe data between their auditory and visual channels in order to best perceive the structure of a dataset. A dual audio-visual presentation mode is found to be a promising alternative to use of a purely visual display mode. / by Juliana Mae Cherston. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-62). / In this thesis, we present a non-invasive and non-intrusive system that enables silent duplex human-machine communication and enables an interface that is internal to the user. We present a peripheral nerve-computer interface, AlterEgo, that allows a user to silently converse with a computing device without any voice or any discernible movements - thereby enabling the user to communicate with devices, AI assistants, applications or other people in a silent, concealed and seamless manner. A user's volitional internally articulated speech is characterized by efferent signal signatures in internal speech articulators that are captured and recognized by the proposed system. The hope is to facilitate a natural language user interface, where users can silently communicate in natural language and receive information and sensory input aurally through bone conduction. This enables a discreet, closed-loop interface with a computing device, and thus providing a seamless form of cognitive augmentation. The goal of the thesis is to describe the architecture, design, implementation and operation of the entire system along with demonstrating the utility of the platform as a personal computing system. / by Arnav Kapur. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 131-136). / Over the past ten years the ability of institutions and businesses to capture, aggregate, and process an individual's data has grown significantly as digital technology has increasingly integrated into our daily lives. In the urban informatics context and in computational social science, projects use data collected about our behavior in the urban environment to solve problems including traffic congestion and public safety, the creation of targeted advertising, and the development of entire neighborhoods. Some projects using aggregate data may ultimately benefit individuals by making improvements to their environment at large. Although individuals are the source of aggregate information, an individual citizen often does not directly engage with the data collected about them. The research contained in this dissertation explores a series of visualization experiments concerning direct engagement between citizens and public datasets such as the U.S.Census. In order for such visualizations to be effective, they not only have to efficiently communicate data, but must also be intuitive, evocative, and utilize narratives presented from the user's perspective. In this dissertation I address the question: How can we design visualizations which inform daily interaction between individuals and public data about their environment? To answer this question, the dissertation introduces 4 sets of maps: (1) the Powers Map and Scopes Map contextualizes Census data(American Community Survey) by invoking changes in scale, (2) the Sightline Map and Cross Section Map use a person's physical experiences to orient Census data, (3) the Filtered Satellite Maps give qualitative comparisons of conditions described by Census tables, and (4) the Personal History Map leverages an individual's geospatial history to filter Census data. These 4 map groups share the goal of allowing us, as individuals, to use public data to design our own experiences within our environments and to make use of public data directly on our own behalf. / by Jia Zhang. / Ph. D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2010. / "October 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-94). / A design feature of contemporary sport video games allows elite athletes to play as themselves in life-like representations of actual sporting events. The relation between playing sport video games and actual physical performance has not yet been established. Drawing on data from interviews and observations of elite athletes playing sport video games, this thesis explores why elite athletes are playing these video games as their virtual selves, and establishes a framework for understanding how this play may enhance learning opportunities. Building on theories based in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, education, and neuroscience, this thesis argues that virtual play by athletes playing as themselves in sport video games has the potential to support and encourage physical performance. / by Lauren Silberman. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / The growth and spread of the Internet have generated new possibilities for public participation with news content, forcing news scholars and makers alike to confront a number of questions about what the nature, role and function of news, journalists, and audiences are in a networked society. If news gathering, reporting, and circulation had existed for generations as a largely centralized process, left to the minds and hands of reporters organized through news rooms across the nation, the environment of the Internet and interactive properties of new media counter such a model, affording users with as much capacity to produce their own news content as they have had to merely consume it. This thesis, then, seeks to contribute to scholarship on online journalism through an ethnographic study of the five-year-old, technology-centered news site Slashdot.org as an emerging model of online news production and distribution I call a collaborative new network. Embodying a pronounced case of the decentralization of editorial control in online news environments, Slashdot's collaborative news network operates through an inscription of users as the primary producers of news content; an expansion of an understanding of the site of news to include not just journalistic reports and articles, but the discussion by users around them; debate around issues of editorial authority; a valuation of subjectivity and transparency as properties of news; and the generation of user-driven forms of collective action whose effects extend beyond the environment of Slashdot's network. This study will focus, then, on an examination of the social practices and processes surrounding the production, consumption and distribution of news on Slashdot, and the meanings that are generated through such activities. Through such an analysis, I hope to explore how practices enacted on Slashdot (re)construct users' relationship to news, editors, and one another - and similarly investigate how it (re)constructs editors relationship to news, readers, and one another. / by Anita J. Chan. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-159). / Much of what we design today is mediated by digital processes, from digital tools and software used to create tangible and virtual artifacts, to online resources and communities that enable people to exchange design knowledge. Encapsulating information about how we design into shared digital formats introduces opportunities for democratized education, where people contribute to and use shared digital resources to support their learning. In this dissertation, I introduce a style of design documentation called make-throughs in which people construct personal narratives of their design process, enabling new opportunities for capturing effort, connecting with other like-minded creators, and reflecting on process. I analyze make-through documentation in the context of two platforms I created: Build in Progress and Spin. Build in Progress is a web-based platform for visualizing how design projects are developed, while Spin is a photography turntable system for creating animations of design projects over time. Through these platforms, I investigate the following questions regarding capturing and sharing design process: (1) How can tools be designed to motivate and support the creation of process-oriented documentation?, and (2) What role can make-through documentation play in enabling reflective practice? Through an analysis of shared documentation created using both platforms, interviews with select users, and observations of spaces utilizing the tools, I reveal opportunities for integrating documentation into design practice and re-thinking documenting as an expressive and creative activity. I show how make-throughs support a range of motivations for sharing process, and based on these insights, I provide a set of design principles for learning environments, physical and virtual, championing documentation as a tool for learners to communicate their growth as makers. / by Tiffany Tseng. / Ph. D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-139). / Tangible Interfaces allow us to utilize our natural propensity for kinesthetic manipulation to control digital computation and touch virtual information. As the technology advances, these interfaces are re-envisioned as programmable materials, able to emulate dynamic physical properties to provide material-based affordances. In this work, I review the motivation and a brief history of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) and examine the implications of the Radical Atoms vision for programmable Material User Interfaces (MUIs). I identify two current limitations to Radical Atoms in practice: 1) material rendering capability and 2) affordance prediction for general-purpose MUIs. I propose force-controlled material displays as a framework for future advancement in material property rendering. I also discuss the use of Al for contextual interaction recognition and introduce Spatial Behaviors as an alternative method to allow interfaces to infer appropriate interaction modes from their location in space. This thesis presents the context, motivation, framework, implementation, evaluation, and future roadmaps towards these visions. I present examples of each proposed paradigm, focusing on inFORCE, a force-controlled material display, and ReVeal, a spatial shape display for tangible rendering in Augmented and Virtual Reality. I analyze the technical performance of this system and assess the interface through user studies. Finally, I discuss potential applications of the current system, as well as limitations and premises for future development and improvement in the context of Radical Atoms. / by Daniel John Fitzgerald. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 136-139). / THE USE of biological agents, such as bacteria, fungi, plant material, and insects, is proposed as a viable design methodology that can include end-of-life material treatment and re-use as part of the design process. Decay, typically thought of as a destructive process with spatially and temporally unpredictable results can be potentially designed to high levels of spatial and temporal tunability, such that the product of decay can still be of value to the designer. In particular, could microbes, in combination with water, be guided to selectively disintegrate, and potentially also then be harnessed as agents of assembly, enabling design construction instead of destruction? What would the ecology of this system that includes the microbes, biocompatible substrate, and contextual environment, look like? How might it behave and how might this affect how architects design the built environment? The main goal of this thesis is to understand how water-induced decay of biocomposite-based artifacts might be designed such that the deterioration process has use-value for the designed artifact and how this decay might be harnessed as a formative agent instead of only as a deconstructive one. This understanding will be informed by the execution and analysis of a series of case study projects that include: Aguahoja: Artifacts and Hexes Aguahoja: Colonization Aguahoja: Pavilion For these projects, water-based composites of chitosan, cellulose, and pectin, will be additively printed into architectural-scale artifacts and panels which are used as the skin of a small pavilion. The use of the chitin-cellulose-pectin composite introduces a water-dependent biocompatible material system that can act as the base scaffold for biofilms and microbial colonies. A series of material characterization tests were done to understand the nuances of the different bio-composites. Working challenges for this system included warping and uncontrolled deflections due to changing relative humidity and the gradual and constant dehydration of the material. This hydration dependent activity also dictated flexibility rigidity, and colour. Water is used to initiate the disintegration of the panels as well as initiate the growth of microbial cultures on the panels. The projects described here are intended to serve as examples of how a designer might be able to incorporate biological agency into her process. It is not intended as a comprehensive guidebook, but rather as case studies of how one might use nascent biological tools in current design methodology and how that methodology might have to change in order to leverage biology in her process. / by Andrea Ling. / S.M.